Re: [tlug] Poll: OpenOffice or LibreOffice?

[Travis Cardwell <travis.cardwell@example.com>]

On 2014年05月20日 23:40, Raymond Wan wrote:
> On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 10:06 PM, Travis Cardwell wrote:
>> The thing that I dislike most about LaTeX is that it is not very
>> accessible.  With non-trivial documents (those with many custom
>> environments and commands), it can be quite difficult for people to
>> contribute or modify the source, perhaps defeating much of the point of
>> releasing the source.  It is analogous to releasing complex software
>> written in assembly language.
>
> Indeed, it is troublesome but not that bad.  When you compile, the
> output indicates what files it is including.

Though it has been a while, I have had experiences of not understanding
TeX errors, in spite of knowing the originating file.  I recall working
with TeX code containing an inordinate amount of \relax [1] commands,
trying to figure out how the various macros were behaving with partial
application of parameters.  I even had to resort to "guess-and-check,"
something that is very painful for a programmer to do.  I am much more
capable today, but it took me years before I could consider myself
proficient at non-trivial LaTeX.

As Edward mentioned, separation of content and presentation is important.
 At least the content of LaTeX projects can be made more accessible by
strict separation.  People contributing to the content should not have to
worry about TeX intricacies (example: fragility [2]).

> In the end, a text document is not really comparable to software.
> With software, you can contribute to fixing a function and as long as
> the interface and return value are unchanged, you can pretty much do
> it in isolation.  (Ok, try not to introduce bugs!)  With text, it
> really does have to flow...I've seen documents written by non-native
> English speakers and the frequency of mistakes increases in one
> paragraph.  Very obvious that someone else wrote the paragraph.

Indeed.  Word documents are just text documents.  LaTeX documents, on the
other hand, consist of text that is coupled with software.  Basic LaTeX
usage, where users rely on classes/styles provided by others, is not much
more difficult than using a word processor.  Non-basic LaTeX usage,
however, *is* software development.

Bruno mentioned that he had difficulty formatting a haiku in LaTeX.  I
imagine that his goal was only concerned with presentation, not the actual
content of the haiku.  Creating a custom haiku layout in LibreOffice is
very simple.  It is not so simple in TeX, where layout entails
programming.  Using a standard LaTeX class is easy, but a custom haiku
layout is not a standard, so even using LyX did not help.  If somebody has
already gone to the trouble of writing a haiku class [3], you can download
it and see if it meets your needs.  If you really want to make a custom
class, however, you must learn a bit more.

As has been mentioned earlier in this thread, many people start LaTeX in
an academic setting, in order to submit an article for publication or
write a thesis.  In the vast majority of cases, this is basic usage, as
all of the programming is done for them.  Even somebody who has written
multiple articles and a thesis using LaTeX and has years of basic LaTeX
experience might have difficulties doing something as seemingly simple as
writing a custom haiku class.

Cheers,

Travis

[1] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/TeX/relax
[2]
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/4736/what-is-the-difference-between-fragile-and-robust-commands
[3] Search http://www.ctan.org/