On Wed, 12 Aug 2020 at 02:12, Tim via users <users@lists.fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 2020-08-11 at 15:39 -0700, ToddAndMargo via users wrote: > > So I put him on LO. He is writing up a book or something. > > A word processor, any word processor, is not a particularly good choice > for writing a book. They've long since gone from being a "word > processor" to being a secretary's all-purpose convoluted typing tool. > > They're not particularly conducive to writing paragraphs and pages as > just paragraphs and pages, often horrible at very long documents, and > not really good for doing page layout. Probably not a very useful > format if you were going to take a book to a printing house, either. > Many print shops want standards compliant PDF's, some will accept Word. My wife once needed a fanfold handout, so I created a PDF using LaTeX. The printer remarked that it had been years since he had seen formatting of comparable quality. Now Word has a TeX engine. > > Latex is the usual suggestion for real authors, but will be even more > of a bastard to use if you're not into that kind of thing. > LaTeX doesn't have to be difficult if you are working with an academic publisher that supports it. Many of the people who found it difficult were following bad advice that is all too easy to find on the internet. LaTeX is designed to allow authors to focus on the logical structure of a document. Details of formatting are handled by a "document class", and scientific publishers usually provide a document class that conforms to the style of a particular book series. Authors need to learn some LaTeX markup commands, usually by imitating a sample document from the publisher or a colleague's previous published LaTeX file. At my former work dozens of students and postdocs who had been using Word were able to switch to LaTeX with minimal effort. There are sometimes glitches that need help from an experienced user. In academia such help is readily available, but there are also many online sources of help. Unfortunately, the internet also has many sites offering really bad advice for LaTeX users. Many non-science publishers contract out the final tweaking/editing and rarely contractors who use anything other than Word. It is worth noting that LaTeX originated on systems with ASCII character sets. There has been a big effort to support Unicode fonts, including work by a consortium of academic publishers and societies to develop high quality free Unicode fonts (STIX2) with comprehensive coverage of scientific symbols. Microsoft developed Cambria Math. These efforts also led to a new "TeX engine", LuaTeX, so those who need Unicode support are well advised to use LuaLaTeX. For linux, LuaLaTeX is provided by TeX Live, which is packaged by linux distros and also available from the TeX User Group (tug.org). -- George N. White III
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