Re: tlug: Transitioning to Linux (was: Many Faces on Linux)

[jwb@example.com (Jim Breen)]

On Sep 28, 10:12am, "Eric S. Standlee" wrote:
} Subject: Re: tlug: Transitioning to Linux (was: Many Faces on Linux)
>> I understand LaTeX's theory that their method should make writing text
>> better, but my problem is that TeXes only add thousands of key strokes to
>> a long product.  

I'm a fairly long-term LaTeX user, and I find that for ornery text, the
overhead is slight, although I admit the typing of the \begin{itemize}
etc. can be a bore unless you set up good macros for it. Of course it gets
even more cumbersome for mathematics and tables.

These days, since practically everything I write ends up on a WWW page as
well as paper, I use a simple markup "language" which I pass through a
preprocessor to produce both LaTeX and HTML versions. I have to constrain
it to  a working subset of LaTeX/HTML, but it makes life easier to the
point I am forgetting how to write LaTeX by hand.

>> GUI wp's take the needless keystrokes and make same
>> processes available...  If there is a better way to use Tex/LaTeX, please
>> tell me so that I can consider that also.

Have you tried lyx? It's in lots of places, including an rpm at
ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/powertools-5.0/i386/lyx-0.10.7-4.i386.rpm

Very nice GUI frontend to LaTeX.

>> Does TeX/LaTeX support Japanese?  

There are Japonified versions. I actually use a clunky frontend called
jemtex that turns any EUC in the document into TeX calls to a special set
of metafonted JIS208 characters. I can run it on a non-Japanese LateX
setup, which is good for here.

>> Are there conversions into other doc
>> formats?

Probably are, but I've not chased them.

Jim

-- 
Jim Breen        School of Computer Science & Software Engineering
Email: j.breen@example.com                Monash University
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/     Clayton VIC 3168 Australia
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