On Sep 28, 2010, at 5:42 PM, Peter Dyballa wrote:
Am 28.09.2010 um 22:44 schrieb Philipp Stephani:
Am 28.09.2010 um 21:16 schrieb Peter Dyballa:
Am 28.09.2010 um 16:20 schrieb Tobias Schoel:
Can we now come back to the beginning problem:
Which way of creating unicode-encoded .tex-documents to propose
in lshort?
Using GNU Emacs 23.x – the Unicode Emacs (and any of its variants)
– with its AUCTeX extension.
I use the same technology, but I would never recommend it to
beginners.
"Beginner" does not mean the same as "dumb user".
No one said that, but beginners are often not as informed about things
as experienced users. And the majority of users these days are *not*
used to using the keyboard for everything, even if there are
shortcuts. I used to use emacs, but I no longer do unless I'm ssh-
ing into my lab server from home. I use TeXShop for latex and
TextWrangler for coding. And I'm not a beginner by any stretch of the
imagination. I agree with Phillip: emacs isn't for beginners and
TeXWorks just works straight out of the box with no fiddling around.
Also, emacs isn't an obvious choice for either Mac users: for Mac
users there are plenty of excellent native text editors available, so
emacs doesn't really fill a need.
For a document like lshort, recommending TeXWorks seems like a no-
brainer especially since it integrates all of the basic tools
(pdflatex, xelatex, bibtex etc) into the editor in an intuitive way.
So a beginner can almost immediately open a window, type a simple
document and view its pdf output in one simple step.
By learning to use accelerating keyboard shortcuts one gains more
time to learn TeX dialects and other details. Having to push the
mouse around steals ones spare time. (Which you can waste in GNU
Emacs as well, since it has hierarchic menus, even when running as a
non-windowing programme, and it also has a tool-bar.)
This is kind of like saying if you drove at 140 instead of 100 km/hr
you'd get to work faster. If your commute is long, it's true, but if
it's short, it really doesn't make a difference. There are so many
other ways we can save/waste time, the idea that using a mouse vs. a
keyboard is one of them is really a bit of a stretch.
--
Alan Munn
am...@gmx.com
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