[XeTeX] XeTeX in lshort

Alan Munn amunn at gmx.com
Thu Sep 30 04:32:15 CEST 2010


On Sep 29, 2010, at 9:49 PM, Mike Maxwell wrote:

> On 9/29/2010 9:29 PM, Herbert Schulz wrote:
>> Take a look at<http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/> and be amazed.
>
> Yes, I've looked at this (and I'm looking at it now), but again I ask:
> who should the audience be for this lshort document, and who on the  
> other hand is not an appropriate target for proselytization?

[snip]

> But trying to convert the *average* High School or college student,  
> who is probably quite well served by MsWord/ OpenOffice Write, may  
> be a waste of time.  You can say the output is ugly, but for some  
> purposes that hardly matters; what's important is that it gets the  
> job done. (PowerPoint, on the other hand,...)

I don't think that's the point of lshort.  And I don't think that  
proselytizing is the point generally.  In my department, many of the  
students are interested in learning TeX because some of the faculty  
use it.  In linguistics (my field), it offers many concrete  
advantages: automatic numbering/referencing of linguistic examples,  
automatic aligning of foreign language words/translations, automatic  
syntactic tree drawing; a full range of logic symbols, easy access to  
phonetic fonts etc., not to mention other basic academic requirements  
such as citations and bibliographies.

So we don't need to proselytize, the students do that to each other  
(it also seems to carry a bit of hipster cachet around here).  But we  
shouldn't confuse the converts with the experts: just because you have  
decided that you should use latex doesn't mean you actually know what  
you're doing with a computer (see my reply to Pete).  So what is  
needed is up-to-date and accurate information about how to use latex  
in today's environment.  This is what lshort is supposed to do. It's  
never been my favourite document for various reasons (some of which  
Andy mentioned in his message), and I don't actually recommend it to  
people, but it's definitely one of the more widely available  
documents, and so is worth trying to update.

So the problem is not about convincing people do use TeX, but giving  
them good beginning information so that their experience with it is  
not alienating.  From my viewpoint (as a faculty member dealing with  
students) this means recommending a simple front end that doesn't  
involve even knowing what the command line is.  TeXWorks is ideal for  
that.  Cross-platform? Even better.

Alan


-- 
Alan Munn
amunn at gmx.com






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