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

["Manuel M. T. Chakravarty" <chak@example.com>]

jwb@example.com (Jim Breen) wrote,

> 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.

I am using the auctex package in Emacs for writing LaTeX and 
this makes it much more comfortable.  You not only have
shortcuts for the environments (like itemize) etc., but you
can also run LaTeX as a sub-process and let auctex show you
the location and cause of each error (which is much more
convenient than manually jumping to the line numbers etc).

> 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.

Why don't you write LaTeX and run it through latex2html or
hyperlatex.  The output is not optimal for mathematics etc,
because of the lack of support in HTML, but otherwise, it is 
quite nice -- for example, it automagically creates
hyperlinks for all references to sections etc and for
citations.

Manuel
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