Re: TeX/LaTeX isn't easy

In article <1152335002.160406.296310@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Mark Mephinasony" <twisted0n3@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Nathan Sanders wrote:
Something online-browseable

Why must it be "online-browseable"?

Remember your Usability 101, from www.alertbox.com. Users, particularly
(but not solely) dial-up users, want to know what they're getting into
before they start that big download. So:
* Unmarked pdf links are a no-no.

I knew it was a PDF before I clicked the link, ergo it was marked.

* Download links and pdf links should go through a gateway page with
information on what you can expect if you go ahead and download the
file.

What would you expect to find in a file called manual.pdf on the Ant
homepage, recipes for BBQ chicken? The information is there for
anyone competent enough to see it. (Anyone not competent enough is
likely not the target audience for Ant.)

* Information on such basic things as what some software does, what
it's about, what motivated its development, what it's for, what its
features are, and what differentiates it from the competition should be
available on the home page. And that doesn't mean "available if you're
willing to spend an hour

Again with your lies! It took me 9 seconds to download the manual.
Even if your dial-up connection is 60 times slower than my (somewhat
mediocre) DSL connection, it would only take you 9 minutes. Your
connection would have to be nearly 400 times slower than mine to get a
download time of an hour.

I defy you to find anyone who has the interest and capability to try
Ant, but who has a connection that would require them spending an hour
downloading an 830 MB file.

Let's contrast this with what we found the other day:
* An unmarked pdf link; in fact, more than one;

The URL for the file was marked. If you need a tutorial on how to
figure out the URL of a link, then you probably aren't the kind of
person who will be using Ant, so it wouldn't matter anyway.

Apparently, you cannot, by hook or by crook, get more detailed
information about Ant from its own home page than a short and vague
list of differences from TeX without committing yourself blindly to at
least one large download *first*, which is entirely the wrong way
around.

Then by all means, don't use Ant. I don't (though not because of some
perverse belief that PDFs are inherently evil).

Then you delete it after looking at it. I assume you don't need a
tutorial on how to delete files.

And who pays you for the wasted time downloading it?

Who pays for the time spent building the informational web pages that
would match your idiosyncratic specifications? (Not to mention time
spent building Ant itself!)

You get what you pay for, and Ant and its documentation are free. If
you don't like either one, you don't have to use them. You're free to
build your own typesetting program, or write your own documentation.

(Remember, some
people in places that aren't quite hip to the whole "information age"
thing yet are *still* stuck on dialup that actually is metered by the
minute, rather than on a flat monthly plan. A dud download of a large
file could cost them as much as a day's pay or more. There's also
people on Compu$erve, AOL, and the like even here where we're solidly
in the information age, but they have alternatives; they made their
beds, let them lie in them. But think of the poor British! Among
others. About five billion others, I expect.)

How many of them would have any interest in Ant?

Quit lying.

That's it. Gloves off.

You claimed the download was "multi-megs". It is not. Therefore,
your claim was false, which means you lied.

(Actually, you only implied it, by talking about multi-meg downloads
in response to discussion about the the Ant manual. If you didn't
believe that this was in fact a multi-meg download, then mentioning
multi-meg downloads was intentionally irrelevant. So either you're a
liar, or you trollishly posted a non sequitur for the purpose of
inflammatorily emphasizing your point, because it wasn't supported by
the facts at hand. I'll retract the "liar" label if you admit to
being a troll.)

*** off and die, nitwit.

Don't get all huffy. If you don't want to get called out for lying or
for being a troll, then don't do it. The file is about 830 KB, well
short of the 2 MB necessary to minimally qualify as your "multi-meg".

Are you on dial-up?

Most of the world still is,

Yet another non sequitur. No one else was expected to download the
Ant manual, so no one else's net connection is relevant here.

Are *you* on dial-up?

if they even have net access.

Non sequitur. How many people without net access are going to be
interested in using Ant? How many people without net access are even
going to be reading this thread?

A lot are on
per-minute-fee plans still. America isn't the world, dumbass.

Non sequitur. Please cite where I said anything about America.

Then don't use Acrobat Reader. There are plenty of other programs
suitable for viewing PDFs.

Really? Such as?

Preview, Foxit Reader, xPDF, PDFViewer, Evince, Brava Reader, KPDF,
Sumatra PDF, any web browser with a PDF plug-in, and plenty of others.

I never open Acrobat any more, except when I want to modify an
existing PDF.

The link is pretty clear. The file is labeled, quite unsurprisingly,
as manual.pdf.

In the anchor text?

If your browser doesn't display the link target, then your browser is
broken. In mine, when I hover the mouse over the link, the URL shows
up in the status bar at the bottom of the browser window. I never
click links from a new website without checking where they go, so no
other text is necessary.

Nathan

--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/
.