Am 10.09.2010 19:24, schrieb Michiel Kamermans:
On 9/10/2010 9:18 AM, Tobias Schoel wrote:
Hello everybody,
some remarks from a happily xelatex-using maths and physics teacher
who has just finished university:
When someone arrives at xelatex he has usually gone some way through
the tex/latex world already. (Mostly latex, I think.) You can safely
suppose that he has read and used:
- lshort
- one latex book (companion, texbook, ...)
- some further tutorials and package documentations he needed
Assumptions are bad science =)
I can't say I ever actually read lshort, for instance, and I personally
jumped straight into xelatex because the internet told me it was the
only unicode-aware flavour of TeX, making the choice ridiculously easy.
The only thing I used at the time to "get up to speed" as it were was
the wikibook on latex. and that stopped being useful relatively quickly
when I discovered big or long tables in latex were ridiculous to typeset
nicely.
If we end up writing good enough documentation, someone doesn't have to
arrive to xelatex "from" another flavour - they'll have been told to use
xelatex by their friends and colleagues already, so writing it now with
an eye to the future would be good policy.
- Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
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OK, it seems I forgot about people, caring more about typographical
aspects than structured content. (Don't take this as mean.) Most people
I know who use TeX flavours, are Mathematicians and Scientists. These
people don't care, if they can't use system fonts. They start to use TeX
flavours, because they are told, its easy, comfortable and structured to
write math and other stuff with it. And the people who tell them, simply
recommend latex. And because the beginning orientation in TeX-World is
difficult for Office users, they tend to keep to usual latex.
Simply because they don't understand about the "Xe" in XeLaTeX, the "u"
in LuaTeX (not the Lua) or even why the La in "LaTeX" is so important
(they will simply use it, because "tex foobar.tex" will raise errors and
"latex foobar.tex" won't).
I would prefer a world, where every good advise to use tex-flavours
would come from people who know how to use xelatex, luatex or even
context, in contrast to only know how to use latex. But that's not the
case in the university world, I know.
So the documentation may have three different kinds of people to target:
1. The arriver in TeX-World, who decides about what tex flavour to use,
before he uses any tex. And those who decide in favour of XeLaTeX.
2. The TeX-World traveller, who gets annoyed about all the problems with
usual LaTeX (fonts, encodings, multilangual support,
copy-paste-from-pdf, nonreadability of text snippets from source code
for non-texies, ...)
3. The (plain) TeX-World familiar, who needs Xe(La)TeX for specific
usage not supported by other flavours.
Even then I recommend beginning with the XeLaTeX-specific packages, how
to use them and the principial wisdoms about unicode, open type, xetex
and how to create / migrate to utf8-files in the different environments.
(I still haven't manage to succesfully migrate my xelatex-files created
on ubuntu using kile to the school computers using texnicenter on windoof.)
That said, I hope you can use my point-of-view-specific contributions.
Toscho
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