Re: [seul-edu] Re: perl or......

["Joseph E. Arruda [zeruch]" <z@valinux.com>]

Chris Hedemark wrote:
> 
> S. Barret Dolph said:
> 
> > How well does Latex work for formatting entire books?
> 
> Argggh!  I starting writing a book using KLyX (the KDE front end to Latex).
> Forget it.  I hate it.  I'd rather use MS Word (really!).  I've not been
> very impressed with any of the word processors I've seen on Linux yet
> compared to MS Word.

Well, to be fair, LateX was not designed as a Word Processor, but as a
text formatting 'language'.
As such, it has its advantages and disadvantages.  KLyx is getting
better, but styill fairly weak in some areas.

Framemaker handles LateX apparently, but Adobe has cut support of FM for
Linux...

>  And I *have* written 200-300 page books in MS Word
> without difficulty.  It's actually pretty nice as it sets up your TOC,
> Index, footnotes, etc. all very easily and largely automatically.  Not
> tooting MS's horn here but just pointing out a big gaping hole that possibly
> exists in Linux tools.

On this I disagree.  LateX is not an Office competitor as much as an
industrial grade formatting tool.  O'Reilly, New Riders, and even
Harvard Press all use DoCBook/LateX almost exclusively. Office-like
tools add extraneous layers of kruft that many serious layout folks do
not like.

> I've also offered to write documentation for Linux projects in the past and
> quickly lost enthusiasm when I found the best tools for writing DocBook
> documents are emacs and vi.  I want a WYSIWYG GUI so I can see what my
> readers will see.  Anything else is a waste of time, IMHO.

And I would say such an outlook is a tad shortsighted.  If you are
writing docs for Linux Projects, many will see your words in a terminal,
so seeing it in vi is just as 'true to form' as WYSIWYG.



z

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