[OS X TeX] rotating vs landscape in two-sided documents
Simon Spiegel
simon at simifilm.ch
Sun Feb 11 19:53:49 CET 2007
On 11.02.2007, at 19:45, Bruno Voisin wrote:
> Le 11 févr. 07 à 18:38, Chabot Denis a écrit :
>
>> Well, thanks to the help of many people here, my report is almost
>> complete and I am very happy with the result, although I hope
>> future reports will allow me to concentrate on content and not on
>> formatting, one advantage of using LaTeX that was not achieved for
>> this particular document...
>
> That is an advantage I have never seen achieved in practice. LaTeX
> is so insistent on imposing a specific formatting, and it may be so
> inconvenient to use at times (think for example of having to
> combine longtable, multline, array and \multicolumn in order to
> write a midly complicated table), that in my experience using LaTeX
> means spending more time formatting and less time writing.
>
> More specifically, LaTeX is nice when you are using a dedicated
> package yielding exactly the desired formatting (for example a
> journal-specific class), and/or when you document contains a lot of
> maths.
>
> But when you want to write a memo or report, say, and the standard
> article, report or book classes do not meet your needs exactly,
> then you'll spend an awful lot of time interrupting your workflow
> to deal with some formatting issues, look for some style to
> accomplish a specific task, search a FAQ, post to a mailing list,
> and so forth. In those cases I find it more efficient and stress-
> free to use a WYSIWYG word processor (Pages in my case). The output
> will possibly be less typographically correct, but it will be
> achieved more easily, and it will be possible to devote more
> attention to the matter at hand without having constantly to
> interrupt the thinking for dealing with some formatting issue; it
> will also be easier to start writing the document without having a
> clear idea of its content or presentation, and then reorganize
> matter, move things around, add columns in table, switch columns,
> and so forth.
>
> I know this is probably a controversial issue on an OS X TeX list,
> but in my opinion (from 15 years or so of intensive TeX use),
> however convenient it may be for maths writing or for using a
> predefined style, LaTeX has failed spectacularly in its aim to
> allow users to concentrate on writing and free them from
> formatting. In this respect plain TeX was more flexible.
>
It really depends on what you plan to write. For an occasional letter
or a document you only use once, LaTeX certainly is far from ideal.
But for a thesis where you spend several years writing the time for
formatting is well spend IMO.
simon
--
Dr. des. Simon Spiegel
EDV-Koordinator
Seminar für Filmwissenschaft
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