[XeTeX] XeTeX in lshort
David J. Perry
hospes.primus at verizon.net
Thu Sep 30 04:00:18 CEST 2010
Alan Munn wrote:
>
> Why should the average person need to learn to program a computer? It's
> like asking why they should learn to repair their fridge. But of course
> when a student bumps up against TeX, they are confronted with many things
> which are truly out of their actual experience with computers (again, for
> most people).
The experiences that some of us had years ago are very different from what
kids today have (mostly, anyway). When I bought my first computer 25 years
ago, I learned a little BASIC, mostly out of curiosity about how one made
the darn things run (and decided that I didn't want to be a programmer). I
also used a word processor that required one to type in codes for bold,
italic, paragraph indentations, and other things; the screen display did not
look like the printed output. When, in these latter days, I decided to
learn Xe(La)TeX, this background made things easier for me. I suspect that
when people who have grown up with only GUIs have a lot of learning to do in
order to understand the whole non-WYSIWYG idea and why someone might want to
do things that way. lshort or our nascent XeTeX opus needs to take this
into account.
David
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