On Mon, Oct 29, 2001 at 02:36:01PM -0500, Bob Koss wrote:
>
> Would TeX (LaTeX) be a suitable replacement for PowerPoint?
Depends.
If you want presentation with animations, 100 different fonts, etc. then
the answer is no. Use StarOffice.
If you are not willing to climb a learning curve at the start, then no. And
it's only worth it if you are going to be creating the right kinds of
documents.
If your presentations are to be printed out anyway, contain a lot of math
symbols (eg. formulas), or a lot of text, and are presented on slides on an
overhead projector or similar anyway, then yes.
If you are sick of MS apps messing up your text alignment, putting images
in the wrong place, and suddenly looking a complete mess because you
changed the default printer, then yes.
If you are sick of MS apps changing the file format every version to force
everyone to upgrade, then yes. (I can still read and process LaTeX
documents from 1992. Without ANY loss of formatting, whatsoever.)
However: LaTeX is _not_ a presentation program. It's a text processor. (Not
even a 'word processor'.). It focuses on the text structure, easily
readable layout, and not WYSIWYG. LaTeX is a WYMIWYG (what you mean is what
you get) type of program, you don't have to know anything about layout, DTP
or whatever to be able to produce perfectly layouted text.
You do have to learn the basic LaTeX tags to get started though. But that's
not a problem ... it's about as easy as writing HTML.
Here's the typical simple 'hello world' in LaTeX:
\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\begin{document}
Hello World!
\end{document}
--
Jens Benecke ········ http://www.hitchhikers.de/ - Europas Mitfahrzentrale
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