[OS X TeX] Who should use (La)TeX - who is able to use it?

[Gerben Wierda]

On 14 Nov 2004, at 14:21, Arno Kruse wrote:

> Dear members of the list,
>
> For years I read the articles which are announced in this list with 
> great interest; I got  many suggestions and a lot of help - please 
> accept my best thanks.
> But during the last months a worrying feeling was arising more and 
> more, especially when reading the lot of sometimes extremely 
> complicated questions and answers: Is a "normal" user generally 
> capable to use  LaTeX?

I recall that the secretaries at the computer science department of my 
old university were using TeX and they had no trouble with it. It all 
depends on what you want to do. If you want to influence the outcome, 
some learning will be involved.

> What to do?
>
> It is easy to criticise, but tedious to make things better. Let me 
> give some ideas what we might do:
>
> 1. Most important: It must be much easier to use LaTeX. This begins 
> with the installation. Thanks to Gerben (next year in january I shall 
> finally transfer an amount to him, he is doing a great work) it is 
> quite easy for us, but not for a normal user, who is used to 
> double-click an icon, the rest is done without  pains.

Yes, let's go back to my original design of the first 
TeXGSInstaller.app: an app with a window and just one button: 
"Install".

What almost everybody would like was a WYSIWYG editor which would 
produce the quality of TeX (better even, because some parts of TeX can 
do with improvement) but which would be completely GUI in its 
interface.

G

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