Re: The Problems of TeX

Hallöchen!

Rowland McDonnell writes:

Torsten Bronger <bronger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[...]

The problem is that you have two groups of people: Those who like
working with computers and like to program, and those who don't
but just write documents. The first groups develops LaTeX,
writes the tutorials and textbooks, and gives advice; and the
second group is the much larger one.

Your categories are wrong, I think. Far too simplistic to divide
the world into two like that.

Some people who develop bits of LaTeX and write bits of
documentation (me, for example), aren't high-powered programmers
(my released code - and it's all going to get updated one of these
days - is crude, and that's the polite word for it).

That doesn't count. You are in the first group.

Most of the good documentation is written by people who seem to be
most interested in *using* computers to get things done.

Then these people should start working on *LaTeX* documentation.
Many tutorials start with "LaTeX is a macro package using the TeX
typesetting engine. TeX was developed by D. Knuth ...". This is
awful. The editor is not explained at all "because one of the
strengths of LaTeX is that you can choose one". The same for the
distribution.

We wrote a (never finished) tutorial for Windows. Of course we
received emails saying, "Why only Windows? Just drop two sections
and your fine tutorial is platform-independent!". Sigh.

In Germany, the books that are recommended most are just *huge*.
Very popular is a book by Prof. Storm at the moment. We read it in
the local user group and were utterly disappointed, all of us old
stagers. What's the point in a one-page table showing all nested
markup combinations that the NFSS offers?

Who's really insterested in breaking up ligatures? Is the
possibility of writing the umlaut ä as "a in order to gain
portibility really interesting in the year 2008?

[...]

The `LaTeX community' doesn't exist. There are LaTeX communities.
But what you describe as being needed - better documentation,
essentially - does not need a concerted effort by everyone in the
community. All it needs is some people to do the right thing,
provide guidelines, write good documentation, and nudge things in
the right direction.

But it must also be enforced. It is not enough to upload a nice
documentation on the net. There will be many LaTeX spindoctors who
turn down documentation that deliverately hides a lot of features
and simplifies some facts drastically. Additionally, there still is
this huge amount of existing documentation.

And last but not least, there is this odd masochism of beginners to
want to know everything, bringing themselves into deep trouble
eventually. In the LaTeX forum that I follow at the moment, the
question I wait for is "how can I move all my "i" dots 0.2mm
downwards?", coming from people with no typographical knowledge. So
the only way is to prune the features of LaTeX itself, which is not
feasible either.

Tschö,
Torsten.

--
Torsten Bronger, aquisgrana, europa vetus
Jabber ID: bronger@xxxxxxxxxx
(See http://ime.webhop.org for further contact info.)
.

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