Re: tlug: Office suite for use under Linux

[Manuel Chakravarty <chak@example.com>]

"Jonathan Byrne" <jpmag@example.com> wrote,

> If I'm writing a book (not
> something most people do very often), I can set up style sheets for the
> various parts, type it, and forget it.  The sytle sheet will take care of
> the formatting automatically.  I will admit to having never bothered doing
> any but the most basic style sheets, but they were essentially point and
> click.  I'm not sure how long it would take to do a more complex one, but in
> the worst case imaginable, it could take no longer than learning to do it in
> TeX.  There is very little that can be done under TeX today that cannot be
> done with similar or equal quality by a high-end word processor (and I'm not
> just talking Mac, Windows, OS/2 here; Applix Words rocks, and it runs on
> Linux :-)   ).

Sorry, but I don't agree on this.  For small documents,
especially letters, there may be no big benefit in using
(La)TeX, but if you are talking about serious
technical/scientific publishing (a significant part of the
work of academics), I am very sure that LaTeX is still
unchallenged.  Especially when you have to set a lot of
mathematics and/or programs text, it is much easier to get
good results with LaTeX and you can do things of which
WYSIWIG users don't even dream.  If you want to get an
ideaof what I mean, have a look, e.g., at Paul Taylors
packages for communting diagrams, his `prooftree' package,
and other stuff:

  http://www.dcs.qmw.ac.uk/~pt/

There are good reasons that major conferences and publishers
highly encourage authors to submit their manuscripts set
with TeX.

The separation between layout an contents encouraged by TeX
also makes it much easier to reformat documents in different
layout.  A process, e.g., often required by publishers after
a manuscript is accepted for publication.

I think, Stephen already made the point for the better look
of a TeX document.  WYSIWIG encourages users to concentrate
on visual effects (this is by no means equal to *good*
layout), which might be good to impress your friends, but
usual gets a professional typesetter to cry in pain.  (You
can, of course, produce aweful documents in TeX also, but it 
is harder :-)

Cheers,

Manuel

P.S.: I wouldn't recommend LaTeX to our secretary.  In other 
      words, the killer applications for LaTeX are long
      documents that evolve over time, definitely not
      personal letters.
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