[texhax] For what it's worth

[William F. Adams]

On Friday, October 15, 2004, at 12:56  PM, Robert Peltier wrote:

> Background: Downloaded LyX which had me download and install 
> i-installer, which brought me to Gerben's i-Directory at TUG through 
> its interface.
>
> After selecting an i-Package name then selecting "Show i-Package 
> window" I have noticed something very confusing. All your descriptions 
> reveal what a package is, but nothing describes what it does.
>
> Example: "This is Gerben Wierda's binary distribution of Fondu for Mac 
> OS X. It has been created by downloading fondu from sourceforge and 
> compiling and installing it with make."

That's a bit disingenuous given that the full name of this package is 
``Fondu Mac font cli tools''. Any reasonably competent mac-user would 
extrapolate from the ``fond'' portion of the name that it's related to 
manipulating a font's resource forks, and any Unix user will have 
bitter experience with dealing with such files and know that 
specialized tools are necessary to pull things out of the Mac OS 9 and 
earlier proprietary file formats.

_Any_ computer user who has figured out the difference between GUI and 
CLI will know that the latter stands for ``Command Line Interface'' and 
know whether or no they are interested in using such tools.

If you don't know what a tool is, you probably don't need it. If you 
want to find out what it does, well, that's ``an exercise left for the 
reader'' as the academics say, and with today's sophisticated search 
engines is trivial.

The home page for LyX is fairly explicit that all one needs is the 
basic tex setup (which has been simplified into a single unified 
package in deference to newbies).

<snip>

William
-- 
William Adams, publishing specialist
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