On 9/29/2010 9:29 PM, Herbert Schulz wrote:
Take a look at<http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/> and be amazed.
Yes, I've looked at this (and I'm looking at it now), but again I ask:
who should the audience be for this lshort document, and who on the
other hand is not an appropriate target for proselytization?
Not that that is really representative of what folks do with TeX.
Right, and I think that leads to the real question: what kind of
document is it worth learning *TeX for?
Maybe: books which need to be nicely typeset (probably not your average
paperback), pamphlets, some kinds of technical articles (particularly
math), multilingual documents where at least one of the languages uses a
complex script, dictionaries. (For print dictionaries, I think the best
approach is to maintain them in an XML or database format, then
automatically translate that into *TeX for typesetting. For the record,
that's also how our own multilingual grammars are produced.)
For some kinds of fancy, graphics-heavy layouts, maybe InDesign is
better suited (I'm just guessing, I haven't done those kinds of layouts,
nor have I used InDesign).
But trying to convert the *average* High School or college student, who
is probably quite well served by MsWord/ OpenOffice Write, may be a
waste of time. You can say the output is ugly, but for some purposes
that hardly matters; what's important is that it gets the job done.
(PowerPoint, on the other hand,...)
I just like well organized articles with good hierarchy although I
used to (before I retired) do all my exams in LaTeX with some custom
macros.
I think you're quite unusual.
--
Mike Maxwell
maxw...@umiacs.umd.edu
"A library is the best possible imitation, by human beings,
of a divine mind, where the whole universe is viewed and
understood at the same time... we have invented libraries
because we know that we do not have divine powers, but we
try to do our best to imitate them." --Umberto Eco
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