Re: Tool for document management
On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 01:31:57AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
On Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:31:32 -0400, Douglas A Tutty
[EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
Here's my personal letter template. I copy it to the correct file
name, edit it, then latex it. The letter text itself is just plain
text.
\documentclass[letterpaper,12pt]{article}
%preamble here
\begin{document}
% no page number on this first page
\thispagestyle{empty} \begin{flushleft} Douglas A. Tutty\\ xxx
x, RR. x\\ xx, ON xxx xxx\\ Ph: (xxx) xxx--\\ Email:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] \end{flushleft}
\noindent \today
\bigskip
[...]
--8---cut hereletter_template-8---
\documentclass[12pt]{letter}
\usepackage[dvips]{graphicx}
\usepackage{times}
\pagestyle{empty}
\usepackage[margin=1in, head=0.25in, headsep=0.25in, nofoot]{geometry}
\setlength{\topmargin}{0pt}
\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{0pt}
\setlength{\headheight}{0pt}
\setlength{\headsep}{0pt}
\setlength{\footskip}{5pt}
\setlength{\textheight}{9.0in}
\setlength{\textwidth}{6.5in}
\address{Manoj Srivastava\\
229 Brandon Lane\\
Woodbury, TN 37190}
[...]
Thanks, guys. I have been doing the same sort of thing -- in more
complex templates -- for some years. I've always felt it was a bit
clumsy to finish up with all these files cluttering up my nice clean
directories. So now you have spurred me into writing a script to take
a given letter -- just the bit from the address to the end of the
content -- and add the template letterhead, the date, and the closing,
put the heading in bold, then latex, dvips, save a tagline on the
original body file to say which template was used, what date, and what
style of closing, clean up the intermediate files and make tea.
Well, I nearly did it too, but I couldn't persuade bash to stop
stripping out backslashes, so I've started again in perl. Nearly there
now. So thanks for the stimulation. I've been putting this off for
years. Now I'll be able to write letters mostly in plain text. :-)
But it doesn't yet make tea...
--
richard
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Re: Tool for document management
On Tuesday 25 September 2007 10:16, Steve Lamb wrote: I do not see this as the case. I took your suggested to google on those terms and what I found in the first 3 pages of hits were many, many Open Source solutions which were Windows only, pared down versions of enterprise solutions. Many of those did not fit my requirements. Most were written in JAVA which is something I'm not going to consider. Oddly enough on the second page was a hit for Subversion so we must not be too far off the mark. ;) --- Hi Steve. I have been watching this thread for a while and it occurred to me that I might have a suggestion that has not been mentioned. I have recently been learning to manage a very involved site that uses Mediawiki as the main software. It actually is very simple to use and it does provide virtually every component that you have listed as needed, so far. Not something I ordinarily would recommend, but you have been at this plenty long enough to figure out how to adapt it to your needs. I would only be concerned as to the real power that you require, might be like nuking flies instead of swatting them. However if you feel that you will involve a number of people working from several locations, then check it out. let me know if you have specific questions. Best wishes! -- John W. Foster -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
On Wed, Sep 26, 2007 at 10:21:04AM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote: One has to change the tool so if one is advocating LaTeX because of the merits of LaTeX over WYSIWYG one cannot offer up WYSIWYG as a front end for LaTeX without invalidating the argument that it is superior. Humbug! It allows people who have not yet seen the light to access its features in a familiar way until they at last see the light and turf the WSYIWG THINGAMAJIG out the window. -- Chris. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tool for document management
On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 11:51:04AM -0700, David Brodbeck wrote: On Sep 26, 2007, at 11:31 PM, Manoj Srivastava wrote: On Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:31:32 -0400, Douglas A Tutty [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: Here's my personal letter template. ... Thanks, those give me a nice starting point. LaTeX is really a godsend for geeks like me with poor artistic skills. It gives me a set of nice, safe, acceptable-looking layouts so I don't have to worry about fonts and margins. I no longer long for the days when it was acceptable to buzz something out in 12-point Elite on a 9-pin dot matrix printer and tear off the tractor feed strips. ;) Guess what. My only printer is an IBM Personal Computer Graphics Printer (like the one pictured in the original marketing material for the origional PC). Its a 9-pin dot-matrix, tractor fed. I run latex and then either get nicely formatted plain-text, or via apsfilter and gs-gpl, I get nice fonts and everything. I still have to tear off the feed strip, it takes 17 minutes per page, and the ribbon-feed is broken so I have to sit and twiddle the ribbon knob... :) Doug. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tool for document management
On Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:31:32 -0400, Douglas A Tutty
[EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
Here's my personal letter template. I copy it to the correct file
name, edit it, then latex it. The letter text itself is just plain
text.
\documentclass[letterpaper,12pt]{article}
%preamble here
\begin{document}
% no page number on this first page
\thispagestyle{empty} \begin{flushleft} Douglas A. Tutty\\ xxx
x, RR. x\\ xx, ON xxx xxx\\ Ph: (xxx) xxx--\\ Email:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] \end{flushleft}
\noindent \today
\bigskip
\noindent Dear:
\bigskip
\begin{flushleft} Yours truly,
\vspace{2cm}
Douglas A. Tutty. \end{flushleft}
\end{document}
--8---cut hereletter_template-8---
\documentclass[12pt]{letter}
\usepackage[dvips]{graphicx}
\usepackage{times}
\pagestyle{empty}
\usepackage[margin=1in, head=0.25in, headsep=0.25in, nofoot]{geometry}
\setlength{\topmargin}{0pt}
\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{0pt}
\setlength{\headheight}{0pt}
\setlength{\headsep}{0pt}
\setlength{\footskip}{5pt}
\setlength{\textheight}{9.0in}
\setlength{\textwidth}{6.5in}
\address{Manoj Srivastava\\
229 Brandon Lane\\
Woodbury, TN 37190}
\signature{Manoj Srivastava}
\makelabels{}
\begin{document}
\letter{Some one\\
P.O. Box 2210\\
Sometown USA, 0-}
\opening{Dear Sir}
Blah Blah blah.
\closing{Yours Sincerely,}
\ps{post scriptum}
\encl{some thing or the other}
\end{document}
--8---cut here---end---8---
--8---cut here-envelopestart-8---
% TeX Template for an envelope
%
% To use:
%
% Copy into a new file, replace all
% [BRACKETED UPPER-CASE TEXT]
% with your own, then run the tex command on it.
% Use dvips to print the .dvi output in landscape mode:
% dvips -t landscape envelope.dvi
\font\cmssa = cmss12
\font\cmssc = cmss14
%\special{papersize=9.5in,3.25in}
%\special{landscape}
\parindent 0 pt\nopagenumbers\parskip 10 pt
\hsize 9.5 in\vsize 3.25 in
\voffset 1.25 in
\cmssa
Manoj Srivastava
229 Brandon Lane
Woodbury, TM 37190
\vskip .5 in\vskip 15 pt\parindent 3.5 in
\font\addressrm=cmss16 scaled\magstep2
\addressrm
document
P.O. Box 2210
Sometown USA, 0-
\end
--8---cut here---end---8---
manoj
--
APL is a natural extension of assembler language programming; ...and is
best for educational purposes. -- A. Perlis
Manoj Srivastava [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.golden-gryphon.com/
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C
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Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Steve Lamb wrote: [snip] To my mind the fact that I said it would be nice to have versioning that worked with OOo, Freemind and Writer's Cafe/Storylines implied that OOo, Freemind and Writer's Cafe/Storylines were not on the table for replacement. You are aware that this mail of yours is the first and only one in the whole thread that ever mentioned Freemind or Storylines? You never stated that these were your requirements. Of course in writing this explanation for you I do find it mildly amusing that lots of people seemed to have latched onto versioning as an absolute requirement, feel obligated to change one of the tools I am using to fit that perception yet have not offered up any replacement tools for Freemind or Storylines. ;) I find it very amusing, that you find it amusing that other people can't read your mind. It amazing how efficient technology is nowadays in carrying your ideas quickly over the Atlantic; all you have to do is this: type them into an e-mail. Don't expect that they float without this little effort. ;-) Johannes -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFG+1R+C1NzPRl9qEURAljdAJ0dqJfd/bsyXHz6/hItkjrNna/w/QCfdCFA pE+rXPNleGvppyHYVsstRVo= =6XiX -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Benjamin A'Lee wrote: On Wed, Sep 26, 2007 at 04:16:06PM +0200, Johannes Wiedersich wrote: (Unfortunately the way from word to LaTeX is not nearly that efficient if not impossible.) Not at all. IIRC, Abiword can both import DOC and export LaTeX. On the other hand, if you want *nice* LaTeX, you'll have to try a bit harder; Abiword seems to try to preserve as much of the formatting as possible, rather than just letting TeX deal with it. The last time I tried, the result was very poor and didn't work for me. I don't expect that such a conversion is 'perfect', but it was much more effort to turn abiword's latex into 'reasonable' latex than to start from plain text. My humble opinion, Johannes -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFG+15cC1NzPRl9qEURAiLQAJ9FydalsMTD+M+9wSYPLbghWxInSQCfUUJ4 ZXWbqAB4Znvj6n089v1Zylk= =EtFB -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 09/27/07 01:58, Johannes Wiedersich wrote: Steve Lamb wrote: [snip] To my mind the fact that I said it would be nice to have versioning that worked with OOo, Freemind and Writer's Cafe/Storylines implied that OOo, Freemind and Writer's Cafe/Storylines were not on the table for replacement. You are aware that this mail of yours is the first and only one in the whole thread that ever mentioned Freemind or Storylines? You never stated that these were your requirements. His original post *did* mention them. Of course in writing this explanation for you I do find it mildly amusing that lots of people seemed to have latched onto versioning as an absolute requirement, feel obligated to change one of the tools I am using to fit that perception yet have not offered up any replacement tools for Freemind or Storylines. ;) I find it very amusing, that you find it amusing that other people can't read your mind. It amazing how efficient technology is nowadays in carrying your ideas quickly over the Atlantic; all you have to do is this: type them into an e-mail. Don't expect that they float without this little effort. ;-) - From the original post, 08/22/07 15:26 UTC: o handle non-text data as well as some textual data. The main file that is going to change most often is an OOo document (odt). I'll also be storing any related files including Mindmap files (mm) and Writer's Cafe files. - -- Ron Johnson, Jr. Jefferson LA USA Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good! -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFG+43/S9HxQb37XmcRAhfoAJ0QXHDPSJQ9rhKDCROXPQ/Xy6HPrACg6hTS fvjbIlNx3CQINKuHfZXQsmM= =6iRa -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 09/26/07 15:33, Steve Lamb wrote: David Brodbeck wrote: Maybe I'm confusing threads. I thought one of his requirements was searchability and version control. Version control tools don't work well with OOo because, by design, it produces opaque binary files. You're not confusing the two. Yes, it was listed as a requirement but it was more of a nice to have requirement and not an absolute one. I admit that I didn't do an adequate job in listing all my requirements as requirements and separating out nice-to-haves as such. To my mind the fact that I said it would be nice to have versioning that worked with OOo, Freemind and Writer's Cafe/Storylines implied that OOo, Freemind and Writer's Cafe/Storylines were not on the table for replacement. Of course in writing this explanation for you I do find it mildly amusing that lots of people seemed to have latched onto versioning as an absolute requirement, feel obligated to change one of the tools I am using to fit that perception yet have not offered up any replacement tools for Freemind or Storylines. ;) In my case it's because it's because I have no idea what format Freemind and Storylines are in. - -- Ron Johnson, Jr. Jefferson LA USA Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good! -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFG+47WS9HxQb37XmcRAmcRAJ4oDmbOIiKgAuK0fWQIHjs8kuIafgCeI61N vTKNkRaAgKcl4r7M7f6RlDI= =jkwk -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 06:03:27AM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote: - From the original post, 08/22/07 15:26 UTC: o handle non-text data as well as some textual data. The main file that is going to change most often is an OOo document (odt). Here we have the source of some of the confusion. He's already specfied odt _and_ some non-textual data. This implies something other than simply some italics. Since we don't know what type of non-text data, we don't know if it needs versioning too or how to do it. We've already determined that we don't know how to version odt. So: if versioning isn't required, then what is the point of this thread? If versioning is required, then odt isn't a possibility and people have recommended LaTex as a suitable alternative that can incorporate non-text data if that means graphics or e.g. formulae. The only other solution to the versioning of something that you can't diff would be a full-fledged database with full logging. Check out the most recent version, edit it, then post it back as a new record. Since these are files, they'd be 'huge' items in the database. I don't know. I've never used Word or OO. Prior to LaTex it was lout; both text markup. Prior to that it was WordPerfect on OS/2 that did its own versioning, including graphics (since they were vector graphics, the vertices were what was stored). Doug. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Ron Johnson wrote: On 09/27/07 01:58, Johannes Wiedersich wrote: Steve Lamb wrote: [snip] To my mind the fact that I said it would be nice to have versioning that worked with OOo, Freemind and Writer's Cafe/Storylines implied that OOo, Freemind and Writer's Cafe/Storylines were not on the table for replacement. You are aware that this mail of yours is the first and only one in the whole thread that ever mentioned Freemind or Storylines? You never stated that these were your requirements. His original post *did* mention them. Sorry for this lapse of mine. I searched the thread for the terms Freemind and Storylines as they appear in the later mail. In the first mail they were called Mindmap and Writer's Cafe instead. Johannes -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFG+78eC1NzPRl9qEURAvxKAJ9apiZirtgY5Wt/z34+mMza0VmhLQCfaoqs stjxVyELvM9Hn648WZCBXts= =jNoj -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
Douglas A. Tutty wrote: On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 06:03:27AM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote: - From the original post, 08/22/07 15:26 UTC: o handle non-text data as well as some textual data. The main file that is going to change most often is an OOo document (odt). Here we have the source of some of the confusion. He's already specfied odt _and_ some non-textual data. This implies something other than simply some italics. Since we don't know what type of non-text data, we don't know if it needs versioning too or how to do it. We've already determined that we don't know how to version odt. You snipped the relevant portion of that requirement. Freemind (stated mistakenly as Mindmap) and Storylines files were the examples I gave for non-textual. I started out the thread thinking that OOo could be versioned since I knew it was nothing more than an XML document. I did not know at the time it was compressed which would render it non-text to a versioning software. I was quickly disabused of that misconception and was perfectly fine to not have versioning via normal textual means. In fact I then switched my thinking to how to get OOo to save uncompressed or have the versioning software to handle OOo documents. But if I can't get it versioned that's no big deal. -- Steve C. Lamb | But who decides what they dream? PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | And dream I do... ---+- signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
Johannes Wiedersich wrote: Sorry for this lapse of mine. I searched the thread for the terms Freemind and Storylines as they appear in the later mail. In the first mail they were called Mindmap and Writer's Cafe instead. To explain I mistakenly called Freemind Mindmap as it is mindmapping software. Storylines is a portion of a suite of software to help an author keep track of the elements of fictional writing which is called Writer's Cafe. It would be what Writer is to OOo. -- Steve C. Lamb | But who decides what they dream? PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | And dream I do... ---+- signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
Ron Johnson wrote: In my case it's because it's because I have no idea what format Freemind and Storylines are in. Oh, I understand why. The amusement came from the perception, correct or not, that people would trust/respect my decision on two pieces and not the third. I can assure you that there aren't many alternatives to Writer's Cafe/Storylines as it is the only software of its kind I have found to run on Linux. There's maybe 2 for Freemind and neither is, AFAIK, any better at being versioning friendly than Freemind is. -- Steve C. Lamb | But who decides what they dream? PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | And dream I do... ---+- signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
Johannes Wiedersich wrote: Steve Lamb wrote: [snip] To my mind the fact that I said it would be nice to have versioning that worked with OOo, Freemind and Writer's Cafe/Storylines implied that OOo, Freemind and Writer's Cafe/Storylines were not on the table for replacement. You are aware that this mail of yours is the first and only one in the whole thread that ever mentioned Freemind or Storylines? You never stated that these were your requirements. Ok, look at the subject line. It reads, OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management). That means, in order: Off-Topic Choice of OOo and LaTex Previous Was Tool for document management. I started the branch because I felt it was straying sufficiently from the main topic. I did so in MSGID [EMAIL PROTECTED]. You can read it here: http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2007/09/msg02387.html But that's not the first message I posted since it was a split from another thread titled Tool for document management which *I* started not only here but on the Ubuntu list. That MSGID is [EMAIL PROTECTED] and can be seen here: http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2007/09/msg02053.html You'll note that I am the original poster and that my third requirement, verbatim, was this: o handle non-text data as well as some textual data. The main file that is going to change most often is an OOo document (odt). I'll also be storing any related files including Mindmap files (mm) and Writer's Cafe files. The fourth requirement was this: o version might be nice in case I want to back out of large portions of the document or refer to previous verbage I had removed and want to reconsider. So no, Johannes, I am quite aware of what I originally wrote and what my original requirements are. The only difference is that I mistakenly called Freemind Mindmap. However it is mind mapping software and I did later correct myself. I find it very amusing, that you find it amusing that other people can't read your mind. It amazing how efficient technology is nowadays in carrying your ideas quickly over the Atlantic; all you have to do is this: type them into an e-mail. Don't expect that they float without this little effort. ;-) I think the URLs posted above clearly show that I did make the effort and that I was not expecting people to do anything more than reading an email. While I do not expect people to read every message of mine and do understand people will jump in in the middle of a conversation I do expect the courtesy of them doing their homework prior to calling me a liar on something I did or did not claim to say. I am by and large an honest person and don't go around intentionally misrepresenting what I have or have not said previously. -- Steve C. Lamb | But who decides what they dream? PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | And dream I do... ---+- signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: Tool for document management
On Sep 26, 2007, at 11:31 PM, Manoj Srivastava wrote: On Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:31:32 -0400, Douglas A Tutty [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: Here's my personal letter template. ... --8---cut hereletter_template- 8--- Thanks, those give me a nice starting point. LaTeX is really a godsend for geeks like me with poor artistic skills. It gives me a set of nice, safe, acceptable-looking layouts so I don't have to worry about fonts and margins. I no longer long for the days when it was acceptable to buzz something out in 12-point Elite on a 9-pin dot matrix printer and tear off the tractor feed strips. ;) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tool for document management
On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 11:51:04AM -0700, David Brodbeck wrote: LaTeX is really a godsend for geeks like me with poor artistic skills. It gives me a set of nice, safe, acceptable-looking layouts so I don't have to worry about fonts and margins. I no longer long for the days when it was acceptable to buzz something out in 12-point Elite on a 9-pin dot matrix printer and tear off the tractor feed strips. ;) When I was reviewing my first large LaTeX doc my coworker thought I was reading a vendor supplied white paper. He was so impressed with the quality of the type-setting he asked me to tech him how to use it. -- Neil Watson | Debian Linux System Administrator| Uptime 13 days http://watson-wilson.ca -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tool for document management
On Wed, Sep 26, 2007 at 10:39:55 -0700, David Brodbeck wrote: On Sep 25, 2007, at 7:17 PM, John Hasler wrote: David Brodbeck writes: TeX is awesome for writing books and scientific papers. If you're writing a letter to Grandma, though, OpenOffice is better suited. Now _that_ sounds like driving a semi truck to the supermarket to pick up a bottle of milk. Depends on your perspective, I guess. It just feels like by the time I get all the preliminary verbiage TeX needs typed out, I could have written the whole letter in OO. Also, looking at my copy of 'The Not So Short Introduction To LaTeX,' it's not clear to me what document class I'd use. They're all going to be a bit clumsy and inappropriate. It's not an article, it's not a report, and it's certainly not a book... I like the scrlttr2 class provided by koma-script (which is included in the texlive-latex-recommended package). It takes care of all the formatting, including details such as the exact position of the address and the matching foldmarks for envelopes with an address window. The letterhead can be stored in a separate file, which makes the source of the individual letters more easily readable and provides a convenient mechanism to switch between different letterheads, e.g. for business, private, other languages... If anyone is interested, here is an example (PDF, 31 KB): http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer/latex-letter/letter.pdf (I replaced the logo of my institute with a simple dummy to make the file smaller; most of the remaining size is taken up by the embedded latex fonts.) The source files are here (tarball, 5.6 KB): http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer/latex-letter/latex-letter.tar.bz2 -- Regards,| http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer Florian | -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 08:50:06AM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote: I was quickly disabused of that misconception and was perfectly fine to not have versioning via normal textual means. In fact I then switched my thinking to how to get OOo to save uncompressed or have the versioning software to handle OOo documents. But if I can't get it versioned that's no big deal. This guy has a makefile which handles ODF packing and unpacking for use in a versioning system: http://clarencedang.blogspot.com/2006/12/another-script-revision-controlled.html http://preview.tinyurl.com/37o2bz HTH dt -- Dave Thayer | Whenever you read a good book, it's like the Denver, Colorado USA | author is right there, in the room talking to [EMAIL PROTECTED] | you, which is why I don't like to read | good books. - Jack Handey Deep Thoughts -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
On Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 04:55:36PM -0500, Russell L. Harris wrote: Occasionally while writing, I save the document, switch to the command-line window and execute LaTeX, then look over the xdvi displays (which are updated automatically whenever LaTeX is run). I can avoid the switch to the cl by programming one of the xemacs functions keys to run latex. That way I have the best of both worlds -- latex and wysiwyg. But, nobody has yet mentioned the FOREMOST advantage of latex - once the penny drops, it is super fun ! I have just finished a small non-technical book using latex and enjoyed every minute of it. Latex is a joy to work with. Joe -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
On 25 Sep 2007, David Brodbeck wrote: On Sep 25, 2007, at 8:01 AM, Steve Lamb wrote: Ron Johnson wrote: PDF? Haven't seen it as an acceptable format for submission, no. Some on-demand publishers use it. For example, Lulu.com. I've just published a book via Lulu. If anyone is interested, I tried with Open Office but it didn't work well. I then switched to Lyx and everything was fine. However, do NOT try to export your file as pdf. Lulu is very demanding about fonts and I was not able to get them inserted in the correct fashion. The solution is to export your file as postscipt. Lulu does not advertise the fact but they do accept this format and it works without problems. Anthony -- Anthony Campbell - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Microsoft-free zone - Using Linux Gnu-Debian http://www.acampbell.org.uk (blog, book reviews, on-line books and sceptical articles) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tool for document management
On Sun, 23 Sep 2007 09:45:11 -0700 Steve Lamb [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I know what you meant. But you are flatly ignoring my requirement for syncing. I make an edit on Machine A and toss-a-tarball onto whatever machine(s) I decide. Then I make an edit on Machine B and do the same. Then I remembered I had edits from machine A, pull them down and, whoops, overwritten. Toss-a-tarball works fine if you're working on a single machine and want to just do a simplistic backup. It falls apart when you add more machines, maybe people, into the mix. That's why version controls showed up in the first place. The idea is good, but vcs (I'm only familiar with svn) won't work with binary files IF several people on several machines might edit one and the same file. Keeping everything in sync across several collaborators who might touch the same files relies heavily on diff/patch mechanisms that only work with text files. Doesn't Oo have some built-in versioning or collaboration system? Something a bit more sophisticated than the Record Changes feature? --D. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
On 26 Sep, Peter Robinson wrote: ... If you write in latex you can always convert to RTF via latex2rtf, which in my experience works excellently. If needed, it is no big deal to convert this to word format. It is definitely worth the effort to learn latex. cheers, peter I disagree. I use latex for some articles which are submitted to scientific journals, but for the type of writing which Steve has described, Oo.org is fine, with no learning curve, and he can output it to .doc or.rtf as necessary. If he wants to have an index, or bibliograpy, footnotes, etc. in the book, it´s definitely worth learning to use latex or some variant. If revision history, etc, is necessary or really desirable, using lyx and subversion, as other posters suggested, might be a good way to go; I haven´t used lyx myself for several years, so I´m dont´t know how easy it would be for him to use. -Chris | Christopher Judd, Ph. D. [EMAIL PROTECTED] | IMPORTANT NOTICE: This e-mail and any attachments may contain confidential or sensitive information which is, or may be, legally privileged or otherwise protected by law from further disclosure. It is intended only for the addressee. If you received this in error or from someone who was not authorized to send it to you, please do not distribute, copy or use it or any attachments. Please notify the sender immediately by reply e-mail and delete this from your system. Thank you for your cooperation.
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Steve Lamb wrote: David Brodbeck wrote: As long as you realize it probably won't look the same to the other person, unless they have the same Word version, the same operating system, and the same fonts. It will look similar enough. ... or it will explode in your face - your mileage will vary. At least that is what happened when I got my word document back from a colleague who had just made a couple of small changes. The version I sent was written with Office 2000, the one I got back was apparently edited with 2003 for mac. M$ generously asked me, if I'd like to report the problem back to them. I am still waiting for their reply and the bug fix :-( I had to try several computers with different combinations of their OS and Office product to spot one that could open the document without crashing. Even on this one some formatting is displayed incorrectly and formulas cannot be edited (yes, their formula editor is installed and works for other documents). It's rare that someone sends me a complicated Word file and I'm able to print it cleanly without adjustments. Good thing that what I'm writing is not at all complex. The two most complex things are italics and indent-first-line. Too complex to be handled by word could mean more than a couple pages of 'simple' text. Remember the program is called 'word' not words, lines, paragraphs, pages, chapters, book, etc. A little free advice: If you're planning on writing long documents, such as books, What kind of books? You description goes on to describe what sounds to be a technical manual. Someone else mentioned mathematics. Another person talked about technical writing. Am I writing a book? Yes. Am I writing a technical book? No! I am writing fiction. I have no in-line graphics, complex font changes for examples, silly little icons to denote special sections, massive indention or the like. This is strictly line-after-line prose which could be done plain text except for the fact that I am making use of italics as a conscious style choice to reinforce when a character is /'thinking'/ something versus saying something. So, as I had repeated several times, I'm sure LaTeX is wonderful for what it is designed for. To say it with the words of the author of tex: TeX, a new typesetting system intended for the creation of beautiful books [...] However it is not something I am interested in learning for the purposes I would put it to at this time. The constant hammering with examples which are far beyond the requirements of the style I writing I am engaging in is getting a tad tiresome. I want WYSIWYG because it helps me think about what is happening. I want simple and easy-to-convert to a common format because I don't know if and by whom this project would be picked up. As someone suggested: try lyx or texmacs as wysiwyg editors for TeX/LaTeX. (I have little first hand experience, though as I don't like wysiwyg.) I don't want a complex programming language because I am writing fiction, not programming an application! If you don't need mathematical formulas in TeX/LaTeX, you don't need to learn anything about it. For a typical work of fiction, the text will be 99+% text with very little markup. While they are both creative they are two different modes of thinking! While I appreciate that other people find it wonderful for their tasks I ask that those people also appreciate that not everyone finds the tools they use as equally suited to their tasks, especially creative tasks. Creative tasks are personal. Processes and tools which work for one person do not work for someone else. And that is OK! Of course you are free to use whatever seems suitable to you. But don't take it personal, when people advise you to do otherwise. Most people using LaTeX (including myself) have experience in both worlds (Office style and Latex style), yet it seems that all (at least almost all) of those that took some time learn to practice LaTeX never like to go back to using office programs. Back to the main topic: I am using LaTeX with bzr (considering to move to mercurial) and they work more or less perfectly together. I don't version graphics files, but for the text files it's become essential for me to 'colordiff' different versions. I don't think that it is practical to accomplish the same with either OOo or M$ Office. The latter has some kind of 'versioning' system, where different authors/revisions get different colours, but it is nothing like as efficient as Latex together with a modern CMS. YMMV, good luck, Johannes -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFG+luHC1NzPRl9qEURAmQGAJ9ik9ysgn+H3A2/NeZOwqz87F9s2gCfVLHm 809U2GbQjfPCYfJ1waDzPgk= =4FAQ -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Russell L. Harris wrote: So now the problem becomes how to convert the HTML produced by HeVeA into RTF or another format which M$ Word can read -- preferably within the Debian environment, and preferably with open-source software. In another hour searching with Google, I came across only one potential solution. I havn't yet tried with HeVeA output, but OOo is quite capable of handling html code. It can also export to .doc Johannes -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFG+lyKC1NzPRl9qEURAsE/AJ9ZIhfCK/WNWFYhMyIuIgxO+WJhdwCbBrsK Wj6ihTDtBpPO7RjTOFPMmFQ= =ieXX -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
Johannes Wiedersich wrote: Of course you are free to use whatever seems suitable to you. But don't take it personal, when people advise you to do otherwise. It is personal when I state quite emphatically that I do not feel it is the best tool for me, personally. At that point any reply stating that I am wrong is personal because I have stated it is *ME*, not the tool, that is at issue. -- Steve C. Lamb | But who decides what they dream? PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | And dream I do... ---+- signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
On Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 10:11:31PM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote: Furthermore I fail to see this supposed don't think about the formatting simplicity when I can't even write a simple financial value without resorting to escapes! Hardly any different from resorting to mouse clicks. However, you seem to have made up your mind without actually spending some time writing a document or two. -- Neil Watson | Debian Linux System Administrator| Uptime 11 days http://watson-wilson.ca -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Steve Lamb wrote: Johannes Wiedersich wrote: Of course you are free to use whatever seems suitable to you. But don't take it personal, when people advise you to do otherwise. It is personal when I state quite emphatically that I do not feel it is the best tool for me, personally. At that point any reply stating that I am wrong is personal because I have stated it is *ME*, not the tool, that is at issue. I hope I didn't state that you are wrong, that's not my intention. - From my personal experience LaTeX *is the tool* when it comes to o version might be nice in case I want to back out of large portions of the document or refer to previous verbage I had removed and want to reconsider. and Am I writing a book? Yes. Any solution with (Open)-office tools that tries to satisfy those two of your requirements will be impractical and cumbersome, as far as I know. If you want *efficient* management of longer texts and versioning, I guess you should learn LaTeX or one of LaTeX's wysiwygish interfaces. It's not as difficult as you seem to think. (texmacs uses F5 for italics, so it's even one key less than OOo's ctrl-i). Johannes -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFG+mQaC1NzPRl9qEURAlNNAJ9wKKEXHBw/UysmxPjqNWfxpKPHxQCff/oA j+RFeb0Vquowf1gqi5Od5wk= =85DO -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
Neil Watson wrote:
On Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 10:11:31PM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote:
Furthermore I fail to see this supposed don't think about the
formatting simplicity when I can't even write a simple financial value
without resorting to escapes!
Hardly any different from resorting to mouse clicks. However, you seem to
have made up your mind without actually spending some time writing a
document or two.
Very nice how you conveniently left out where I stated CNTL-I is fewer
keystrokes compared to {\it}. In other words you're shifting it to a personal
attack of look, he's one of those GUI people. Whatever. I don't need to
write a document or two to know that it would be inconvenient, to me, to shift
to 5 keys instead of 2 (or even 1) for a simple operation like italics and
that having to remember to escape certain normal characters would be a problem.
The ultimate irony is that the end result of all this evangelical blather
for LaTeX has resulted in people suggesting extremely convoluted methods of
achieving a simple requirement in OOo. Convert LaTeX to HTML and then from
HTML to Word! That is reasonable?! The most amusing part is that people have
suggested using a WYSIWYG editor for LaTeX... and use LaTeX because the
WYSIWYG editor called OOo is bad because it is WYSIWYG. A-wha!?
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Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
Johannes Wiedersich wrote: I hope I didn't state that you are wrong, that's not my intention. By refuting my personal opinion so emphatically even if you haven't said the word the sentiment is clear. - From my personal experience LaTeX *is the tool* when it comes to You personal experience is not *MY* personal experience. o version might be nice in case I want to back out of large portions of the document or refer to previous verbage I had removed and want to reconsider. and Am I writing a book? Yes. But does not fit the requirement of easily converted to an acceptable format or being able to work visually with it. No, I am not counting LyX and the like because to suggest a WYSIWYG editor for LaTeX who's stringent proponents eschew WYSIWYG is to put oneself right back at the same level as any other tool. Any solution with (Open)-office tools that tries to satisfy those two of your requirements will be impractical and cumbersome, as far as I know. They're not the only requirements. I thought the words might be nice was a good clue that it wasn't a high priority. Normally one states high priority without qualifiers or with words like is essential. It's not as difficult as you seem to think. (texmacs uses F5 for italics, so it's even one key less than OOo's ctrl-i). Yeah, EMACS, not working for me. And as for one less than OOo's CNTL-I that depends, do you cound a chord as one keystroke or two? Most people don't count the chord for capitalization as two keystrokes. Is FIVE 8 keystrokes, 5 keystrokes or 4 keystrokes? Chording is a part of typing, as any EMACS user is well aware. :P -- Steve C. Lamb | But who decides what they dream? PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | And dream I do... ---+- signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
Please approach this subject in a more subjective manner. I was suggesting that until you gain experience with both manners of document creation you can hardly form an accurate conclusion as to what best suits your needs. -- Neil Watson | Debian Linux System Administrator| Uptime 11 days http://watson-wilson.ca -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Steve Lamb wrote: The ultimate irony is that the end result of all this evangelical blather for LaTeX has resulted in people suggesting extremely convoluted methods of achieving a simple requirement in OOo. Convert LaTeX to HTML and then from HTML to Word! That is reasonable?! Yes. Reasonable, simple, efficient. (Unfortunately the way from word to LaTeX is not nearly that efficient if not impossible.) Note, that you said that you don't know yet, if you need .doc at all, since the manuscript is not finished and you don't know for sure that .doc is a requirement for the publishers you will be sending your manuscript to. The most amusing part is that people have suggested using a WYSIWYG editor for LaTeX... and use LaTeX because the WYSIWYG editor called OOo is bad because it is WYSIWYG. A-wha!? No. The reason for suggesting WYSIWYG editors was that you said you are not comfortable with other editors. The rationale behind it is that those editors will store your files in LaTeX-format, which is plain text and *extremely* suitable for version control -- opposed to OOo. Johannes NB: Why don't *I* like to write texts in WYSIWYG? - - the fonts I use for the editor are optimized for (my) readability on my screen at my resolution; the fonts I use for the printout are optimized for the printout - - the printed text is black and white; the computer screen is colour. My editor shows colour highlighting on screen, but will produce b/w output. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFG+mmmC1NzPRl9qEURAgBXAJ9rzd4+Uj+A+Rx7Yu8Jrp5d8gwzqACfYZOy E2y3NhcURuG8FPzqc6QUW3s= =0lus -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
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Steve Lamb wrote:
Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
I hope I didn't state that you are wrong, that's not my intention.
By refuting my personal opinion so emphatically even if you haven't said
the word the sentiment is clear.
- From my personal experience LaTeX *is the tool* when it comes to
You personal experience is not *MY* personal experience.
True. But my personal experience includes quite a bit of work with word,
OOo *and* LaTeX.
[snip]
But does not fit the requirement of easily converted to an acceptable
format or being able to work visually with it. No, I am not counting LyX and
the like because to suggest a WYSIWYG editor for LaTeX who's stringent
proponents eschew WYSIWYG is to put oneself right back at the same level as
any other tool.
LaTeX, especially without formulas or too complicated formatting, is
easily converted to many different acceptable formats: HTML, pdf, plain
text, etc. The route via HTML to OOo and .doc is straightforward for the
situation you describe.
[snip]
Yeah, EMACS, not working for me. And as for one less than OOo's CNTL-I
that depends, do you cound a chord as one keystroke or two? Most people don't
count the chord for capitalization as two keystrokes. Is FIVE 8 keystrokes, 5
keystrokes or 4 keystrokes? Chording is a part of typing, as any EMACS user
is well aware. :P
I didn't want to do hair splitting. I just used the example to convince
you that you don't require to type '\textit{}' all the times you need
italics.
texmacs is not emacs! See www.texmacs.org.
Johannes
PS: Your other remarks have already been answered in another post on
this thread.
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Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
Neil Watson wrote: Please approach this subject in a more subjective manner. I was suggesting that until you gain experience with both manners of document creation you can hardly form an accurate conclusion as to what best suits your needs. Until you've tried a vacuum you can't say you can't breathe in one. -- Steve C. Lamb | But who decides what they dream? PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | And dream I do... ---+- signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
Johannes Wiedersich wrote: Steve Lamb wrote: The ultimate irony is that the end result of all this evangelical blather for LaTeX has resulted in people suggesting extremely convoluted methods of achieving a simple requirement in OOo. Convert LaTeX to HTML and then from HTML to Word! That is reasonable?! Yes. Reasonable, simple, efficient. OOo - Save As .doc LaTex - Export to HTML, find an HTML to .doc converter, hope all the formatting goes through (which it won't). That is not simple, that is not efficient and that is not reasonable. (Unfortunately the way from word to LaTeX is not nearly that efficient if not impossible.) Good thing I'm not using Word then, a point that most people gloss over. Note, that you said that you don't know yet, if you need .doc at all, since the manuscript is not finished and you don't know for sure that .doc is a requirement for the publishers you will be sending your manuscript to. Correct. However I also said that in my research of potential publishers only 3 formats were accepted. Printed manuscript which is increasingly frowned upon, plain text which loses formatting, or .DOC. That means it is in my best interest in the long run to ensure that whatever format I work in is easily and reasonable converted to the most widely accepted format which retains formatting. No. The reason for suggesting WYSIWYG editors was that you said you are not comfortable with other editors. I never said that, either. I said that for this purpose I wish to think about it visually, not conceptually. My vim-fu is quite strong, thanks. -- Steve C. Lamb | But who decides what they dream? PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | And dream I do... ---+- signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
True. But my personal experience includes quite a bit of work with word,
OOo *and* LaTeX.
Happy for you. Let me know when you turn into me so your personal
experience matches mine. I'll be happy to let you write the book for me. :P
LaTeX, especially without formulas or too complicated formatting, is
easily converted to many different acceptable formats: HTML, pdf, plain
text, etc.
Acceptable by whom? My end goal is to get published. None of those
formats are acceptable for that goal.
The route via HTML to OOo and .doc is straightforward for the
situation you describe.
No, it's not. It does not retain all the formatting.
I didn't want to do hair splitting. I just used the example to convince
you that you don't require to type '\textit{}' all the times you need
italics.
Which I never said.
texmacs is not emacs! See www.texmacs.org.
Technically you're right. From the FAQ, first question:
* is a free scientific text editor, which was both inspired by TeX and GNU
Emacs.
Yea, scientific text is what I am writing here. Inspired by Emacs.
You're out of touch.
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Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
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Steve Lamb wrote:
Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
OOo - Save As .doc
LaTex - Export to HTML, find an HTML to .doc converter, hope all the
formatting goes through (which it won't).
No: LaTeX - Export to HTML; open html in OOo - Save as .doc.
One additional step.
That is not simple, that is not efficient and that is not reasonable.
(Unfortunately the way from word to LaTeX is not nearly that efficient
if not impossible.)
Good thing I'm not using Word then, a point that most people gloss over.
The last time I tried, an export from OOo to latex didn't work for me.
Same sad story here.
[snip]
No. The reason for suggesting WYSIWYG editors was that you said you are
not comfortable with other editors.
I never said that, either. I said that for this purpose I wish to think
about it visually, not conceptually. My vim-fu is quite strong, thanks.
So you could just use a bit of key mapping to solve your problem of
typing too much \textit{}.
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Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
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Steve Lamb wrote:
Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
True. But my personal experience includes quite a bit of work with word,
OOo *and* LaTeX.
Happy for you. Let me know when you turn into me so your personal
experience matches mine. I'll be happy to let you write the book for me. :P
LaTeX, especially without formulas or too complicated formatting, is
easily converted to many different acceptable formats: HTML, pdf, plain
text, etc.
Acceptable by whom? My end goal is to get published. None of those
formats are acceptable for that goal.
The route via HTML to OOo and .doc is straightforward for the
situation you describe.
No, it's not. It does not retain all the formatting.
It does not retain the formatting in the sense that it retains page and
line breaks. But it does retain the structure and italics, etc. ie. all
that appears to be important in your case.
I didn't want to do hair splitting. I just used the example to convince
you that you don't require to type '\textit{}' all the times you need
italics.
Which I never said.
Well you complained about:
You're also ignoring that CNTL-I is a tad shorter
than {\it}, esp. since \ is way out of the way of my normal typing habits.
texmacs is not emacs! See www.texmacs.org.
Technically you're right. From the FAQ, first question:
* is a free scientific text editor, which was both inspired by TeX and GNU
Emacs.
Yea, scientific text is what I am writing here. Inspired by Emacs.
You're out of touch.
As said before, you can use it for non-scientific text just as you want.
It may be inspired by emacs, but is totally different: appearence,
usage, output format, etc. I wasn't focussing about technical
differences, it is fundamentally different.
Johannes
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Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
It does not retain the formatting in the sense that it retains page and
line breaks. But it does retain the structure and italics, etc. ie. all
that appears to be important in your case.
Or margins. That is not inconsiderable.
I didn't want to do hair splitting. I just used the example to convince
you that you don't require to type '\textit{}' all the times you need
italics.
Which I never said.
Well you complained about:
You're also ignoring that CNTL-I is a tad shorter
than {\it}, esp. since \ is way out of the way of my normal typing habits.
Yes, because {\it} is \textit{}. I see it now!
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Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
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Steve Lamb wrote:
Yeah, and vim is a WYSIWYG editor. Now you're arguing just to be a prick.
No, it's you who is arguing just to be a prick. I told you before, that
from your previous e-mail I got the impression that you don't like to
type things like '{\it}' too often. Since you also mentioned
I want to work on this document visually, not conceptually
The solution that came to my humble mind was to suggest a WYSIWYG that
would feature shortcut keys. There are other solutions as well. Sorry,
for not realizing from the beginning that your vim-fu is so strong.
Johannes
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Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
Steve Lamb wrote:
Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
OOo - Save As .doc
LaTex - Export to HTML, find an HTML to .doc converter, hope all the
formatting goes through (which it won't).
No: LaTeX - Export to HTML; open html in OOo - Save as .doc.
One additional step.
Did you miss hope all formatting goes through (which it won't)? I'm
betting you did.
The last time I tried, an export from OOo to latex didn't work for me.
Same sad story here.
Which isn't a concern of mine.
I never said that, either. I said that for this purpose I wish to think
about it visually, not conceptually. My vim-fu is quite strong, thanks.
So you could just use a bit of key mapping to solve your problem of
typing too much \textit{}.
Yeah, and vim is a WYSIWYG editor. Now you're arguing just to be a prick.
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Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 09/26/07 09:00, Steve Lamb wrote: [snip] But does not fit the requirement of easily converted to an acceptable format or being able to work visually with it. No, I am not counting LyX and the like because to suggest a WYSIWYG editor for LaTeX who's stringent proponents eschew WYSIWYG is to put oneself right back at the same level as any other tool. You're saying that only stringent proponents get to define the usage parameters of a system. Highly invalid logic. The kind I'd expect from political activists. - -- Ron Johnson, Jr. Jefferson LA USA Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good! -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFG+o6kS9HxQb37XmcRAsQOAKCMeS1VrglmSMNG+p9EuIF3BElp/QCfYUpC 1rcdLRW1Bjkk8i5egI9iqEk= =/oAE -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 26 Sep, Peter Robinson wrote: ... If you write in latex you can always convert to RTF via latex2rtf, which in my experience works excellently. If needed, it is no big deal to convert this to word format. It is definitely worth the effort to learn latex. cheers, peter I disagree. I use latex for some articles which are submitted to scientific journals, but for the type of writing which Steve has described, Oo.org is fine, with no learning curve, and he can output it to .doc or.rtf as necessary. If he wants to have an index, or bibliograpy, footnotes, etc. in the book, it´s definitely worth learning to use latex or some variant. If revision history, etc, is necessary or really desirable, using lyx and subversion, as other posters suggested, might be a good way to go; I haven´t used lyx myself for several years, so I´m dont´t know how easy it would be for him to use. I write all my texts in latex, use JabRef/bibtex to manage references, subversion to keep track of things and to collaborate with coauthors, and -- if I need to submit to a journal misguided enough only to accept word, latex2rtf. Gone are the days of hundreds of different versions of a manuscript as separate word files. Gone are the days when EndNote kept loosing my references or word kept screwing up almost anything. Things have become simply EASIER and I have more time to do real work, as opposed to secretarial/editorial chores. The time I invested to learn all this has been repaid at least 50 times. Even if Steve or others have different needs, I submit that they too will benefit from latex/SVN etc for document management, the cost of rethinking a few work steps is truly minor.. just my 2c :- } -peter -Chris | Christopher Judd, Ph. D. [EMAIL PROTECTED] | IMPORTANT NOTICE: This e-mail and any attachments may contain confidential or sensitive information which is, or may be, legally privileged or otherwise protected by law from further disclosure. It is intended only for the addressee. If you received this in error or from someone who was not authorized to send it to you, please do not distribute, copy or use it or any attachments. Please notify the sender immediately by reply e-mail and delete this from your system. Thank you for your cooperation. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
Ron Johnson wrote: You're saying that only stringent proponents get to define the usage parameters of a system. No. But their usage parameters are the only one that change significantly from what I'm working with now. It's a matter of drop the WYSIWYG and do the work in LaTeX vs. Save in a different format. Saving in a different format does not fundamentally change the tool. It would be like saying if Word were able to save in ODT it would be ok to use Word instead of OOo because of the file format it saves in. One has to change the tool so if one is advocating LaTeX because of the merits of LaTeX over WYSIWYG one cannot offer up WYSIWYG as a front end for LaTeX without invalidating the argument that it is superior. -- Steve C. Lamb | But who decides what they dream? PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | And dream I do... ---+- signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 09/26/07 12:21, Steve Lamb wrote: Ron Johnson wrote: You're saying that only stringent proponents get to define the usage parameters of a system. No. But their usage parameters are the only one that change significantly from what I'm working with now. It's a matter of drop the WYSIWYG and do the work in LaTeX vs. Save in a different format. Saving in a different format does not fundamentally change the tool. It would be like saying if Word were able to save in ODT it would be ok to use Word instead of OOo because of the file format it saves in. One has to change the tool so if one is advocating LaTeX because of the merits of LaTeX over WYSIWYG one cannot offer up WYSIWYG as a front end for LaTeX without invalidating the argument that it is superior. And I just *totally* disagree with that line of thinking. Since I don't think we will change each other's mind regarding this, I think it should be dropped. - -- Ron Johnson, Jr. Jefferson LA USA Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good! -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFG+pgrS9HxQb37XmcRAuzkAKCLRPx176XSLl6sEZ8nq6UlCNXJwACeJ/eS UI77gThx0AW3XCM2pAS8N7g= =+c/y -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tool for document management
On Sep 25, 2007, at 7:17 PM, John Hasler wrote: David Brodbeck writes: TeX is awesome for writing books and scientific papers. If you're writing a letter to Grandma, though, OpenOffice is better suited. Now _that_ sounds like driving a semi truck to the supermarket to pick up a bottle of milk. Depends on your perspective, I guess. It just feels like by the time I get all the preliminary verbiage TeX needs typed out, I could have written the whole letter in OO. Also, looking at my copy of 'The Not So Short Introduction To LaTeX,' it's not clear to me what document class I'd use. They're all going to be a bit clumsy and inappropriate. It's not an article, it's not a report, and it's certainly not a book... -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
On Sep 26, 2007, at 6:10 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I disagree. I use latex for some articles which are submitted to scientific journals, but for the type of writing which Steve has described, Oo.org is fine, with no learning curve, and he can output it to .doc or.rtf as necessary. Maybe I'm confusing threads. I thought one of his requirements was searchability and version control. Version control tools don't work well with OOo because, by design, it produces opaque binary files. If I'm conflating two threads, than I apologize. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tool for document management
On Wed, Sep 26, 2007 at 10:39:55AM -0700, David Brodbeck wrote: Depends on your perspective, I guess. It just feels like by the time I get all the preliminary verbiage TeX needs typed out, I could have written the whole letter in OO Once of the good things about TeX is that you only need to create that preamble once for any single type of document. I have a report template. When I want to write a new report I copy the template to the name of the new report file, open it and start editing. As for classes, article and report are pretty similar. I see no reason not choose one arbitrarily and then change later if necessary. -- Neil Watson | Debian Linux System Administrator| Uptime 11 days http://watson-wilson.ca -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tool for document management
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 David Brodbeck wrote: On Sep 25, 2007, at 7:17 PM, John Hasler wrote: David Brodbeck writes: TeX is awesome for writing books and scientific papers. If you're writing a letter to Grandma, though, OpenOffice is better suited. Now _that_ sounds like driving a semi truck to the supermarket to pick up a bottle of milk. Depends on your perspective, I guess. It just feels like by the time I get all the preliminary verbiage TeX needs typed out, I could have written the whole letter in OO. Also, looking at my copy of 'The Not So Short Introduction To LaTeX,' it's not clear to me what document class I'd use. They're all going to be a bit clumsy and inappropriate. It's not an article, it's not a report, and it's certainly not a book... And given what's going on in TeX (let alone LaTeX) behind the scenes, OO, when used to typeset a single letter, might prove to be a somewhat smaller truck :) Sarunas -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFG+qwtejaFVltl6E8RAl9QAJ9XHNvhaRXSND0zZ+p4pst4joeMSACgqBE+ D1EZO5xbXWC6JL+ScialPfk= =Upkx -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tool for document management
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1
David Brodbeck wrote:
On Sep 25, 2007, at 7:17 PM, John Hasler wrote:
David Brodbeck writes:
TeX is awesome for writing books and scientific papers. If you're
writing a letter to Grandma, though, OpenOffice is better suited.
Now _that_ sounds like driving a semi truck to the supermarket to pick
up a
bottle of milk.
Depends on your perspective, I guess. It just feels like by the time I
get all the preliminary verbiage TeX needs typed out, I could have
written the whole letter in OO. Also, looking at my copy of 'The Not So
Short Introduction To LaTeX,' it's not clear to me what document class
I'd use. They're all going to be a bit clumsy and inappropriate. It's
not an article, it's not a report, and it's certainly not a book...
Just put the 'reliminary veriage' into a style file of your own, jw.sty,
and your letter becomes:
==
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{jw}
\begin{document}
Text to go here...
\end{document}
==
... not much longer than opening a template in OOo.
Johannes
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Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
Ron Johnson wrote: Since I don't think we will change each other's mind regarding this, I think it should be dropped. This is D-U, you can't do that! -- Steve C. Lamb | But who decides what they dream? PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | And dream I do... ---+- signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
David Brodbeck wrote: Maybe I'm confusing threads. I thought one of his requirements was searchability and version control. Version control tools don't work well with OOo because, by design, it produces opaque binary files. You're not confusing the two. Yes, it was listed as a requirement but it was more of a nice to have requirement and not an absolute one. I admit that I didn't do an adequate job in listing all my requirements as requirements and separating out nice-to-haves as such. To my mind the fact that I said it would be nice to have versioning that worked with OOo, Freemind and Writer's Cafe/Storylines implied that OOo, Freemind and Writer's Cafe/Storylines were not on the table for replacement. Of course in writing this explanation for you I do find it mildly amusing that lots of people seemed to have latched onto versioning as an absolute requirement, feel obligated to change one of the tools I am using to fit that perception yet have not offered up any replacement tools for Freemind or Storylines. ;) -- Steve C. Lamb | But who decides what they dream? PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | And dream I do... ---+- signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
On Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 10:11:31PM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote:
Rob Mahurin wrote:
I know you've settled on OOo, but it's worth pointing out that TeX is
a simple language if you're writing a simple document. In particular
you are already writing valid plain TeX in your email. Copy the above
(without the 's) into file.txt; change /'thinking'/ to {\it thinking}
and saying to ``saying''; type pdftex file.txt and \end.
file.pdf looks like http://sns.phys.utk.edu/~mahurin/du/09-25.pdf,
which I think is what you're after.
Uh, no. It's more than that. You're forgetting loading in the templates
and the entire structure.
Sorry I wasn't clearer. I made the output linked above using /plain/ TeX;
the only \command was the italics. LaTeX is a set of templates and macros
for typesetting structured documents with TeX, which it sounds like you
don't need. When I was writing MLA-formatted papers as an undergraduate I
used plain TeX like this and was pretty happy with it.
Your other complaints, though, are all perfectly reasonable. It sounds
like you want to write your fiction using a word processor, not a
typesetting language. Great --- that's why the word processor was
invented, after all.
Let me see if I remember what you want:
1. revision control, including
- resurrect erased text
- merge changes from two computers
2. shallow learning curve, so you can focus on the writing
3. export to .doc that preserves italicization.
You're concerned (I think) about not being able to merge changes in
OpenOffice's data files using revision control, because those files
aren't straightforward text. Someone else mentioned Abiword, which
saves uncompressed XML; but there's metadata in there too, which might
not merge correctly. It looks like Abisource offering revision control
for collaborative writing, http://collaborate.abisource.com/faq/, but
that's probably not what you want either. These options give you #2 and
#3, maybe #1, or maybe a broken document after a certain level of
complexity is reached.
Many of the replies have been about TeX, its macro packages, etc. You
complain that gives you #1 at the expense of #2 and #3.
You mentioned you're not afraid of programming, so here's an idea.
You could just write in plain text, and use /italics/ the same you
have on this list. You said the publishers you've spoken to accept
plain text; that additional markup is easy enough to read.
If you /must/ send someone a .doc, you could write a Word macro (or a
macro in a program that produces Word files) to match and italicize text.
For that matter, a three-line perl (or whatever) script could
1. escape TeX's special characters, $%#\{}^_~
2. replace / with \it (italicize) or \rm (roman) in alternation
3. run pdfTeX on the output
giving you something nice to print out. You should call the converter
SLIPTT, Steve Lamb's Italicized Plain Text Typesetter.
Don't want to print? Publisher can read plain text? You're all set.
The fact is that any document formatting specification is going to be in
SOME language, whether that language is embedded in the file format by
the word processor, marked up by the author, or whatever. Most of the
open-source revision control systems are for marked-up text, or code,
where the author can tell if the merged text is right or not. File
formats that warn don't change this file manually, as AbiWord and
OpenOffice do, probably require specialized version control software
that's aware of those formats. The conclusion of this thread seems to
be that debian users are using source-controlled LaTeX markup, and that
there's not yet a good solution for source-controlled word processor
output. I'll be interested to know what you decide to do.
Good luck with your writing.
Rob
--
Rob Mahurin
Dept. of Physics Astronomy
University of Tennessee phone: 865 207 2594
Knoxville, TN 37996email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
On Sep 26, 2007, at 2:11 PM, Rob Mahurin wrote: You're concerned (I think) about not being able to merge changes in OpenOffice's data files using revision control, because those files aren't straightforward text. Someone else mentioned Abiword, which saves uncompressed XML; but there's metadata in there too, which might not merge correctly. It looks like Abisource offering revision control for collaborative writing, http://collaborate.abisource.com/faq/, but that's probably not what you want either. He's made it clear that he doesn't want to use anything but OOo. So the focus of the thread discussion so far would appear to be completely wrong; he apparently has a very specific desire for a version control tool that works within OOo. I'm not sure such a thing exists, so he may be up a creek without a paddle. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tool for document management
On Wed, Sep 26, 2007 at 10:39:55AM -0700, David Brodbeck wrote: Looking at my copy of 'The Not So Short Introduction To LaTeX,' it's not clear to me what document class I'd use [for a letter]. For some reason that book omits the LaTeX letter class. -- Rob Mahurin Dept. of Physics Astronomy University of Tennessee phone: 865 207 2594 Knoxville, TN 37996email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
* Johannes Wiedersich [EMAIL PROTECTED] [070926 08:28]: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Russell L. Harris wrote: So now the problem becomes how to convert the HTML produced by HeVeA into RTF or another format which M$ Word can read -- preferably within the Debian environment, and preferably with open-source software. In another hour searching with Google, I came across only one potential solution. I havn't yet tried with HeVeA output, but OOo is quite capable of handling html code. It can also export to .doc Johannes Thanks, Johannes. I did not realize that OOo could read HTML. I just tried OOo on the HeVeA output (which is claimed to conform to the HTML standard), and it works reasonably well. The only real problem is that some of the characters are rendered by code such as: A0; 2013; 2014; 2026; 201C; 201D; So, unless OOo has a switch to enable these characters to be rendered properly, I need to do a search-and-replace on them before converting to M$ Word .doc format. RLH -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tool for document management
* Rob Mahurin [EMAIL PROTECTED] [070926 16:42]: On Wed, Sep 26, 2007 at 10:39:55AM -0700, David Brodbeck wrote: Looking at my copy of 'The Not So Short Introduction To LaTeX,' it's not clear to me what document class I'd use [for a letter]. For some reason that book omits the LaTeX letter class. The LaTeX letter class is rather pathetic. The letters it produces have wide margins and are suitable only for personal correspondence; they remind me of the style which was taught in American elementary schools back in the 1950's. Kopka and Daly, in A Guide to LaTeX, third edition, provide a fully-detailed example of a letterhead class which is suitable for the correspondence of a business or an organization. Using as a guide the letterhead class of Kopka and Daly, I created my own letterhead class which has a header, a footer, two columns, page numbers, etc. The header for the second and subsequent pages displays the name of the recipient and the date of the communication. The footer of every page displays my own organization name and address. The result is a layout which is attractive, professional in appearance, and stands out from the crowd. RLH -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tool for document management
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 09/25/07 18:05, David Brodbeck wrote: On Sep 24, 2007, at 9:39 PM, Russell L. Harris wrote: I use XEMacs daily to produce LaTeX documents. I have frequent need to search my archives of material I have written in the past, and I use grep for this purpose. It is difficult for me to imagine an advantage offered by OpenOffice which would compensate for the inability to make use of grep in searching my archives. I think it depends on what you're doing. TeX is awesome for writing books and scientific papers. If you're writing a letter to Grandma, though, OpenOffice is better suited. Using TeX for that is a bit like driving a semi truck to the supermarket to pick up a bottle of milk. Load that beast to write a simple letter? Or do some simple spreadsheet work? AbiWord and Gnumeric are *much* better at that task. - -- Ron Johnson, Jr. Jefferson LA USA Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good! -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFG+tWZS9HxQb37XmcRAsmbAKCpjV+F0adDajobWg1+VZbTK7HS3wCgwEjq UyuW2tB5VF0bdGVCztOZiho= =RaH4 -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
On Wed, Sep 26, 2007 at 04:16:06PM +0200, Johannes Wiedersich wrote: (Unfortunately the way from word to LaTeX is not nearly that efficient if not impossible.) Not at all. IIRC, Abiword can both import DOC and export LaTeX. On the other hand, if you want *nice* LaTeX, you'll have to try a bit harder; Abiword seems to try to preserve as much of the formatting as possible, rather than just letting TeX deal with it. -- Benjamin A'Lee [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://subvert.org.uk/~bma/ signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Tool for document management
On Wed, Sep 26, 2007 at 10:39:55AM -0700, David Brodbeck wrote:
On Sep 25, 2007, at 7:17 PM, John Hasler wrote:
David Brodbeck writes:
TeX is awesome for writing books and scientific papers. If you're
writing a letter to Grandma, though, OpenOffice is better suited.
Now _that_ sounds like driving a semi truck to the supermarket to
pick up a
bottle of milk.
Depends on your perspective, I guess. It just feels like by the time
I get all the preliminary verbiage TeX needs typed out, I could have
written the whole letter in OO. Also, looking at my copy of 'The Not
So Short Introduction To LaTeX,' it's not clear to me what document
class I'd use. They're all going to be a bit clumsy and
inappropriate. It's not an article, it's not a report, and it's
certainly not a book...
Here's my personal letter template. I copy it to the correct file name,
edit it, then latex it. The letter text itself is just plain text.
Doug.
---
\documentclass[letterpaper,12pt]{article}
%preamble here
\begin{document}
% no page number on this first page
\thispagestyle{empty}
\begin{flushleft}
Douglas A. Tutty\\
xxx x, RR. x\\
xx, ON xxx xxx\\
Ph: (xxx) xxx--\\
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
\end{flushleft}
\noindent \today
\bigskip
\noindent Dear:
\bigskip
\begin{flushleft}
Yours truly,
\vspace{2cm}
Douglas A. Tutty.
\end{flushleft}
\end{document}
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Re: Tool for document management
Steve Lamb: However the decision came down to one factor which I did not list. When I was reviewing SVN one thing popped into my head over and over, Why Perl!? What does Subversion have to do with Perl? (Not that I think your decision is wrong, I just don't know what you're referring to.) J. -- Television advertisements are the apothesis of twentieth century culture. [Agree] [Disagree] http://www.slowlydownward.com/NODATA/data_enter2.html signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Tool for document management
On Mon, Sep 24, 2007 at 09:57:35PM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote: Not having to learn LaTeX would be the head of my list. While I am sure it is a fine and dandy language for what it does and I know there are people who have produced some nice text using it I do not wish to learn a third computer language just to write fiction in my native language. What OpenOffice offers is convenience of visually representing what I want with a low barrier to entry. Did you try lyx? Just going through the tutorial should give you an idea. Regards, Andrei -- If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. (Albert Einstein) signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Tool for document management
On Mon, Sep 24, 2007 at 09:57:35PM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote: I use XEMacs daily to produce LaTeX documents. I have frequent need to search my archives of material I have written in the past, and I use grep for this purpose. It is difficult for me to imagine an advantage offered by OpenOffice which would compensate for the inability to make use of grep in searching my archives. Not having to learn LaTeX would be the head of my list. While I am sure Latex is very easy to learn. It is similar to HTML. Have learned LaTeX last year and having used word processors since Wordperfect 5.1 I definitely prefer LaTeX. I can produce higher quality papers (work or academic) in less time than ever before. With TeX and LaTeX and its ilk the templates actually work. I can use the same template for all of my reports and they always look the same. There are no annoying format inconsistencies that are so common with Word and OpenOffice. -- Neil Watson | Debian Linux System Administrator| Uptime 10 days http://watson-wilson.ca -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tool for document management
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 09/24/07 21:10, Steve Lamb wrote: [snip] One I think that will go unfulfilled. First off Word suffers from the same problem. I found out the hard way on one of my scripting projects. So there's precedent. The second reason is that OOo developers have stated, many times, that the format's not designed to be manipulated by anything other than OOo so no consideration is given to either human readability or to the usefulness of other tools. That, too, I found in reading up on putting ODTs in some sort of repository. That's a very closed-source attitude. :( Coming from BigCo employees, though, I'm not terribly surprised. Do you happen to have a bug number? - -- Ron Johnson, Jr. Jefferson LA USA Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good! -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFG+Q6DS9HxQb37XmcRAgOnAKCctFXnO7SQ/MHM+Cy506r4wlEylACeM3Ww qpYlWijSsEdo8XgcUpZ+2X8= =IBwt -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tool for document management
On Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 09:00:28AM -0400, Neil Watson wrote: With TeX and LaTeX and its ilk the templates actually work. I can use the same template for all of my reports and they always look the same. There are no annoying format inconsistencies that are so common with Word and OpenOffice. A +1, and I'd also vouch for consistency, like Neil. Also, CTAN has numerous classes and formats which can be readily used, like for Resume writing, exam paper setting etc. Of course, a praise for TeX's math is always a must. Anyway, I think this is a little OT with respect to the thread. :-) Kumar -- Kumar Appaiah, 458, Jamuna Hostel, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai - 600 036 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tool for document management
Jochen Schulz wrote: What does Subversion have to do with Perl? Huh... For some reason I was under the impression it was written in Perl. It is not, it is written in C. So, uhm... that changes it to Eww, C! :) Mea culpa. -- Steve C. Lamb | But who decides what they dream? PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | And dream I do... ---+- signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
Neil Watson wrote: With TeX and LaTeX and its ilk the templates actually work. I can use the same template for all of my reports and they always look the same. There are no annoying format inconsistencies that are so common with Word and OpenOffice. To be fair I am operating out a large measure of ignorance. One of my main concerns is that the typesetting languages are languages. I'm sure they're robust but I have always seen their use tied to another editor. Since an outside editor is required it is my impression that there is no WYSIWYG, no way to get a basic view of how it might look printed outside of actually doing whatever magic it is to send it off to a printer. Which I don't have. Also the end result of my labor will be to send this out to be published. I have seen many publishers take submissions in Word, plain text or printed out. I've yet to see one accept LaTeX. So without a printer I am stuck with transforming what I want into an acceptable format and plain text won't so. I am using some formatting. Nothing fancy, noting that will cause formatting inconsistencies. But just enough that plain text is unacceptable. -- Steve C. Lamb | But who decides what they dream? PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | And dream I do... ---+- signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: Tool for document management
Ron Johnson wrote: Do you happen to have a bug number? I do not. I found several references on the OOo forums when searching for methods of setting my documents to uncompressed for use with Subversion. On the bright side Mercurial does have a FAQ about using Mercurial with OOo documents. I haven't dug into it yet. I just got Mercurial up and running in an ad hoc fashion last night. -- Steve C. Lamb | But who decides what they dream? PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | And dream I do... ---+- signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
On Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 07:30:35AM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote: To be fair I am operating out a large measure of ignorance. One of my main concerns is that the typesetting languages are languages. I'm sure they're robust but I have always seen their use tied to another editor. Since an outside editor is required it is my impression that there is no WYSIWYG, no way to get a basic view of how it might look printed outside of actually doing whatever magic it is to send it off to a printer. Which I don't have. Kile and Lyx may be for you. Also the end result of my labor will be to send this out to be published. I have seen many publishers take submissions in Word, plain text or printed out. I've yet to see one accept LaTeX. So without a printer I am stuck with transforming what I want into an acceptable format and plain text won't so. I am using some formatting. Nothing fancy, noting that will cause formatting inconsistencies. But just enough that plain text is unacceptable. I am actually a bit surprised. Numerous scientific books are written in TeX. In fact, Dr. Knuth's own books are typeset in TeX, which is what eh created TeX for. Besides, I am really surprised publishers won't want TeX, since a lot of books I've read have acklowledged that they were written in TeX. Kumar -- Kumar Appaiah, 458, Jamuna Hostel, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai - 600 036 signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 09/25/07 09:30, Steve Lamb wrote: Neil Watson wrote: With TeX and LaTeX and its ilk the templates actually work. I can use the same template for all of my reports and they always look the same. There are no annoying format inconsistencies that are so common with Word and OpenOffice. To be fair I am operating out a large measure of ignorance. One of my main concerns is that the typesetting languages are languages. I'm sure they're robust but I have always seen their use tied to another editor. Since an outside editor is required it is my impression that there is no WYSIWYG, no way to get a basic view of how it might look printed outside of actually doing whatever magic it is to send it off to a printer. Which I don't have. Also the end result of my labor will be to send this out to be published. I have seen many publishers take submissions in Word, plain text or printed out. I've yet to see one accept LaTeX. PDF? So without a printer I am stuck with transforming what I want into an acceptable format and plain text won't so. I am using some formatting. Nothing fancy, noting that will cause formatting inconsistencies. But just enough that plain text is unacceptable. lyx is supposed to be a good GUI front-end to latex, and I'm sure that there's a way to convert latex to PDF. - -- Ron Johnson, Jr. Jefferson LA USA Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good! -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFG+SAxS9HxQb37XmcRAoMpAKCLYHk2olkHMxY2sRjplw4pwFiPQQCfT0en HaZvM+ADY95JkwBjUk/zCOg= =+Hd5 -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
Neil Watson wrote: I have seen many publishers take submissions in Word, plain text or printed out. I've yet to see one accept LaTeX. Publishers of scientific journals accept LaTeX, most even provide a style file so that the document is formatted according to the specific journals requirements. Most also do not accept Word documents due to formatting problems across different versions. Cheers Adam -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
On Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 07:30:35AM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote: Also the end result of my labor will be to send this out to be published. I have seen many publishers take submissions in Word, plain text or printed out. This is another good thing about TeX. You can publish your document in many different formats, all from the same source file, including HTML, PDF, RTF and with the help of elinks or lynx plain text. -- Neil Watson | Debian Linux System Administrator| Uptime 10 days http://watson-wilson.ca -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
Ron Johnson wrote: PDF? Haven't seen it as an acceptable format for submission, no. -- Steve C. Lamb | But who decides what they dream? PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | And dream I do... ---+- signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: Tool for document management
Folks, I share some of the original writers interest in finding a good document management tool. It was sort of disappointing to see a discussion that has focused primarily on version control tools, and a little on TeX vs. Word vs. Open Office issues. There are a huge number of document and content management systems around - aimed at managing text documents, rather than code, and many of them open source (try googling document management along with open source). I was hoping to see somebody with some experience with one or more of them comment. Apparently there's no such experience on debian-user. So... just as a suggestion to the original writer: cast a wider net. And... if you happen to come across a good email list focused on document/content management - let me know! Miles Fidelman -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
Kumar Appaiah wrote: I am actually a bit surprised. Numerous scientific books are written in TeX. In fact, Dr. Knuth's own books are typeset in TeX, which is what eh created TeX for. Besides, I am really surprised publishers won't want TeX, since a lot of books I've read have acklowledged that they were written in TeX. Those are scientific texts which is a different standard completely. I'm not writing a scientific text. Just good ol' fiction here where the writer writes and the typesetter typesets. :) -- Steve C. Lamb | But who decides what they dream? PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | And dream I do... ---+- signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: Tool for document management
Miles Fidelman wrote: It was sort of disappointing to see a discussion that has focused primarily on version control tools, and a little on TeX vs. Word vs. Open Office issues. This is D-U where the relative geek level is high. We're going to tend towards the technical solutions over the business. There are a huge number of document and content management systems around - aimed at managing text documents, rather than code, and many of them open source (try googling document management along with open source). I do not see this as the case. I took your suggested to google on those terms and what I found in the first 3 pages of hits were many, many Open Source solutions which were Windows only, pared down versions of enterprise solutions. Many of those did not fit my requirements. Most were written in JAVA which is something I'm not going to consider. Oddly enough on the second page was a hit for Subversion so we must not be too far off the mark. ;) -- Steve C. Lamb | But who decides what they dream? PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | And dream I do... ---+- signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: Tool for document management
Andrei Popescu schrieb: On Mon, Sep 24, 2007 at 09:57:35PM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote: Not having to learn LaTeX would be the head of my list. While I am sure it is a fine and dandy language for what it does and I know there are people who have produced some nice text using it I do not wish to learn a third computer language just to write fiction in my native language. What OpenOffice offers is convenience of visually representing what I want with a low barrier to entry. Did you try lyx? Just going through the tutorial should give you an idea. Some years ago I changed from LyX to OpenOffice. These days I tried to change back. One of the reasons was that there is no grep possible in OO. Alas, Texlive and therefore LyX, too, seem not to allow UTF-8, which by now has become an absolute necessity for me. Yours Hans Regards, Andrei -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
UTF-8 support in Latex (was: Tool for document management)
On Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 17:37:52 +0200, Hans Vogelsberger wrote:
[...]
Some years ago I changed from LyX to OpenOffice. These days I tried to
change back. One of the reasons was that there is no grep possible in OO.
I believe that the common desktop search tools can search and index
OASIS documents. I know that it works with namazu, which I use, and I
would expect that it works as well with beagle et al.
Alas, Texlive and therefore LyX, too, seem not to allow UTF-8, which by now
has become an absolute necessity for me.
Do you mean support for UTF-8 encoded characters in the input text? That
can be achieved by putting
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
into the preamble of the document.
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Florian |
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Re: UTF-8 support in Latex (was: Tool for document management)
Some years ago I changed from LyX to OpenOffice. These days I tried to
change back. One of the reasons was that there is no grep possible in OO.
I believe that the common desktop search tools can search and index
OASIS documents. I know that it works with namazu, which I use, and I
would expect that it works as well with beagle et al.
Alas, Texlive and therefore LyX, too, seem not to allow UTF-8, which by
now has become an absolute necessity for me.
Do you mean support for UTF-8 encoded characters in the input text? That
can be achieved by putting
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
into the preamble of the document.
How would I do this for musixtex?
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Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
Steve Lamb: To be fair I am operating out a large measure of ignorance. :) One of my main concerns is that the typesetting languages are languages. I'm sure they're robust but I have always seen their use tied to another editor. Since an outside editor is required it is my impression that there is no WYSIWYG, no way to get a basic view of how it might look printed outside of actually doing whatever magic it is to send it off to a printer. Which I don't have. Hm? Usually, you have one editor (Notepad-like or something more advanced) for your Latex code and some viewer application where you can see your compiled document (PDF, DVI). However, the more you get used to it, the less you need to know how exactly some specific markup looks like. You can always adjust the details at a later time without touching the actual contents of your document. I know that there is a special Latex-mode for Emacs which displays some kind of inline-preview directly in your editor. I like vim better, though, so I cannot tell much about it. Also the end result of my labor will be to send this out to be published. I have seen many publishers take submissions in Word, plain text or printed out. I've yet to see one accept LaTeX. So without a printer I am stuck with transforming what I want into an acceptable format and plain text won't so. I am using some formatting. Nothing fancy, noting that will cause formatting inconsistencies. But just enough that plain text is unacceptable. Sounds like a job for reStructured Text to me, but that's unacceptable as well, probably. ;-) J. -- It is not in my power to change anything. [Agree] [Disagree] http://www.slowlydownward.com/NODATA/data_enter2.html signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
* Jochen Schulz [EMAIL PROTECTED] [070925 16:07]: Steve Lamb: they're robust but I have always seen their use tied to another editor. Since an outside editor is required it is my impression that there is no WYSIWYG, no way to get a basic view of how it might look printed outside of actually doing whatever magic it is to send it off to a printer. Which I don't have. Hm? Usually, you have one editor (Notepad-like or something more advanced) for your Latex code and some viewer application where you can see your compiled document (PDF, DVI). However, the more you get used to it, the less you need to know how exactly some specific markup looks like. You can always adjust the details at a later time without touching the actual contents of your document. I know that there is a special Latex-mode for Emacs which displays some kind of inline-preview directly in your editor. I like vim better, though, so I cannot tell much about it. Rather than the Emacs preview, I use xdvi to view the typeset document: I use the Gnome desktop. I find it convenient to open several terminal windows (Gnome terminal or multi-Gnome-terminal). One window I use for the command line, and in each of the others I run an instance of xdvi for the file which I am editing. Inasmuch as xdvi allows me to zoom to any magnification I wish, I use each instance of xdvi to provide a different view: = a magnified view of the region of the page or column on which I am working (I typically typeset documents in two-column format) = a magnified view of the footnotes = a reduced view of the entire page (you can flip through the pages with the PAGEUP and PAGEDOWN keys; this makes it very easy to spot mark-up errors in section titles) = a normal view of the table of contents Using alt-TAB (or the rodent), I can switch between the XEmacs window, the xdvi windows, and the command-line window. Occasionally while writing, I save the document, switch to the command-line window and execute LaTeX, then look over the xdvi displays (which are updated automatically whenever LaTeX is run). RLH -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
On Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 07:30:35AM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote: Neil Watson wrote: With TeX and LaTeX and its ilk the templates actually work. I can use the same template for all of my reports and they always look the same. There are no annoying format inconsistencies that are so common with Word and OpenOffice. To be fair I am operating out a large measure of ignorance. One of my main concerns is that the typesetting languages are languages. I'm sure they're robust but I have always seen their use tied to another editor. Since an outside editor is required it is my impression that there is no WYSIWYG, no way to get a basic view of how it might look printed outside of actually doing whatever magic it is to send it off to a printer. Which I don't have. I remember when I first switched from OS/2 to Linux. I was used to using WordPerfect. When I switched to Linux, I was overwhelmed with the thought of learning LaTex. So I tried Lout. I found it great after a while. Think of it as a stripped-down LaTex. The output is PostScript so I kept a copy of GhostView (gv) running (watching the file) and whenever I wanted to see how things looked, just ran lout on my file to the same output file name. When I got my new computer, it wouldn't run Sarge so I had to use Etch while it was still testing and Lout wasn't in testing at the time. So I had to learn LaTex. Its not much different once you take a day or two to read the docs and try it. Again, the standard output (dvi) has a viewer, or you can put it into ps, and have a viewer follow that. Also the end result of my labor will be to send this out to be published. I have seen many publishers take submissions in Word, plain text or printed out. I've yet to see one accept LaTeX. So without a printer I am stuck with transforming what I want into an acceptable format and plain text won't so. I am using some formatting. Nothing fancy, noting that will cause formatting inconsistencies. But just enough that plain text is unacceptable. Talk to your publisher. They may be able to take dvi or ps. If they're going to take your work and plug it into their desktop publishing software, they may just want plain text plus .eps graphics. The issue here is that it seems that you want to do some formatting and then the publisher will want to tweak your formatting. You need to determine what your final output and their first input format should be to effect this. Your final output format doesn't have to have anything to do with your input format; the format that goes into your version controll system. Doug. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
On Sep 25, 2007, at 8:01 AM, Steve Lamb wrote: Ron Johnson wrote: PDF? Haven't seen it as an acceptable format for submission, no. Some on-demand publishers use it. For example, Lulu.com. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tool for document management
On Sep 24, 2007, at 9:39 PM, Russell L. Harris wrote: I use XEMacs daily to produce LaTeX documents. I have frequent need to search my archives of material I have written in the past, and I use grep for this purpose. It is difficult for me to imagine an advantage offered by OpenOffice which would compensate for the inability to make use of grep in searching my archives. I think it depends on what you're doing. TeX is awesome for writing books and scientific papers. If you're writing a letter to Grandma, though, OpenOffice is better suited. Using TeX for that is a bit like driving a semi truck to the supermarket to pick up a bottle of milk. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
Douglas A. Tutty wrote: The output is PostScript so I kept a copy of GhostView (gv) running (watching the file) and whenever I wanted to see how things looked, just ran lout on my file to the same output file name. Yeahhh, no thanks. I don't like coding HTML with the produce and peek method of screwing it up. Talk to your publisher. This presumes I have a publisher. I never said I did. I pointed out that it appears that submissions are desired in two formats. Implication being that when I am done with my work I'll be submitting it to different places in the hopes of getting it picked up. Since I am unaware of what company, if any, I will end up with I cannot make any presumptions about any format they will accept outside of the lowest common denominator. Word, plain text or printed manuscript. The issue here is that it seems that you want to do some formatting and then the publisher will want to tweak your formatting. No, my issue is that I have some formatting I want to be there and I need to be able to express that formatting in a way that will be accepted by the broadest scope of submission requirements. Working in ODT and then either printing it and mailing out the manuscript or simply saving it in Word (and ensure it still looks clean) prior to sending it through email is the best bet. Your final output format doesn't have to have anything to do with your input format; the format that goes into your version controll system. Exactly. I have not heard of LaTeX outputting to Word. I have heard of an ODT to Word converter OOo. ;) -- Steve Lamb -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
On Sep 25, 2007, at 4:31 PM, Steve Lamb wrote: No, my issue is that I have some formatting I want to be there and I need to be able to express that formatting in a way that will be accepted by the broadest scope of submission requirements. Working in ODT and then either printing it and mailing out the manuscript or simply saving it in Word (and ensure it still looks clean) prior to sending it through email is the best bet. As long as you realize it probably won't look the same to the other person, unless they have the same Word version, the same operating system, and the same fonts. It's rare that someone sends me a complicated Word file and I'm able to print it cleanly without adjustments. Usually things like spacing and pagination get screwed up due to differences in fonts, different interpretations of tab stops, etc. The only way to be sure the other person sees what you see is by using a page description language, like PDF. A little free advice: If you're planning on writing long documents, such as books, I'm going to humbly suggest that the initial pain of learning a typesetting program (TeX or some equivalent) will save you from worse pain later. A company I used to work for once did a large operations manual entirely in MS Word 2000. It was a nightmare. Every time the client wanted us to change the format of, say, the section headings, we had to go fix every section heading by hand and ensure they all came out the same. Invariably we'd miss some, which would be flagged on the next review. It took hours, sometimes even days, to make simple global formatting changes. About the time we hit the 650 page mark, Word started corrupting the file and it became impossible to go through more than a few edit/save cycles before the file became unreadable and we had to restore from backup. In a proper typesetting program, changing the format of a heading means changing the template -- once -- and then regenerating the document. It does the drudgery of maintaining consistency for you. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
On Sep 25, 2007, at 5:11 PM, David Brodbeck wrote: On Sep 25, 2007, at 4:31 PM, Steve Lamb wrote: No, my issue is that I have some formatting I want to be there and I need to be able to express that formatting in a way that will be accepted by the broadest scope of submission requirements. Working in ODT and then either printing it and mailing out the manuscript or simply saving it in Word (and ensure it still looks clean) prior to sending it through email is the best bet. As long as you realize it probably won't look the same to the other person, unless they have the same Word version, the same operating system, and the same fonts. Oh, and the same printers installed. Forgot to add that one. Word adjusts its margins based on the printer that's currently selected, which affects pagination. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
David Brodbeck wrote: As long as you realize it probably won't look the same to the other person, unless they have the same Word version, the same operating system, and the same fonts. It will look similar enough. It's rare that someone sends me a complicated Word file and I'm able to print it cleanly without adjustments. Good thing that what I'm writing is not at all complex. The two most complex things are italics and indent-first-line. A little free advice: If you're planning on writing long documents, such as books, What kind of books? You description goes on to describe what sounds to be a technical manual. Someone else mentioned mathematics. Another person talked about technical writing. Am I writing a book? Yes. Am I writing a technical book? No! I am writing fiction. I have no in-line graphics, complex font changes for examples, silly little icons to denote special sections, massive indention or the like. This is strictly line-after-line prose which could be done plain text except for the fact that I am making use of italics as a conscious style choice to reinforce when a character is /'thinking'/ something versus saying something. So, as I had repeated several times, I'm sure LaTeX is wonderful for what it is designed for. However it is not something I am interested in learning for the purposes I would put it to at this time. The constant hammering with examples which are far beyond the requirements of the style I writing I am engaging in is getting a tad tiresome. I want WYSIWYG because it helps me think about what is happening. I want simple and easy-to-convert to a common format because I don't know if and by whom this project would be picked up. I don't want a complex programming language because I am writing fiction, not programming an application! While they are both creative they are two different modes of thinking! While I appreciate that other people find it wonderful for their tasks I ask that those people also appreciate that not everyone finds the tools they use as equally suited to their tasks, especially creative tasks. Creative tasks are personal. Processes and tools which work for one person do not work for someone else. And that is OK! -- Steve Lamb -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tool for document management
On Tue, 25 Sep 2007 16:05:53 -0700, David Brodbeck [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: On Sep 24, 2007, at 9:39 PM, Russell L. Harris wrote: I use XEMacs daily to produce LaTeX documents. I have frequent need to search my archives of material I have written in the past, and I use grep for this purpose. It is difficult for me to imagine an advantage offered by OpenOffice which would compensate for the inability to make use of grep in searching my archives. I think it depends on what you're doing. TeX is awesome for writing books and scientific papers. If you're writing a letter to Grandma, though, OpenOffice is better suited. Using TeX for that is a bit like driving a semi truck to the supermarket to pick up a bottle of milk. I dunno. I have a template for letters all created, with my address, salutations, etc. It prints out an envelope for me as well, All I have to do is type in the content, and the destination. Far, far faster than using openoffice, if you ask me. manoj -- When anyone says `theoretically,' they really mean `not really.' David Parnas Manoj Srivastava [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.golden-gryphon.com/ 1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 09/25/07 19:11, David Brodbeck wrote: [snip] changes. About the time we hit the 650 page mark, Word started corrupting the file and it became impossible to go through more than a few edit/save cycles before the file became unreadable and we had to restore from backup. A single 650 page .doc file??? I'm more than impressed. In a proper typesetting program, changing the format of a heading means changing the template -- once -- and then regenerating the document. It does the drudgery of maintaining consistency for you. OOo has similar DTP-like template functionality. - -- Ron Johnson, Jr. Jefferson LA USA Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good! -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFG+cOXS9HxQb37XmcRAnMNAKDJeO9WjPoj6gHEb0ZRDVHPuvObBwCfUgbH pq1wzMhLs+2vBnqEDtIzOcY= =dKgU -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tool for document management
David Brodbeck writes: TeX is awesome for writing books and scientific papers. If you're writing a letter to Grandma, though, OpenOffice is better suited. Now _that_ sounds like driving a semi truck to the supermarket to pick up a bottle of milk. -- John Hasler -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
On Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 05:27:02PM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote:
Good thing that what I'm writing is not at all complex. The two most
complex things are italics and indent-first-line.
[...]
Am I writing a book? Yes.
Am I writing a technical book? No!
I am writing fiction. I have no in-line graphics, complex font changes
for examples, silly little icons to denote special sections, massive
indention or the like. This is strictly line-after-line prose which
could be done plain text except for the fact that I am making use of
italics as a conscious style choice to reinforce when a character is
/'thinking'/ something versus saying something.
I know you've settled on OOo, but it's worth pointing out that TeX is
a simple language if you're writing a simple document. In particular
you are already writing valid plain TeX in your email. Copy the above
(without the 's) into file.txt; change /'thinking'/ to {\it thinking}
and saying to ``saying''; type pdftex file.txt and \end.
file.pdf looks like http://sns.phys.utk.edu/~mahurin/du/09-25.pdf,
which I think is what you're after.
Good luck with your writing.
Rob
--
Rob Mahurin
Dept. of Physics Astronomy
University of Tennessee phone: 865 207 2594
Knoxville, TN 37996email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 09/25/07 19:27, Steve Lamb wrote: [snip] Am I writing a book? Yes. Am I writing a technical book? No! I am writing fiction. I have no in-line graphics, complex font changes for examples, silly little icons to denote special sections, massive indention or the like. This is strictly line-after-line prose which could be done plain text except for the fact that I am making use of italics as a conscious style choice to reinforce when a character is /'thinking'/ something versus saying something. So, as I had repeated several times, I'm sure LaTeX is wonderful for what it is designed for. However it is not something I am interested in learning for the purposes I would put it to at this time. The constant hammering with examples which are far beyond the requirements of the style I writing I am engaging in is getting a tad tiresome. I want WYSIWYG because it helps me think about what is happening. I want simple and easy-to-convert to a common format because I don't know if and by whom this project would be picked up. I don't want a complex Lyx, texlive-latex-recommended (for the memoir and rcs plugins) and tex4ht (for exporting to Word or odt format) are what you want, then. Create a simple template (/memoir/, from texlive-latex-recommended) should point you in the right direction), and then start typing im the GUI window. Since it's plain multi-line text, mercurial won't have any problem diffing the file and saving the changes. - -- Ron Johnson, Jr. Jefferson LA USA Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good! -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFG+cqOS9HxQb37XmcRAqvPAJ9gOhoRlzlmfUSUao8UEgBSaKsJJgCghdsq mPYcA75mYQxnlzP+AyrHfz8= =Y8k9 -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
Rob Mahurin wrote:
I know you've settled on OOo, but it's worth pointing out that TeX is
a simple language if you're writing a simple document. In particular
you are already writing valid plain TeX in your email. Copy the above
(without the 's) into file.txt; change /'thinking'/ to {\it thinking}
and saying to ``saying''; type pdftex file.txt and \end.
file.pdf looks like http://sns.phys.utk.edu/~mahurin/du/09-25.pdf,
which I think is what you're after.
Uh, no. It's more than that. You're forgetting loading in the templates
and the entire structure. You're also ignoring that CNTL-I is a tad shorter
than {\it}, esp. since \ is way out of the way of my normal typing habits.
Then there's the problem of most of the common symbols one just might want to
use in a work of fiction are reserved in LaTeX so they need to be escaped with
\. Well, except \ itself which requires a special macro. Oh, and it
completely ignores the two facts that I want to work on this document
visually, not conceptually, AND that I *NEED* to be able to revert it to the
proprietary format used by Word which, in a quick Google check, seems to
require at minimum of a shareware product!
After all this talk I decided to cure my ignorance of LaTeX and actually
go to the main site and read the first two chapters. The two chapters, I
might add, that the document itself states is all that is needed to write a
basic paper. I am, quite frankly, appalled that anyone would consider LaTeX
in any way an appropriate suggestion to someone who has stated, repeatedly,
the above requirements.
Furthermore I fail to see this supposed don't think about the formatting
simplicity when I can't even write a simple financial value without resorting
to escapes! I *HAVE* to think about the formatting lest I trip up on one of
the language's reserved clauses! I hate to break it you but I do not want to
be thinking about matching braces and proper escapes when I am trying to
figure out the right words to describe one of my antagonists reactions to a
bit of bad news delivered by a side-flipping protagonist. What I care about
at that point is how to I describe his reaction without TELLING my audience
what that reaction is.
--
Steve C. Lamb | But who decides what they dream?
PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | And dream I do...
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Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
Steve Lamb wrote: Douglas A. Tutty wrote: The output is PostScript so I kept a copy of GhostView (gv) running (watching the file) and whenever I wanted to see how things looked, just ran lout on my file to the same output file name. Yeahhh, no thanks. I don't like coding HTML with the produce and peek method of screwing it up. Talk to your publisher. This presumes I have a publisher. I never said I did. I pointed out that it appears that submissions are desired in two formats. Implication being that when I am done with my work I'll be submitting it to different places in the hopes of getting it picked up. Since I am unaware of what company, if any, I will end up with I cannot make any presumptions about any format they will accept outside of the lowest common denominator. Word, plain text or printed manuscript. If you write in latex you can always convert to RTF via latex2rtf, which in my experience works excellently. If needed, it is no big deal to convert this to word format. It is definitely worth the effort to learn latex. cheers, peter -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
* Peter Robinson [EMAIL PROTECTED] [070926 00:35]: If you write in latex you can always convert to RTF via latex2rtf, which in my experience works excellently. If needed, it is no big deal to convert this to word format. It is definitely worth the effort to learn latex. This afternoon, out of curiosity, I installed latex2rtf and ran it on a typical document of the variety which I routinely produce. The document has a header, a footer, page numbers, two columns, and footnotes. The resulting RTF document was crude to the point of being laughable, and was unusable. I then spent an hour or so with Google, searching for alternative approaches. The most promising seems to be first to convert from LaTeX to HTML, and then to convert from HTML to M$ Word .doc format. In previous experimentation, I determined that, for the type of documents I create, HeVeA is by far the best solution for converting from LaTeX to HTML. The header detail cannot be reproduced in HTML, and the output is in a single column, but these losses are insignificant for my application. HeVeA is marvelous in its handling of footnotes and the table of contents. And HeVeA has been carefully designed for compatibility with LaTeX, so there is no need to maintain parallel versions (LaTeX and HTML) of my source documents. So now the problem becomes how to convert the HTML produced by HeVeA into RTF or another format which M$ Word can read -- preferably within the Debian environment, and preferably with open-source software. In another hour searching with Google, I came across only one potential solution. RLH -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tool for document management
On Wed, 26 Sep 2007, Manoj Srivastava shared this with us all: --} On Tue, 25 Sep 2007 16:05:53 -0700, David Brodbeck --} [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: --} --} On Sep 24, 2007, at 9:39 PM, Russell L. Harris wrote: --} I use XEMacs daily to produce LaTeX documents. I have frequent need --} to search my archives of material I have written in the past, and I --} use grep for this purpose. It is difficult for me to imagine an --} advantage offered by OpenOffice which would compensate for the --} inability to make use of grep in searching my archives. --} --} I think it depends on what you're doing. TeX is awesome for writing --} books and scientific papers. If you're writing a letter to Grandma, --} though, OpenOffice is better suited. Using TeX for that is a bit like --} driving a semi truck to the supermarket to pick up a bottle of milk. --} --} I dunno. I have a template for letters all created, with my --} address, salutations, etc. It prints out an envelope for me as well, --} All I have to do is type in the content, and the destination. --} --} Far, far faster than using openoffice, if you ask me. --} --} manoj I also find using lyx is great for that. Using templates very fast, very clean and all the virtues of great printing and exporting into all kind of file formats for emailing. Charlie -- Registered Linux User:- 329524 +++ The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. .Henry David Thoreau Debian - Just the best way to do magic. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tool for document management
Hi, On Sun, Sep 23, 2007 at 04:29:46PM -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: On Wed, Aug 22, 2007 at 08:26:59AM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote: Hello, I am looking for a tool to help me maintain a backup of a writing project. Being a programmer my first instinct is to use something along the lines of rcs/cvs. I was thinking of svn since I have a project on Google Code and have the tools installed on one of the machines on which I would do a part of the writing. However in attempting to answer this question for myself with Google searches I ran across a message in a mailing list which said that version controls designed for software might not be the best for documents. What I want is the following: steve, several have pointed out how svn would work for you, but Ron made the point that it might not work so well with .odt as they are zipped files (I think). Yep, call it zip or jar file. The problem being that you won't get proper diffs between versions where you've only changes a few words. I don't really know the inner workings of the various VCS, but have a couple suggestions. In theory, OO documents are zipped archive of XML and graphics files. You can make diff between XML but I do not think you can use diff efficiently. If you have graphic files etc, diff on them may not be much useful. 1) depending on your requirements in terms of formatting and so forth, you could save in a different file format. I think(!) without looking that the earlier versions of openoffice saves were not compressed, so you may be able to save as and earlier version and essentially work around that. Or you could use .rtf or .txt or whatever, again depending on whether you need support for formatting and so forth during the writing stage. Yes but that loses info and extra work. (You can always get text out from old odt files quite easily if you need it later for some reason.) 2) ISTM that it would be darn straightforward to get a VCS to handle zip files properly -- unzipping the current repo version and comparing to the new incoming version and then zipping the whole thing up. I know it doesn't help your current situation much, but once of the still in development VCS'es might be able to incorporate this feature right away. I'm thinking particular of Darcs which is still heavily worked on, I think, and being written in Haskell should be subject to fairly quickly adding a feature like this. Might be worth a shot. But why let the generic VCS do something which it is not designed for. Just let them store old files as they are designed for. I suggest a bit more practical solution using readily available functions. Whatever editor you use (OO Write or even MS Word), they provide change history function. You save files as is into VCS with history enabled. You retrieve the latest non-broken file and you get history in it. Osamu -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tool for document management
I have been using Subversion for this very application for several years; it works well. Most revision control systems will do the job. And most of the post-CVS revision control systems (other than Subversion) also allow you to commit locally before sending the commit to the remote server. They also all (except for Subversion again, AFAIK) keep track of merges, in case you use branches. All in all, Subversion is probably the least flexible of the new tools. Of course, it doesn't mean it's bad, just that it's worth taking a look at alternatives. Subversion doesn't care; it handles any file type, including binaries. The problem is in what is meant by handle. Being able to store and retrieve arbitrary revisions is easy. Doing it half-efficiently with binary data is terribly hard. But the main problem is how to do merges since the merge algorithm necessarily needs to understand something about the structure of the file. In general, it requires intelligence. In the case of OOs files, you'll need to ask OOo to (help you) do the merge. or for revisions made to dozens of documents. But Subversion uses a diff technique, so the size of the repository grows very little from one revision to the next, unless you are adding much new material. A diff between two compressed versions of very similar files may still be just as big as the compressed file. And with Subversion, you always can go back to any previous version of any document. You can return even to a previous version of a document which you have removed from the repository; this is a consequence of All revision control systems can do that, even the ancient ones. Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tool for document management
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 09/24/07 02:13, Osamu Aoki wrote: Hi, On Sun, Sep 23, 2007 at 04:29:46PM -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote: [snip] The problem being that you won't get proper diffs between versions where you've only changes a few words. I don't really know the inner workings of the various VCS, but have a couple suggestions. In theory, OO documents are zipped archive of XML and graphics files. You can make diff between XML but I do not think you can use diff efficiently. If you have graphic files etc, diff on them may not be much useful. It's too bad that OOo doesn't let you specify uncompressed as a document attribute. Or even have a directory-as-document mode. - -- Ron Johnson, Jr. Jefferson LA USA Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good! -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFG92xIS9HxQb37XmcRAg/VAKDQ2ofdqssEVHLHpK4gChskWUdRkQCeP1RE GQuIP49FpYvVukx9vNGjfYI= =cnFg -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
