[XeTeX] XeTeX in lshort

Tobias Schoel liesdiedatei at googlemail.com
Tue Sep 28 16:20:49 CEST 2010


Hi,

this discussion does indeed seem to get hot. (Wrong adjective?)

The arguments concerning user expectance and user experience of windows 
UI have been exchanged, (The simples solution -- porting kile to windoof 
and using a pdf viewer which doesn't grab&hold its file -- is of course 
out of reach. ;-)) and no agreement has been achieved.

Can we now come back to the beginning problem:
Which way of creating unicode-encoded .tex-documents to propose in lshort?

(When I see 20 new mails in my xetex-inbox, I hope it's something 
interesting and I prefer to keep it thus.)

Thanks

Toscho

PS: My mustard (translated by word from German) to this OT-discussion:
Windoof user have to be hardened by ugly UI. Every time I open a windoof 
explorer in Vista on my mothers laptop, I get a window, which doesn't 
show anything useful despite taking up half the screen. And my 
experience is, that windoof users 1. hesitate to use ubuntu because 2. 
they think they don't know how to use it but 3. do it self-surprisingly 
quite well.


Am 28.09.2010 10:13, schrieb Alain Delmotte:
> Hi!
>
> Le 28/09/2010 7:42, Michiel Kamermans a écrit :
>> On 9/27/2010 8:53 PM, Khaled Hosny wrote:
>>>
>>> You know, because Windows has the most consistent user
>>> interface an OS
>>> ever had.
>>>
>>> (From some one who is yet to see two "native" Windows
>>> applications that
>>> behave the same)
>> Yeah, yeah, look, my name isn't "Gates", but in windows the
>> idea is, and virtually every applicaiton sticks to this, "if
>> there's multiple windows, you get them INSIDE a master
>> frame". I'm not going to argue that every single app
>> developer went "yes windows design style guide, I will
>> unquestioningly do what you say" but the vast majority of
>> important applications obeys this simple unwritten rule.
>>
>> I never said TeXWork was a bad program - it's great. But i
>> annoys the hell out of me that it launches two applications
>> when it says it's one. You close the right application, the
>> left application doesn't close. Wtf? I thought I was running
>> one program? So it's two applications... you close the left
>> applicaiton, the right one does close. Again, wtf? So it IS
>> one program? This is not good design for a windows
>> application. It doesn't matter that some other people write
>> good programs with bad UIs on windows, too. A worthwhile
>> program uses the visual semantics that come with the OS it's
>> made for. Stick both the windows side by side in a master
>> frame when the code detects it's being compiled for Windows,
>> make them visible and invisible via checkboxes in
>> view/window->source and view/window->final or something, and
>> presto, the entire gripe's gone. Now it's a cross platform
>> editor that respects the user expectation of the vast
>> majority of people who are going to be new to TeX.
>
> Have you used Microsoft Office lately?
> When you open a Word document and a second or create a second, it
> creates a second separate windows!! At least by default. (Could be an
> option to have only one main windows)
>
> Nowadays, there are almost more programs creating several windows than
> programs working in one main windows with sub-windows.
>
>> Some people love TeXWork because it's a better alternative
>> to everything they tried before, but that's because *they've
>> tried everything else and didn't like it*. It's almost
>> impossible to miss that means you're hardly new at TeX, but
>> that you're a long time user who's sampled everything there
>> is to sample over an extensive period of time and settled on
>> TeXWorks because it lets you get the job done. That's great,
>> if TeXWorks is where you ended up, awesome, it's a really
>> good program, even on windows. It also breaks the idea of a
>> single application that people that are new to TeX, and use
>> windows, will be used to. When you're new to something, you
>> don't want a program that behaves completely different from
>> all the other big programs you use. You want to give someone
>> new to TeX a familiar base first, so they don't tune out
>> going "this is so radically different that I cannot get
>> comfortable with it". Then, once you're familiar enough with
>> it to realise that even a plain text editor on a command
>> prompt works just fine (even if it's more work), looking at
>> better editors that take away the UI familiarity is no
>> longer objectionable. It's basically common sense.
>> Familiarity + a little bit of new, then shift focus until
>> the new is familiar, then drop the original hook you needed
>> to convince people it was worth getting familiar with the new.
>
> Under Windows I do not think there is a TeX program working only with
> one window for editing and viewing.
> Saying that viewing with Adobe Reader, from let say notepad2, is not
> breaking the rule, is correct only because there are really two
> programs, but for the new user to TeX it is much more difficult than
> using TeXworks which manages everything. You do not have to create or
> parameter builds (in TeXnicCenter) or something else. (and having the
> system close the first Reader window before (re-)compiling!!! like it is
> now)
>
> In a new edition of a French book to come out soon, they recommend
> TeXmaker (and still perhaps TeXnicCenter) because there are tools bars
> with button for the common (La)TeX commands, this doesn't exist,
> intentionally, in TeXworks.
>
> Alain
>>
>> - Mike "Pomax" Kamermans
>> nihongoresources.com
>>
>>
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