[XeTeX] XeTeX in lshort

[Alan Munn]

On Oct 2, 2010, at 2:47 PM, Philipp Stephani wrote:

> 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.

I'm not sure that this discussion should really continue, but what do  
you know about linguistics that would give you such an opinion?  LaTeX  
is very appropriate for linguistics, and many working linguists are  
using it (not to mention that it is used to typeset various  
linguistics journals.)  As I mentioned in a previous message it  
provides  many concrete advantages: automatic numbering/referencing of  
linguistic examples, automatic aligning of foreign language words/ 
translations, automatic syntactic tree drawing; a full range of logic  
symbols, easy access to phonetic fonts etc., not to mention other  
basic academic requirements such as citations and bibliographies.   
Doing most of this in Word is either not trivial or not possible.

>
>> - 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.

Which Word have *you* been using?  Even if the latest version of Word  
for Windows (not Mac) offers improved math typesetting (which is  
debatable), it any previous version of Word certainly doesn't.

> TeX engines are currently striving to achieving Word's level of  
> quality.

Now you're starting to sound like a troll, (even though I know you're  
not.)

Alan


-- 
Alan Munn
amunn at gmx.com