re: Compatibility

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

Ted writes:

   Steve,
     Our definitions of "transparent" are possibly different.

Actually, I don't think so.  With one caveat, see next para.

   To me, with regards to printing, it means seeing something on the
   screen or opening a document and hitting the print selection and
   grabbing the paper.  No lpr, No spool, No Ghostscript, No Script
   Programming, No PreProCeSsing.

Excuse me, what do you think all those DLLs are doing?  No spool =
printing means your computer stops doing anything else.  "Transparent"
simply means you don't see the helper programs, whether separate
processes or installed in the kernel as DLLs.  Script programming you
do once, then it's transparent.  What you mean by "transparent" is
"pre-setup" or "plug-n-play", I guess.  This works only if you have
plug-n-play hardware; the classic example being the Mac.

   Get the picture?  I know you won't buy Win95, so do yourself a
   favor and go

No, I didn't buy Win95, it was installed without my consent on the
Gateway that I recently inherited.  Turns out that Win95 uses a bunch
of undocumented conventions that make Win95 transparent to itself, and
seriously screw up a number of PD softwares that I use (details on
request, they're not relevant).  That is the price of one-touch
printing---if you're not a member of the plug-n-play cabal, the cabal
feels free to use your resources.  (Note---the fix is trivial, for a
script-capable programmer.  That's not the point, the point is that
this convention is *undocumented*.  If the convention *were*
documented, it would scare the WYSIWYG crowd away, so it will never be
documented.)

   try out at a store in Akihabara, right along side the Nintendo and
   Playstations.  See what I mean by "transparent".  I do know what
   you mean, and I call it "pain in the ass" printing.

It only has to be a pain in the ass twice.  The first time you do it,
and the next half hour while you sweat over configuring your system to
do it with an X selection and button click.

This is more pain than some people wish to take, and I agree heartily
with them---if they think it's painful, it is.  If you have more money
than interest in hacking, then you should buy Microsoft and buy
Microsoft-compatible hardware to go with it.  That's not that
difficult anymore, of course.  Everybody supplies Microsoft drivers.
Of course, get the wrong printer and your MS driver can take 40
minutes to produce the first page of Latin-1 encoded text, because the
driver sucks.  (If you're buying a printer, I'll tell you in private
which printer I had that problem with.)

Me, I use LaTeX and my typical WP session goes:

[click on Mule window]
[type like crazy] Ctrl-X Ctrl-S Ctrl-C Ctrl-C Ret Ctrl-C Ctrl-C Ret Ret
[Examine document under xdvi, decide it sucks, edit, edit, edit]
Ctrl-X Ctrl-S Ctrl-C Ctrl-C Ret Ctrl-C Ctrl-C Ret Ret
[Examine document under xdvi, decide it's cool]
Ctrl-C Ctrl-C "print" Ret

I could do all of the control character stuff above from pull-down
menus, but I prefer the keystroke shortcuts.  I did have to do a
little configuration.  Of course, if I didn't have a PS printer, I'd
have to add

(setq LaTeX-print-command "dvips %s | gslj")

to my .emacs.  By the way, I don't consider the lack of WYSIWYG in
LaTeX a detraction.  I like seeing the logical structure.  This
includes lots of recursively defined macros with mnemonic names for
math notation, which you absolutely cannot have in WYSIWYG by
definition.  If you do want WYSIWYG, of course life is a little
tougher in Linux.  But MS-Office is expensive deshou?

Not that expensive, of course.  More important, it demands that you
live in MS-Office friendly environment.  Those environments are not
friendly to Unix programmers, or in general to people who think in
terms of managing things by writing programs.  Those environments
encourage you (well, me, anyway) to do repetitive tasks by hand over
and over again because the investment in programming a macro even is
too high in the very short run.

This is not intended to convert anyone.  This is just a statement of
why I expect to continue using Linux for the forseeable future.  For
example, I don't really think most of you write complicated
mathematical documents where it is convenient to have a logically
structured notation with macro definitions nested typically three deep
and occasionally 6 or 7 deep.  I have yet to hear of a WYSIWYG wapuro
that will automate that task for *me*, but most people don't have
requirements like that.

Steve