[X4U] RE: Alternatives to MS Word

[Zane H. Healy]

At 12:37 AM +0100 10/6/05, Stroller wrote:
>On Oct 5, 2005, at 3:26 pm, Bill Bauldry wrote:
>
>>For technical (read that as math or science) writing the best choice is
>>LaTeX. This software is a typesetting system that produces "camera ready
>>copy" for publishing... One of the best TeX systems
>>available is TeXShop on OS X using TeTeX. See:
>>     TeXShop: http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/
>>     TeTeX:   http://www.rna.nl/ii.html
>>
>>I did a book in Word long ago - typesetting was a nightmare. I switched: My
>>second book (and third and ...) was done with LaTeX -- I'll never go back.
>
>I've been meaning to try LaTeX for a while - it sounds very good, 
>but I've been put off because there seems no way to avoid learning 
>yet another mark-up language in order to use it.
>
>I might add that every LaTeX website I've ever seen gives examples 
>using the most BORING layout ever - uniformly Times serif fonts and 
>looking like a university textbook. I know that it's possible to do 
>clever stuff using LaTeX, so why doesn't anyone ever produce 
>anything clean & stylish with it?

As Bill Bauldry pointed out, it's probably best for math or 
scientific technical writing (aka university textbooks and papers).

I've personally never used LaTeX, however, at the core of LaTeX is 
TeX, and about 11 years ago I was a heavy TeX user.  For what it's 
good for, it's absolutely fantastic, however, it's not something I 
would recommend to the typical Mac user (though in spite of the 
"title" of this mailing list, I get the impression that a large 
number of us aren't that).

As a programmer, there are some serious advantages to mark-up 
languages such as TeX/LaTeX or SGML.  It's quite easy to have your 
program output the source document, and then run it through the 
document processor.

Oddly enough I've recently found myself using DECdocument on OpenVMS, 
it uses SDML (sort of a precursor to SGML), and at it's core it seems 
to run the document through TeX.  On the downside, it seems to be far 
more limiting than TeX, I'd probably use TeX because of this, but I 
don't seem to have the output options I'd need available.

Having said this, these days my normal method of producing a document 
is to use MS Word 2004 for basic stuff.  For more complex things I 
use MS Word 2004 with, Adobe Photoshop CS, Adobe Illustrator CS, and 
ClarisDraw (no kidding, I love this program, and just can't kick the 
habit), to produce the basic pieces, which I then import into Adobe 
InDesign CS.  But then I'm not trying to do mathematical formulas, if 
I was, I'd likely drop back to using TeX or LaTeX.

		Zane


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| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
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