Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX
On Tue, 25 Sep 2007 07:30:35 -0700, Steve Lamb <grey@dmiyu.org> said:
> 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.
Yup, TeX is Turing complete.
> I'm sure they're robust
Heh. This is an understatement. Professor Knuth has been
offering monetary rewards to people who find bugs in TeX for decades,
and with each release, the award goes up. I forget when was the last
time he had to pay up.
In other words, I would sooner expect google.com to be down for
a month that to find a bug in TeX. Could happen, I suppose.
> 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.
There are viewers agore for dvi, ps, and pdf. I have a little
shell script that just runs make every minute or so, and my viewer then
refreshes itself. As I type along, I can see a per minute version --
but I find that very distracting.
TeX allows me to concentrate on the content, and structure,
confident in that the end result will be prettier than what Oos or word
can produce -- without distracting me by cosmetic decisions until I am
ready for that phase of the document prep.
> 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.
These people do not accept PDF? wow.
manoj
--
QOTD: "I used to jog, but the ice kept bouncing out of my glass."
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@acm.org> <http://www.golden-gryphon.com/>
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C
Reply to: