Re: [NTG-context] Context, LaTeX, or an XML for academic writing?
Ville Voipio wrote: I am not saying HTML is bad and PDF good. HTML is extremely good for many purposes. Wiki is a good example of this, and so are many web pages. But as HTML is not necessarily a good form for a book, concentrating on PDF is probably a better idea. I hadn't thought of half the stuff you mention, which comes of the fact that my requirements come anticipation rather than recent use (I'm returning to academia after 10 years being in jobs where the only writing I've had to do is reports in Word for semi-literate business people). I thought it might be good to pick and learn a system now rather than start with one format only to find deficiencies and have to switch later. I can see a place for books and articles in HTML, but as a supplement to PDF for fast online browsing (and in that context I don't see a problem with just reducing layout standards). But I agree PDF is the thing to concentrate on for fully-formatted output. Well, if everyone around you is using Word and requires you to collaborate by using Word, you are up to your lower back in alligators. On the other hand, there are ways around this. What I use when commenting on other people's texts, I want to have the texts as PDF. Then I just simply write a mail with my comments: p. 123, paragraph 2: Not so. Dr. Frankenstein proved this to be wrong in 1974, see Journal of Unlikely Science, 1865, pp. 1456-1505 p.127, figure 2.13: I don't get it. That seems fine to me, but many people are often so wowed by GUI stuff that they wouldn't consider using this rather than the pretty marginal notes that Word produces. I have a friend in academia here who does successfully resist the (sometimes quite heavy) insistence on Word. She just says that she's not willing to be forced to use the products of a foreign monopolist which has been found guilty of large-scale corporate malfeasance in multiple jurisdictions worldwide. Being a humanities-based academic, she can get away with this ;) Her colleagues yawn and tell her to use what she wants. Really, I hate it when people send me their Word files. I am quite convinced I am not the only one. The annotation mechanism in Word is similar to almost everything else in the program: looks easy, feels easy at first, makes you run circles on the walls in the end. - Ville That's also my experience. I've worked in a company which has hired very expensive Microsoft consultants to come in and set up some Sharepoint+Word-based workflow for documentation. The system was so complex and fragile, it got dumped within weeks and everyone went back to hacking up adhoc Word docs again, copying and pasting like fury. ___ ntg-context mailing list ntg-context@ntg.nl http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
[NTG-context] Context, LaTeX, or an XML for academic writing?
Hi, I'm returning to graduate study after a few years out in the workplace. I'm a bit rusty on what good stuff there is out there for academic writing, and after a bit of research I've come up with: ConTeXt, LaTeX or an XML dtd (tbook or DocBook?) plus appropriate tools. I'm ruling out Word (having wrestled with it at work), and am reluctant to use anything similar like OpenOffice. I have used LaTeX for some things in the past. There will a little maths in my writing, but it's not central. Here are my main criteria for choice, in order of priority: 1) future-proofing. ie. I want my text to be always available to me forever, or until I die, whichever comes first. I take this to mean that I want the canonical form of my documents to be plain text of some sort. It also means that the system needs to be widely-used enough that it will be translateable into essential future formats as they arise. 2) semantic rather than layout-oriented markup as much as possible. I'm impatient with, and marginally interested in, layout. I'm very interested in what my text means. As much as possible, I want to set up my layouts early in the piece, and never think about them again. 3) relatively easy integration with some form of bibliographic database(ish) system (bibtex would do). 4) ability to produce pdf's, html, and rtf versions (for interoperation with Word-users) at least. 5) no need for me to write any code. I used to be a programmer, and when I left, promised myself, my wife, and my cat that I would never write a line of code again. I don't mind a bit of TeXish fiddling if *absolutely* necessary. ConTeXt seems to fit the bill for 1,3 and 5. I'm not sure about 4 (html? rtf?) or 2 (I haven't had a proper look at the nature of the available macros yet) . Would anyone with 1st hand knowledge of writing in academia care to comment either on the above or your own reasons for your choice of tools? I am doing my own research on all this stuff, but I know that until I get into the fray, there will be things I haven't thought of. Cheers, CB. ___ ntg-context mailing list ntg-context@ntg.nl http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
