Alan Munn wrote:
Why should the average person need to learn to program a computer? It's like asking why they should learn to repair their fridge. But of course when a student bumps up against TeX, they are confronted with many things which are truly out of their actual experience with computers (again, for most people).
The experiences that some of us had years ago are very different from what kids today have (mostly, anyway). When I bought my first computer 25 years ago, I learned a little BASIC, mostly out of curiosity about how one made the darn things run (and decided that I didn't want to be a programmer). I also used a word processor that required one to type in codes for bold, italic, paragraph indentations, and other things; the screen display did not look like the printed output. When, in these latter days, I decided to learn Xe(La)TeX, this background made things easier for me. I suspect that when people who have grown up with only GUIs have a lot of learning to do in order to understand the whole non-WYSIWYG idea and why someone might want to do things that way. lshort or our nascent XeTeX opus needs to take this into account.
David
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