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

[William F. Adams]

On Nov 16, 2004, at 5:07 AM, Thøger Juul Thorsen wrote:

> An interesting, though far from perfect, scientific word processor 
> hevily inspired by TeX is *Texmacs* (http://www.texmacs.org/), which, 
> like LyX, doesn't go with the Mac interface, but has a lot of very 
> interesting features.

That's a good example.

Also, I believe it's important to note that LyX is GUI-agnostic --- 
there're two different front-ends for it, xform and QT, and I believe 
work is progressing on a Gnome front-end.

More importantly (and on-topic), I first learned of LyX when a person 
asked if it could be made to work on NeXTstep --- there's really no 
reason a Cocoa front-end couldn't be developed, which would be a 
Mac-native interface, and would afford one access to Services &c.

Anyway, there's been a lot of writing on word processors as opposed to 
typesetting / document markup schemes, so anyone interested could read 
that.

Personally, I'm currently wrestling w/ a largish project (4,000+ 
graphics, ~200 major sections, ~1100 pgs. tens of thousands of index 
entries) and the opacity of Word is a major stumbling block --- things 
which look right / identical on-screen may not be formatted using 
similar schemes (I'd give my interest in hell for something like 
WordPerfect's reveal codes, something better than Word's ``reveal 
formatting''), and so are handled differently at the conversion step.

It seems to not be possible to insert an indexing code using search / 
replace, and one can't set a given character style to always be indexed 
(I'd be delighted to be proven wrong on these counts).

Even w/ the purchase of an almost $1,000 authoring package to do the 
conversion from Word to .htm, the project is still running slow 'cause 
of buggy and inconsistent behaviour (the ToC keeps getting mucked up, 
it won't build the index if I nest folders, it won't terminate links 
which it builds from references and it crashes, a lot) in the authoring 
app (did I mention it crashes? A lot?).

My boss still hasn't answered my last question on why we couldn't just 
bite the bullet and convert it to LaTeX using rtf2latex and use 
latex2html.... (he wouldn't even try to find me the time to make an 
experiment of it)

William
(who really needs to dedicate a year of his life to learning emacs)
-- 
William Adams, publishing specialist
voice - 717-731-6707 | Fax - 717-731-6708
www.atlis.com

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