Re: The Problems of TeX



I'm not so sure about LaTeX, though. Over the last year, I've had a
lot to do with beginners, and I was stunned how badly they used
LaTeX. Mostly, these people were really good scientists or
engineers, so the limiting factor must have been somewhere else. I
think while a mere backend like TeX can cope with a lot of
historical burden that has been accumulated over the decades, this
is a real problem for systems like LaTeX that are supposed to be
used by human beings.


I my opinion the main problem here is (1) bad templates, and (2) using tutorials as their LaTeX bible.

(1) people tend to get their templates from colleagues, so bad construction survive and gets passed on. For example why do we keep on getting files using epsfig? Another issue is that people does not understand what the settings in their template do. I encourage our users to at least document what the various settings does, or why they are using them.

(2) This, in my opinion is the real killer. The general LaTeX user sees LaTeX as a tool, they have often learned LaTeX from some tutorial like No So Short, but since they do not have much interest in LaTeX it self, they never looked further than the tutorial. So for every single problem they ever have in their document they will try to solve it using the methods presented in the tutorial.

We as a community has to acknowledge this, and provide better tutorials. Yes, learning LaTeX from a 400 pages book (like my own) is a daunting task, but the alternative is users that still uses typographic ideas from Word, who does not know how to write beautiful tables, and has no idea on how to present nice looking math.





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/daleif (remove RTFSIGNATURE from email address)

LaTeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
LaTeX book: http://www.imf.au.dk/system/latex/bog/ (in Danish)
Remember to post minimal examples, see URL below
http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=minxampl
http://www.minimalbeispiel.de/mini-en.html
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