Actually I don't know what our papers were written on. I did the text and diagrams and somebody else dealt with formatting it all for submission. Ad astra per aspera
CTAN: What are TeX, LaTeX, and friends?
With a word processors your text is places while you type it, referred to as "what you see is what you get." In contrast, TeX is a formatter: it separates the steps of entering the material and placing it on the page. To see the difference, consider how a typical user of each system might start a new section. In a word processor a typical user might start that section by hitting <Enter> twice to get two lines of vertical space, typing "Section 1.2: New results", clicking to highlight that text, clicking to select a larger type size, clicking to select a new type style, and finally entering two more lines of vertical space. A typical user TeX user will type into a file the line "section{New results}". That is, a word processing user is formatting the text as they enter it, while the TeX user describes the meaning of the text and later TeX will format it. Beginners like word processing but when they graduate to complex jobs the appeal fades. Word processing a twenty page technical article is hard; for instance, keeping the vertical space between sections uniform is error-prone, and so is making sure that all of the bibliographic entries follow the required format. In particular, very few people have both the knowledge and the eye to correctly lay out equations -- people often say their equations "just don't look right." That is, as a user becomes more experienced and knowledgable the TeX approach of having the typesetting done by the program becomes the better choice. (Some word processors offer as advanced features TeX-like facilities for organizing input text, although few users take advantage of them.)
With a word processors your text is places while you type it, referred to as "what you see is what you get." In contrast, TeX is a formatter: it separates the steps of entering the material and placing it on the page.
To see the difference, consider how a typical user of each system might start a new section. In a word processor a typical user might start that section by hitting <Enter> twice to get two lines of vertical space, typing "Section 1.2: New results", clicking to highlight that text, clicking to select a larger type size, clicking to select a new type style, and finally entering two more lines of vertical space. A typical user TeX user will type into a file the line "section{New results}". That is, a word processing user is formatting the text as they enter it, while the TeX user describes the meaning of the text and later TeX will format it.
<Enter>
Section 1.2: New results
section{New results}
Beginners like word processing but when they graduate to complex jobs the appeal fades. Word processing a twenty page technical article is hard; for instance, keeping the vertical space between sections uniform is error-prone, and so is making sure that all of the bibliographic entries follow the required format. In particular, very few people have both the knowledge and the eye to correctly lay out equations -- people often say their equations "just don't look right." That is, as a user becomes more experienced and knowledgable the TeX approach of having the typesetting done by the program becomes the better choice. (Some word processors offer as advanced features TeX-like facilities for organizing input text, although few users take advantage of them.)
The input is plain text. TeX's source files are portable to any computing platform. They are compact; for instance, all of the files for my 450 page textbook and 125 page answer supplement fit easily on one floppy disk. And, they integrate with other tools such as search programs.
The output can be anything. As with inputting, TeX's outputting step is separate from its typesetting. The TeX engine's results can be converted to a printer language such as PostScript or to PDF or HTML, or, probably, to whatever will appear in the future. And, the typesetting -- line breaks, etc. -- will be the same no matter where your output appears. (Did you know that word processing output depends on the printer's fonts, so that if you email your work to someone with a different printer then for them the line and page breaks are likely to come out differently?)
As I understand it, changing one or two lines can change the appearance of a paper from AMS standard to pick your favorite glossy magazine standard. The blurker formerly known as ignorant bystander.
BTW, pace TBG, TeX is not a programming language, it's a markup language. Anyone who can use HTML tags should be able to use TeX. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. — John M. Keynes
As for your second comment, I doubt anybody who can use HTML will be able to figure out how to use \expandafter... You comment applies more to LaTeX, than to TeX itself.
One of the problems I often encounter is that I am not aware of all the programs that a given package will install. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. — John M. Keynes
The rest of us use InDesign, which is an awful tool because it does fast WYSIWYG layout and makes your job easier rather than harder for 95% of all possible DTP applications.
Every so often someone points to a book and says 'Typeset entirely in LaTeX!' and then you ask them how long it took and the answer always seems to be measured in significant fractions of a lifetime - especially when you include how long it took to learn in the first place.
Aside from being free and good for mathy symbols, LaTeX really has very little to recommend it if you want to get a big job done in a reasonable time scale and want to include little extras like colour profiles, soft proofing, and good text flow around objects.
Looks great. Couldn't have been done in LaTeX.
I also got to see some giant print presses. 8500 sheets a minute - running at close to its slowest speed.
Huge ink vats in bright colours. Six foot high stacks of pre-cut large format paper. A console out of Star Trek showing colour values and calibration settings across the surface of the document.
Cool. It's not a job I'd ever want to do, but it was fun to watch. :)
Oh, wait, PostScript is a programming language. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. — John M. Keynes
There's a lot more to commercial DTP than PostScript, which is 80s technology and doesn't include features that are standard in PDF and XML. And the next part of the project is putting together a PHP front end for a website which will dump XML content into InDesign templates automatically, so that when we do this all again next year all of the content will be collected in a single database and copied onto tagged spreads in a single pass.
I'll do code if it makes life simpler, but I object to pissing about with it when there are simpler and faster tools available, or if its main appeal seems to be as a tribal marker for the cool kids. There's a lot of the latter around Open Source, and very little of it can hold its own against standard issue features in commercial software.
It follows the line of this. Rien n'est gratuit en ce bas monde. Tout s'expie, le bien comme le mal, se paie tot ou tard. Le bien c'est beaucoup plus cher, forcement. Celine
That's fine, but sometimes you have a job to do, and coding isn't any part of that job.
But at the end, there are no reasons why we shouldn't strive to get the most fun in work, right? i'm sure that there are ways you do your job that you chose because they were more fun than some others. Rien n'est gratuit en ce bas monde. Tout s'expie, le bien comme le mal, se paie tot ou tard. Le bien c'est beaucoup plus cher, forcement. Celine
Now I don't any more. I think both of us prefer it that way.
you are the media you consume.
Can someone explain the hardware thing? Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
XP was the first version of windows to offer comparable performance to mac's OS offerings of the same era in this category. Vista has been a huge step back because they crippled it with what I refer to as sociopathic levels of DRM (which goes all the way down into the hardware level - we're not just talking encrypted media here).
Before I spark a mac/pc war, I'll note that only a subset of mac fans are deluding themselves - there are certainly legit reasons to go for mac products.
That's not to say it doesn't look good and perform well, but they all have problems and there's no perfect platform. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
Performance is so-so. I've been using Macs for about a year and a half now, and a bunch of stuff either doesn't work, works weirdly, or works in ways which are distracting and unproductive.
OS X seems more stable than XP, in that you can leave it running for days on end. But Mac Mailer crashes reliably, and I have a weird Firefox bug which only appears on dKos and suddenly slams the processor load up to 100% across both cores.
We had true pre-emptive multitasking back in the 80s on both Amigas and STs, and between Linux, M$ and Apple not much has changed in terms of core OS features or cool new tools.
I'm bemused by Linux - it's yet another reincarnation of Unix, which makes it pure computing nostalgia. I'd love to see some cool new stuff happening, but we seem to have reached a plateau for applications where nothing much is changing - the web-based stuff seems to be spinning its wheels for now as well.
I'm not a linux zealot, not am i even knowledgeable in linux, so I won't carry this conversation too far... Sry. Rien n'est gratuit en ce bas monde. Tout s'expie, le bien comme le mal, se paie tot ou tard. Le bien c'est beaucoup plus cher, forcement. Celine
MillMan:
Average people do not use linux
To be honest, I still find Windows less fun than Linux. Mac OS X seems like fun so far, but that's a descendant of BSD Unix, and it is Open Source, too. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. — John M. Keynes
I can't really understand how far open source Mac OS X is. Most of what shows up on screen is screen is still apple proprietary. Rien n'est gratuit en ce bas monde. Tout s'expie, le bien comme le mal, se paie tot ou tard. Le bien c'est beaucoup plus cher, forcement. Celine
