[XeTeX] XeTeX in lshort

[Mike Maxwell]

On 9/29/2010 9:29 PM, Herbert Schulz wrote:
> Take a look at<http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/> and be amazed.

Yes, I've looked at this (and I'm looking at it now), but again I ask:
who should the audience be for this lshort document, and who on the 
other hand is not an appropriate target for proselytization?

> Not that that is really representative of what folks do with TeX.

Right, and I think that leads to the real question: what kind of 
document is it worth learning *TeX for?

Maybe: books which need to be nicely typeset (probably not your average
paperback), pamphlets, some kinds of technical articles (particularly
math), multilingual documents where at least one of the languages uses a
complex script, dictionaries.  (For print dictionaries, I think the best 
approach is to maintain them in an XML or database format, then 
automatically translate that into *TeX for typesetting.  For the record, 
that's also how our own multilingual grammars are produced.)

For some kinds of fancy, graphics-heavy layouts, maybe InDesign is 
better suited (I'm just guessing, I haven't done those kinds of layouts, 
nor have I used InDesign).

But trying to convert the *average* High School or college student, who 
is probably quite well served by MsWord/ OpenOffice Write, may be a 
waste of time.  You can say the output is ugly, but for some purposes 
that hardly matters; what's important is that it gets the job done. 
(PowerPoint, on the other hand,...)

> I just like well organized articles with good hierarchy although I
> used to (before I retired) do all my exams in LaTeX with some custom
> macros.

I think you're quite unusual.
-- 
	Mike Maxwell
	maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu
         "A library is the best possible imitation, by human beings,
         of a divine mind, where the whole universe is viewed and
         understood at the same time... we have invented libraries
         because we know that we do not have divine powers, but we
         try to do our best to imitate them." --Umberto Eco