[XeTeX] XeTeX in lshort

[Philipp Stephani]

Am 30.09.2010 um 09:36 schrieb Tobias Schoel:

> Hi,
> 
> there are three kinds of people who should learn TeX&Co:
> - those who absolutely need TeX, because no other system let's them produce the documents they have to (all this linguistis and co. [don't take offense, I have no idea of the professions around this topic])

Please elaborate on why they should use TeX. Personally I think that TeX is quite inappropriate for linguistics.

> - those who can use other systems but who would have an enourmous advantage in time and effort using TeX (mathematicians, other scientist, typographers of some kind [see above], ...)

Again, why do they have an advantage of using TeX?
People who need lots of mathematics should preferably use Word because it offers the highest quality of math typesetting. TeX engines are currently striving to achieving Word's level of quality.
Typographers generally use systems with better typographical support than TeX can offer, e.g. InDesign or QuarkXPress.

> 
> and now the important part
> 
> - those who should think structurally (does this word exist?), when creating a text document. and that's nearly everybody who creates a text document other than a greeting or similar.

I disagree, with both the proposition and the conclusion: Structure is not very important for most documents, and TeX-based systems don't help much when you need rich semantics.

> 
> To state it clearly:
> 
> Every high school student, who wants to continue to university (in Germany: jeder Gymnasialschüler) should learn TeX&Co.

Should they also learn how to operate a steam engine?

> in order to _think_ _structurally_.

Nice goal; teach them Haskell or Scala.