On Sep 29, 2010, at 5:59 PM, Peter Dyballa wrote:
Am 29.09.2010 um 23:40 schrieb Philipp Stephani:
reality is approximately as follows: Users who read beginner
documents such as lshort don't want to use TeX, but are forced to
do so by their advisor. They don't want to read discussions about
the pros and cons of various text editors or why Microsoft is evil.
Beginners usually know how to visit web sites and how to create
simple documents in Microsoft Word (perhaps in three years from now
they might not know about the latter, simply because they don't
need it). Not a bit more. They don't know what a text file or a
text editor is, they have never heard the word "Unicode", and they
have never used a programming language before. What they need are
step-by-step instructions that tell them, in simple words, how to
create TeX documents.
This *might* have been the situation in the so-called first or
industrialised world 20 years ago.
No, in fact this is very accurate (except maybe the part about being
forced by advisors). How often do you actually interact with
undergraduate (or even graduate students) Pete? My experience is that
they're really good at updating their Facebook status, but things
deteriorate quickly from there, exactly as Philipp describes. And I
deal with a broad range of students at a major US research university.
Alan
--
Alan Munn
am...@gmx.com
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