Le 02/10/2010 22:36, Philipp Stephani a écrit :
Am 02.10.2010 um 21:52 schrieb Paul Isambert:
Le 02/10/2010 21:22, Alan Munn a écrit :
On Oct 2, 2010, at 2:47 PM, Philipp Stephani wrote:
Am 30.09.2010 um 09:36 schrieb Tobias Schoel:
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])
Please elaborate on why they should use TeX. Personally I think that TeX is
quite inappropriate for linguistics.
I'm not sure that this discussion should really continue, but what do you know
about linguistics that would give you such an opinion? LaTeX is very
appropriate for linguistics, and many working linguists are using it (not to
mention that it is used to typeset various linguistics journals.) As I
mentioned in a previous message it provides 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. Doing
most of this in Word is either not trivial or not possible.
And I'll add: printing a corpus with annotations that don't show up but are fed
to LuaTeX for statistics, and returned as tables. What I'm doing right now.
With reference from main work to example number, mention of origin, etc.
At the very least, I'd concede TeX is not mandatory for linguistics, as
anything else, but ``inappropriate'' lets me wonder, and I'd require an
explanation, if transient trollism wasn't an option, as suggested by Alan.
Well, I hope you accept lack of information as valid reason. I'm not a linguist
and don't know much about the exact requirements in that field, but I haven't
seen much LaTeX usage outside of the world of math and natural science, that's
why I was a bit surprised.
Many books in linguistics are typeset with LaTeX (and many aren't); and
most if not all my fellows in PhD use LaTeX to typeset their
dissertations, without advisors forcing them to do so. And the fields
are quite diverse: experimental phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics,
acquisition, field linguistics... While I have my doubts about the first
advantage of LaTeX as stated in lshort (since that's what we're talking
about), namely that ``Professionally crafted layouts are available,
which make a document really look as if `printed','' nobody can deny
that a LaTeX document looks better than a Word document (which doesn't
mean it doesn't look as LaTeXish as a Word document looks Wordish).
As for structure, of course you can say {\bf Title} in TeX to produce a
section title, but \section{Title} isn't more complex, so you use it. In
Word, on the other hand, clicking ``Bold'' is simpler than fetching a
style (as far as I can tell). Most people use LaTeX like they use Word:
they don't ask many questions nor do they try to understand much of
what's going on. Basically, they do what they're told to do. But the
underlying software is simply better.
Paul
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