Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
Miles Fidelman wrote:Johannes Wiedersich wrote:Outside of high academia & the publishing industry, most people don'tcare how ugly their printed documents look.I think there are an awful lot of us in business, non-profits, and government who'd contest this. Not to mention those in the advertising and marketing arena.To take this further, one would have to argue about what is ugly. There is a continuous scale from very ugly to very beautiful. Products like M$ Word cover the range from very ugly to somewhere in between. The very beautiful end is accessible to professional typesetting systems only, ie. TeX based systems like LaTeX or Adobe's InDesign.
Point taken.I think what typically happens is that individuals who care about really beautiful design will migrate to either a commercial product or a Tex based system, depending on what they're more comfortable with. Corporate design departments (or university, or other large organization) are likely to pick a tool for reasons having to do support, or what their vendors (printers, ad agencies, etc.)
use.
Likewise. Just commenting on personal experience in various work environments.These remarks are not intended to start a flame
I'm personally in the camp of time and data exchange being more important than beauty - Word is good enough, it's what most of the people I exchange documents use, and we have internal templates to start from. (And I'm not sure my eye or taste are good enough to do much better).
When I need really fancy design work, I hand a Word document to someone else (like my wife, a former mechanical artist from the old pre-computer days, who went on to work at Bitstream for a while) and let them use their prefered tools.
FYI: Just for perspective, I'm also old enough to remember designing control logic for film processors used for in preparing print the old-fashioned way (you know, half-tone separations, prepared with screens and cameras) - and, for that matter, laying out the PC boards with black tape on acetate. Never used TeX or LaTeX, but used enough runoff and troff (remember those :-) to prefer WYSIWIG editors for short documents.
Cheers, Miles