Re: [tlug] Poll: OpenOffice or LibreOffice?

[Bruno Raoult <braoult@example.com>]

On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 2:23 AM, Raymond Wan <rwan.kyoto@example.com> wrote:
> As for Stephen's patient postings to help you see beyond what you
> know, I personally think that LaTeX is good for not just for
> mathematics.   What it produces just looks nicer, just as Microsoft
> Word looks nicer than handwriting, it is nicer than Microsoft Word.
> LaTeX is analogous to a typesetter and not a word processor.  The only
> way for LaTeX to disappear is if someone comes up with a similar
> software that does it better (much like how WordPerfect "disappeared"
> because of Microsoft Word).

I did not say it is not good. Wordperfect was not a bad product, and
sick people are not good nor bad.
My term was "dying" (which is also very different from
"disappearing"). I should find a better
word, but none comes in mind. What would be the correct word for a
game like chess which
would have less and less players in a near future ?
Please note that, even for chess, my feeling is different from current
facts (http://www.chess.com/news/fide-statistics-chess-is-on-the-rise-3367).

> You might ask, "Who cares?".  Well, one big part of communication is
> presentation.  Ask anyone who writes a CV and spends the extra time to
> make it look nice.

If you have to send it in Word format, I don't see how it could look "nicer":
The relative beauty of a document is the one of the weakest element in
a chain. Having A -> B -> C transformations cannot have
C making more beautiful documents than another written directly written in C.
I would personally consider that any automatic translation from a
format to another will be wrong.
Some will say I am silly, but I always *edit* docs after such
transformations. Meaning that I have to edit the presentation,
and any source format would have given me the same job, except if
written from beginning in target format.

>> By the way, what it the official format in CERN (which I consider an elite too,
>> and inventor of our current web)?
>> If you work in an university, you surely exchange a lot of docs with
>> them, and know
>> what they prefer to use internally.
>
> Why would you think that CERN is at the centre of the academic
> universe and anyone who works in academia must work with CERN?

I never said that they are at center of anything. I was asking if some
of academics
have relations with others (CERN came to my mind, as it is quite a
famous institution,
but you could choose any other one), to try to understand what is the
current trend now.
Jim said there was a push to some proprietary format in an university,
which surprised me,
and that I consider as a bad sign. Please don't read more from my writing.

> I'm not sure if I should laugh or cry...

None, if this is a simple misunderstanding.

br.

-- 
2 + 2 = 5, for very large values of 2.