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
