On Sep 29, 2010, at 9:49 PM, Mike Maxwell wrote:
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?
[snip]
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 don't think that's the point of lshort. And I don't think that
proselytizing is the point generally. In my department, many of the
students are interested in learning TeX because some of the faculty
use it. In linguistics (my field), it offers many concrete
advantages: automatic numbering/referencing of linguistic examples,
automatic aligning of foreign language words/translations, automatic
syntactic tree drawing; a full range of logic symbols, easy access to
phonetic fonts etc., not to mention other basic academic requirements
such as citations and bibliographies.
So we don't need to proselytize, the students do that to each other
(it also seems to carry a bit of hipster cachet around here). But we
shouldn't confuse the converts with the experts: just because you have
decided that you should use latex doesn't mean you actually know what
you're doing with a computer (see my reply to Pete). So what is
needed is up-to-date and accurate information about how to use latex
in today's environment. This is what lshort is supposed to do. It's
never been my favourite document for various reasons (some of which
Andy mentioned in his message), and I don't actually recommend it to
people, but it's definitely one of the more widely available
documents, and so is worth trying to update.
So the problem is not about convincing people do use TeX, but giving
them good beginning information so that their experience with it is
not alienating. From my viewpoint (as a faculty member dealing with
students) this means recommending a simple front end that doesn't
involve even knowing what the command line is. TeXWorks is ideal for
that. Cross-platform? Even better.
Alan
--
Alan Munn
am...@gmx.com
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