> On Wednesday 05 September 2001 16:09, you wrote:
> > John Levon writes:
> >
> > I've turned tens of normal students onto lyx instead
> > of word (even unix-hating students) entirely as a result of the output.
> >
> > Yes, but ...
My two bits:
The effect on my students has been the same. Two years ago we started
pushing them to LaTeX/LyX. At first they were rather reluctant,
but they learned that they can write rather large documents WITHOUT:
1) Getting ridiculously large .doc files
2) Losing all formatting because W*rd gets suddenly insane.
3) Losing pictures, references, numbering, etc due to the same
reasons.
4) blah-blah-blah: all bugs that W*rd has.
In fact, one year ago just one work (out of 20) was written in LyX,
a rather bad record. This year, there were 8 out of 12. Next year
we plan to crush the W*rd users, as people are learning that the
effort to learn a new editor completely pays itself.
Our price to have such results: we had to provide .cls and
.layout files for our written works (took a few days to adapt from
report.cls) and support them. Not such a terrible job.
Our advantage: all written works using such a format seem alike,
and there are NO formatting wars: everyone gets the same results
and nobody cares about "making it more beautiful than the others" or
such a crap. Gluing them all together to produce a volume is simple.
The students notice that they do not have to format their documents
for hours, or produce title pages by themselves, or many other
things that are done automatically. They notice that they are free
to concentrate on the thinking part of their texts.
This is all referent to LyX, but there is a point that specifically
refers to LaTeX: one CAN write programs that automatically produce
LaTeX files as output. I have already done that in my thesis long
ago, and it is a \HUGE satisfaction to have a program that runs
and produces TeX output automatically, formatted and ready to be
included into another document. There is no copy and paste, no
nothing. I have been using this to produce random exercise lists,
so that every student gets different tasks. You just need a lot
of tasks, a program to produce a .tex context around the task to
be done, and run LaTeX automatically. Couldn't be smoother, and in
three minutes I get 50 high-quality documents ready for distribution.
Yes, in this list we have all those little formatting problems:
How do I enlarge this, or reduce that, or insert this other, or
change all of.... about this, there are two things that may be said:
-- Solving such things is fun, and one learns a lot from them.
-- There are such discussions because LaTeX allows us to make such
special demands (and we are free to try it), although a typical user
does not need to care about it. Thousands of LyX users don't care.
To sum it up, the best thing is to see a formerly reluctant student
come proudly to you to show the document he has produced, and saying
"This is so much better to work with, and results are better too."
I think this is the joy of doing it all.
jb
