it's good to note that TeX and its brethren are document formatting
engines. they handle the nasties associated with the creation of
large documents and the consistent formatting and production of them.
i'll take issue with the notion that you need to beat your head
against the wall to create a professional quality document with word.
there are millions of people who do precisely that with word every day
and i've seen very few with pronounced head trauma.
TeX and company have their place. but i haven't seen anything to date
that allows me to share a 200 page document with other folks who
aren't going to learn the markup and the CED process asssociated with
TeX. i have yet to see TeX work nicely with the 15000 cell
spreadsheet that i've tied to my bigass document as well. abiword -
which outside of the (star|open)office suites has the best import and
graphics handling characteristics of any of the free word processors
out there still can't import a pretty trivial word document. it
still can't save them.
the biggest driver for an OS X laptop to me was having freebsd with a
real implementation of office on the same box. when there are
keyboard shortcuts for everything i'll be in heaven.
> >On Tuesday 28 May 2002 20:17, Kevin Bullock wrote:
> >>Second example: creating a professional-quality document. I'll
> >>leave Word out of this discussion because the only way to create a
> >>professional-quality document in Word is to beat your head against
> >>it for a really long time. Instead, consider LaTeX vs. InDesign.
> >>Which is easier? Having worked extensively with both, I can tell
> >>you, InDesign is. (Also a lot more expensive. I keep toying with
> >>the idea of writing a free (GUI) page layout program that uses TeX
> >>for a backend.)
> > Have you considered contributing to LyX? I have never played
> > with
> >InDesign, but so far, LyX is as close as you can come to a Free GUI
> >for LaTeX. Of course, it is not strictly a "page layout" program
> >since it's WYMIWYG. Actually, one of my gripes with LyX is that
> >any time you want to so something just a little bit different, you
> >need to resort to LaTeX commands, but the developers are working at
> >making LyX support more LaTeX packages out of the box.
>
> I've played with LyX a fair amount. It's useful for what it does,
> even if it is klunky and doesn't behave like any other app in
> existence. What I've considered writing would be significantly
> different, and I don't know pure TeX well enough to know if it would
> actually be possible. Instead of a document formatting program, it
> would be an actual page layout program, meaning you draw text boxes
> to put text in and position them on the page, then worry about
> formatting styles from there. Also a lot more flexible than what
> LaTeX or LyX do.
>
> The main reasons I've never looked into this any further are (a) TeX
> is a big, nasty thing to try and learn enough to do useful things
> and (b) I got InDesign at an educational discount :)
>
> <flamebait who-cares="no clue"> XForms does indeed suck, GPL'ed or
> no. The open source/free software community should band together to
> kill it once and for all. :) </flamebait>
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--
steve ulrich sulrich at botwerks.org
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