[texworks] Insert garphic

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Wed Oct 7 23:49:25 CEST 2009


On 7 October 2009 Peter Hertel wrote:

 > TeXworks is intented to lower the entrance barrier to TeX, but not to 
 > make it another MS-Word.. Such specialized topics as including graphics 
 > by pressing a button really distract from the strength of TeX or LaTex. 
 > For including pictures into your documents you should write a macro 
 > making use of the figure environment, label the figure and provide a 
 > caption. In my opinion, one of the real advantages of TeX or LaTex is 
 > its powerful and easy-to-lern macro language. It is a bad idea to shield 
 > users from writing LaTeX macros. TeX or LaTeX is for literate 
 > programmers of texts, not for quick hacks.
 > Peter

I agree with you, though I think that macro programming shouldn't be
taught in the very first lesson.  It's more important that users
learn quickly how LaTeX works and I'm sure that they recognize
themselves quite fast that macros are useful.

Another point is that I'm quite interested in similar behavior on all
platforms.

At the moment I'm working on a document class for students who are
doing their diploma theses in our company.  The idea is to hide all
the layout/encoding/font stuff in the class file so that they have to
concentrate on the content of their work only.  I recently gave one of
them the files l2kurz.pdf and amsldoc.pdf, asked him to read them, and
to use a text editor.

A few weeks later he gave me the files he prepared so far because none
of them could be processed by TeX.  And indeed, everything was broken.
There had been about 10 mistakes within a single formula (no, I'm not
exaggerating).  It was easier to write the formulas from scratch than
to repair them.

I asked him whether he read the docs I proposed and, who, the hell,
advised him to do such stupid things.  He said: "Oh, I thought it's
easier to learn LaTeX with TeXnicCenter.  When I click on a button I
can see what it produces."

Actually, he just produced a heap of crap and learned nothing.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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