Re: Why use the TeX suite?

anon k <nospam@xxxxxxx> writes:

Joel J. Adamson wrote:
Jose Geraldo <jggouvea@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
I recently showed a table that I prepared in LaTeX to my supervisor,
and he said "I'm torn between looking at the data and noticing how
nice the table is formatted." When I told him that it took me only
seconds to make that table (using a converter that I wrote), he was
even more impressed. Most of our tables around here are made in Word,
and you have to click this, click that and it always ends up comping
out different every time I open it.

However, suppose that you need to insert an extra column in a large
table. Here's one instance where pointing and clicking makes the task
much faster. In the markup, you may have to count out through very
similar-looking entries for each row, hoping that you've inserted your
cell in the right place.

Oooooh, and the word wrap, don't forget the word wrap. OTOH, squeezing
visual table data into 80x50 is some hoop to jump through. I agree
with you that it's better to do that sort of thing on an abstraction
layer on top of (La)TeX.

[...]
In the non-technical sense of the word, it's NOT just 'text'. If it
were, it would be far more legible to the non-tech reader. On the
contrary, LaTeX is text riddled with markup. If you are not
accustomed to coping with footnotes, endnotes and citations mingled in
with the body text, it's not easy to read at all.

Yes. Frankly, in a pinch, you can extract the text content of a .doc
file with a hex editor, and I guess LaTeX source looks no different to
a Word user.

Even the chapter
and section headings can appear indistinguishable from the rest.

I wonder, though, if LaTeX could fare better by being pretty-printed.
To me, LyX is very much a pretty-printing editor. It'd be good if
more LaTeX-oriented editors allowed something similar, beyond only
color-coding.

For example, how about indenting footnotes, enlarging and emboldening
section headings, and so on?

Yes, but that's encouraging bad practices: You pretty much have to
hardcode the handling. Never mind the parameters, without an insame
amount of semantic analysis of .cls files and friends, you have to
manually tell that \chapter, \section,... are headings, \footnote is a
footnote, etc.pp.

If you have enough functionality to do something useful with that
information, your system is too complex to let the average user define
visual effects for their own logical markup commands. (And I've gone
down that road: Talcum-render had its fair share of "if it's a number,
it's the nth argument, if it's a string, it's a literal, if it's a
function, it's called, and it can also be a list of the above, oh, and
it can have font attributes, too!" that pretty much broke Emacs'
customization facilities in a gazillion places. I know of exactly one
user who defined custom rules. (And yes, I'm pretty confident I had
more than one.))

Never mind the usability nightmare that is differing font sizes and
widths in an editor, which is usually designed for fixed-width fonts.
On the other front, I've tried LyX (OK, ages ago) and µImp, and I
can't wrap my head around the way they go with sub- and superscripts.
Mind you, I can't offer a better alternative if you insist on WYSIWYM.

Code-folding (for long footnotes in particular) is also not widely
offered by the 'friendly' editors that low-tech users are most likely
to try.

Well, usability in the face of complexity is an art that I haven't
seen mastered all that often. You can polish a fractal all you want,
either it's spiky or you've polished off the fractality.

Your comment about "share of the word processing market" is similarly
misinformed: TeX/LaTeX are not word processors. They use a totally
different paradigm. One that, in my mind, is superior.

It's indeed superior for some things, but not for all. One of the
reasons why mathematically-oriented people like it is because it
accommodates their work well. If you try something like a parallel
translation with multiple footnote sequences, and texts with a lot of
superscripts, subscripts and other localized formatting, it gets very
messy to edit.

Or some of the more fancy beamer things: list of bullet points on the
left, alerted in turn, for each bullet have pro- and con-bullets on
the right, of course nothing should bounce, you'll have to use
explicit numbering for either side and don't you dare insert another
bullet on the left.

[...]

That may be because you were trying to use a word processor for a task
that isn't inherently word processing. Word processing is not needed
all that often in the sciences, is it? It'd be a bit like using Word
or HTML for fine typesetting; they just aren't designed for that. The
market for fine typesetting isn't lucrative enough for big players
like Microsoft to care about.

I don't think I agree with the "big player/not lucrative" argument.
Programs like Framemaker or Xpress do make money or they wouldn't be
around. But I get the impression Microsoft likes to target
mass/consumer markets, they want to sell a million boxes for a hundred
bucks each, not a hundred boxes for a million each.

Ulrich
--
Von wegen "die 80 Superhits der 90er" -- wenn's so viele wären, wäre
ja alles gut. (Erik Meltzer, Arnim Sommer)
-- Das muß "Suppenhits" heißen. Und Konni kann bestimmt bestätigen,
daß man für einen Eintopf nicht gerade die besten Stücke aufhebt.
.

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