From helbig@man.ac.uk Tue Jun 6 20:03:58 2000 Received: from mailhost.rug.nl (mailhost.rug.nl [129.125.4.6]) by dkuug.dk (8.9.2/8.9.2) with ESMTP id UAA13761 for ; Tue, 6 Jun 2000 20:03:57 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from helbig@man.ac.uk) Received: from gladia.astro.rug.nl (gladia.astro.rug.nl [129.125.6.17]) by mailhost.rug.nl (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id UAA08982 for ; Tue, 6 Jun 2000 20:03:55 +0200 (MET DST) Date: Tue, 06 Jun 2000 19:56:42 +0100 Message-Id: <00060619564210@man.ac.uk> From: helbig@man.ac.uk (Phillip Helbig) To: SC22WG5@dkuug.dk Subject: Re: LaTeX X-VMS-To: SC22WG5@DKUUG.DK X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Van Snyder wrote: > I believe the primary use of WG5 documents is to read and print them. To > that end, PDF and PostScript are eminently well suited. If somebody > other than the author needs to modify a WG5 document, the source form > can usually be gotten from the author. > > If you really insist on being able to read, print, edit and convert WG5 > documents, as opposed simply to reading and printing them, there is no > solution that is more portable and less expensive than plain text. Despite John's plea to stop debating WORD, I'd really like to second Van's points here. > If you want the ability to make attractive documents, there is no > solution that is more portable, flexible and powerful, and less > expensive, than LaTeX. Agreed. > LaTeX is free, available for every platform, can produce output for > numerous printers, can do most things other word processors can do, and > does some things (at least equations) far better than others do. There > are numerous good texts and references for LaTeX, and a world-wide > community of developers that is far larger than the staff that is > committed to development of any single proprietary document processing > system. LaTeX is also quite common in many parts of the scientific community. Fortran is quite common in many parts of the scientific community. And there is a large overlap between these as well. Before starting my master's thesis work, I was told to learn Fortran and LaTeX. I suspect that this is true of many others as well. I don't know how many Fortran users use LaTeX, or how many LaTeX users use Fortran, but I suspect a significant fraction in both cases. LaTeX has all the advantages Van mentioned and is also easy to learn, has printable, 7-bit ASCII as its source (and thus takes up a small, almost optimal amount of space, can be emailed raw etc) and most Fortran users will probably feel comfortable with the paradigm (write the code, compile it, examine the output, debug, repeat until perfect). > LaTeX has the additional advantage that it is text with markup. > Therefore, although it is tedious, LaTeX documents can be read directly. This also mean that the logical structure is visible in some sense, which makes it possible to convert it to HTML etc if so desired. Note that there is such a thing as a LaTeX-to-RTF (and back) converter. Although not ideal, it does make it possible for people to work on (parts of) the same document using LaTeX and WORD, although one cannot make use of all features of either program (but this would usually not be necessary in such cases anyway).