Hi,
there are three kinds of people who should learn TeX&Co:
- those who absolutely need TeX, because no other system let's them
produce the documents they have to (all this linguistis and co. [don't
take offense, I have no idea of the professions around this topic])
- those who can use other systems but who would have an enourmous
advantage in time and effort using TeX (mathematicians, other scientist,
typographers of some kind [see above], ...)
and now the important part
- those who should think structurally (does this word exist?), when
creating a text document. and that's nearly everybody who creates a text
document other than a greeting or similar.
To state it clearly:
Every high school student, who wants to continue to university (in
Germany: jeder Gymnasialschüler) should learn TeX&Co. in order to
_think_ _structurally_.
It's not about programming vs. using. (I myself don't do anything plain
TeX. I use packages and create new commands only as placeholders.) It's
about the order in which to create a document:
1. content
2. structure
3. revise 1&2
4. layout
MS Word&Co. proposes another order:
1. content and layout mixed.
2. structure
3. revision (nearly impossible for large documents if its harder than
using replace)
Btw: Is the table of contents in word still created from layout forms?
bye Toscho
PS: The high school, where I teach (better: learn teaching) will begin
to teach LaTeX to the grade-10-students of its STEM-branch.
Am 30.09.2010 03:19, schrieb Mike Maxwell:
On 9/29/2010 8:39 PM, Andy Lin wrote:
lshort needs to be updated, not just because it's missing sections on
Unicode and XeTeX. It's also working under the assumption that people
will *need* to use the command line in order to process a document.
This should be a concern to anyone who's looked at it recently.
I hesitate to jump in, but I think it's worth thinking about (and
perhaps saying, in this lshort document) why someone would want to use a
TeX-type program, as opposed to MsWord or some such. I'm not convinced
it's the right solution for everyone. If all you're doing is writing a
five page homework paper, for example, do you really need to typeset it?
By the time the prof marks it up for content (and maybe spelling), any
typography is going to be obscured by the red ink.
Dissertations are, I think, different; but very few people wind up
writing dissertations.
My own reason for getting into XeLaTeX is that we write multi-lingual
grammars, the second of which was Urdu. Trying to produce decent looking
Urdu text is a stretch for anyone who isn't a calligrapher, so I think
we had a good case for using XeLaTeX for typesetting. (Probably the only
other possibility would have been the Middle East version of InDesign.)
I suppose some people use *TeX because they like programming approaches
to things. (However, I've programmed in at least a dozen programming
languages, and there are still design choices in *TeX that I scratch my
head over. But yes, Donald Knuth is much smarter than I am, so I'm sure
there's a reason.) Maybe a few people use it to produce greeting cards
or wedding invitations or something. Mathematicians too, maybe, but
there aren't many of them around.
So: Who is the audience? And who among the not-already-converted ought
to be proselytized?
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