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.
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