Re: [tlug] Poll: OpenOffice or LibreOffice?

[Raymond Wan <rwan.kyoto@example.com>]

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 10:06 PM, Travis Cardwell
<travis.cardwell@example.com> 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.  Yes, it takes some
work...especially compared to someone who wants to contribute to a
Word document.  With Word, you just have to buy Word.  As long as you
share the same version, then you will probably not have any problems.
Nevertheless, not difficult and not mysterious.

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.

So, I'm not so sure contributing operates in the same sense as
software.  The authors of the document really need to communicate more
than programmers for a piece of software.

Ray