[XeTeX] xetex vs. pages

[Herbert Schulz]

On Nov 17, 2005, at 9:28 AM, Scott Murman wrote:

> ...
> latex float placement is far from seamless.  wrapfig barely makes  
> it possible, even if you're an expert.  pages supports more than  
> simply drag/drop, it's dynamic so you get on-the-fly formatting of  
> your paragraphs to float placement.  the downside of this is the  
> paragraph formatting is crude, as pointed out by Herb.  since latex  
> is compiled it can throw more resources at the formatting problem,  
> but it's not clear to me that as performance increases we can't  
> have the same in GUI apps.  i'm pretty sure my quad-G5 at work  
> could handle the new micro-formatting on-the-fly.
>

Howdy,

And here I sit with my 550MHz TiBook... :-)

> ...
> cropping pdf from the output really isn't useful.  you can drop  
> data from your spreadsheet into pages and have a formatted table.   
> you can copy this table to keynote for presentation.  and you can  
> run the process in reverse.  this is powerful.  latex only lets you  
> see a single representation of the data, while integrated  
> applications let you manipulate both the data and present it in  
> multiple formats depending upon context.
>
> -SM-
>

Howdy,

You can use LaTeXiT to make nice looking equations which can be  
embedded in Keynote (and, using LinkBack you can even get to re-edit  
them at a click) but Keynote doesn't have a concept of in-line graphics.

You can use those equations in Pages too (without LinkBack, at least  
for now), and it has in-line graphics, but doesn't understand  
baseline information. Each in-line equation has to be hand adjusted  
to the baseline. That, plus the ugly looking line breaks, makes Pages  
virtually useless for me. There is always hope for the future.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest.com)