Rob Mahurin wrote:
> I know you've settled on OOo, but it's worth pointing out that TeX is
> a simple language if you're writing a simple document. In particular
> you are already writing valid plain TeX in your email. Copy the above
> (without the >'s) into file.txt; change /'thinking'/ to {\it thinking}
> and "saying" to ``saying''; type "pdftex file.txt" and "\end".
> file.pdf looks like http://sns.phys.utk.edu/~mahurin/du/09-25.pdf,
> which I think is what you're after.
Uh, no. It's more than that. You're forgetting loading in the templates
and the entire structure. You're also ignoring that CNTL-I is a tad shorter
than {\it}, esp. since \ is way out of the way of my normal typing habits.
Then there's the problem of most of the common symbols one just might want to
use in a work of fiction are reserved in LaTeX so they need to be escaped with
\. Well, except \ itself which requires a special macro. Oh, and it
completely ignores the two facts that I want to work on this document
visually, not conceptually, AND that I *NEED* to be able to revert it to the
proprietary format used by Word which, in a quick Google check, seems to
require at minimum of a shareware product!
After all this talk I decided to cure my ignorance of LaTeX and actually
go to the main site and read the first two chapters. The two chapters, I
might add, that the document itself states is all that is needed to write a
basic paper. I am, quite frankly, appalled that anyone would consider LaTeX
in any way an appropriate suggestion to someone who has stated, repeatedly,
the above requirements.
Furthermore I fail to see this supposed "don't think about the formatting"
simplicity when I can't even write a simple financial value without resorting
to escapes! I *HAVE* to think about the formatting lest I trip up on one of
the language's reserved clauses! I hate to break it you but I do not want to
be thinking about matching braces and proper escapes when I am trying to
figure out the right words to describe one of my antagonists reactions to a
bit of bad news delivered by a side-flipping protagonist. What I care about
at that point is how to I describe his reaction without TELLING my audience
what that reaction is.
--
Steve C. Lamb | But who decides what they dream?
PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | And dream I do...
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