Re: Ubuntu vs. Debian (was Re: Introduction)
Joe Hart wrote:
> Andrei Popescu wrote:
>> On Sun, 11 Feb 2007 18:41:55 +0200
>> Micha Feigin <michf@post.tau.ac.il> wrote:
>>
>> lyx is good for big documents, or when you already have a class to use.
>> If you are doing something small (one or two pages) and atypical it
>> might be faster to just use abiword.
>>
> I've never heard of lyx. Have to check it out. Would you consider a
> 450 page book a big project?
Another difference between anything based on TeX (LaTeX, Lyx,
pdftex,...) and anything not based on it (M$, abiword, OOo, etc.) is
that the formatting of the text will be much better with LaTeX.
It will take care of ligatures, have better integration of symbols,
foreign characters, better hyphenation, better page breaks, better than
TTF-looking large and small letters (headings, footnotes etc.), better
setting of mathematics, etc. etc.
It is really surprising that all the money earned from commercial office
products has only led to more (pseudo)-features, but not to improvements
in the finished product (ie. improvements in hyphenation, integration of
professional fonts instead of the not-so-beautiful ones that were
available for free decades ago, when the word processor business
started, etc. etc.). But maybe that only tells
There are many leading book publishers that use LaTeX-based typesetting
for their finished products and next to none that use plain
doc-documents, because of the bad result of the latter.
I might be a bit of a purist, but I would say that even for one page of
a document you will be better of with LaTeX. Word output might be ok for
a quick fax, but the printed text from a half-way decent printer will
always look better, if it's done in LaTeX.
My 2ct.
Johannes
Reply to: