Re: [tlug] Poll: OpenOffice or LibreOffice?

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

On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 12:32 PM, Travis Cardwell
<travis.cardwell@example.com> wrote:
> On 2014年05月21日 11:14, Raymond Wan wrote:
>> TeX is really troublesome ... no arguments there!  Maybe because of
>> the existence of LaTeX, documentation of TeX on the Internet is
>> minimal (in comparison).
>
> The definitive TeX documentation is The TeXbook [1].


[Also in reply to Jens' message]  Yes, that is true that there is the TeXbook.

I guess there should be an emphasis on the word "comparison" in what I
wrote.  With LaTeX, there is just more information.  Not just books,
but message postings, blogs, package documentation, etc.  Sure...the
quality of some of this information is questionable.  But, in
comparison, there is more information and maybe even more people you
can ask, too!

Of course, Stephen's answer about them being different things is the
reason for this!


> The task can be easily done in (La)TeX because TeX is a programming
> language.  If anybody is interested in seeing how such a straightforward
> task is implemented in LaTeX, see the 150-line source [2]. ;)  (I smile
> because I see some of my beloved \relax commands in it!)
>
> I have a good friend who is a biologist, by the way, and she claims that
> very few biologists use LaTeX, as the journals accept/expect Word. :|


I think for biological journals, accepted manuscripts are copy edited
prior to publication.  I've experienced this one or twice and the
quality of the work is pretty poor.  At least, if you care about your
work, you really can't be lazy...you have to check it very carefully
as silly typos do appear.

What I wonder is what do the copy editors use?  They take the
Microsoft Word file and use what?  A desktop publishing software?  Why
not ask authors to use that program to produce something that is near
final so there is less work for the copy editors (and less of a chance
of making mistakes)?

Ray