[mdlug] [OT] Perspective

[Michael Corral]

2007-07-22, Monsieur M. D. Krauss a ecrit:
> Well, of course, Word is awful.  There are just a ton of issues that
> make anything beyond the most basic formatting a total headache.  OOo
> Writer is Somewhat better.  Abiword is much cleaner.  At the end of the
> day, though, I've never seen an office suite that actually impresses me.

I've always liked Applixware. I actually bought the Linux version
several years ago. I'd use that if I had to use an office suite.

> /snipped example
>
>> I honestly don't think that is too hard.
>
> No it is not.  If that is the document you wanted.

Well, I left all my examples of documents you don't want on my other PC.:)

> I will certainly not argue that LaTeX isn't better for some purposes.
> However, out there in the real world,

Oh oh...

> some people have to deal with
> ever-changing format requirements, bosses and co-workers looking over
> their shoulders and nit-picking details in real-time, and producing
> documents that are more like a flier or spec-sheet than a standardized
> letter, article, or book, and my impression is that this is where LaTeX
> and relatives fall short.

Hmm, I don't know how you got that impression. In fact, LaTeX is much
better for that sort of thing than office suites.

> I guess it depends on if you are looking at your task as creating
> textual content, and would like the formatting to be handled
> for you in a nice way; or looking at it as creating visual content, and
> would like to have more control over the composition.  For most people,
> I suppose, it is a little of each.

LaTeX excels at both. It's not just for nice text formatting. Its
graphics capabilities are pretty powerful. Right now I'm using LaTeX
to write a book, with lots of graphics, many of them fairly complex
and all created by LaTeX. And importing external graphics is no problem.

> From what I've seen of it, LyX has a very cool interface.  Takes some
> getting used to, though.

LyX is probably the best free GUI frontend to LaTeX I've seen, though
I think there are some commercial ones. I just feel more comfortable
editing LaTeX code myself instead of letting LyX do it.

> PDF is irrelevant - you can't pass documents around and edit them with
> PDF effectively.

Every "real world" place I've worked at had the full Acrobat suite so that
you could edit PDFs (which is the format many places standardized on for
official docs). Actually, "passing documents around and editing them" is
usually frowned upon in large corporations that follow some sort of
Quality Management System (e.g. CMMI). They don't want lots of different
versions of documents edited by different people floating around. You're
supposed to have a Document Owner (or Maintainer) for each document, and
that person does the editing. Other people can email that person or submit
a change request with their proposed changes to the document.

> ODF is showing signs of breaking the .doc
> stranglehold, and I hope it does - but so what? A program still has to
> be able to interchange documents well with Word, even if Word has been
> forced to support ODF.

Why? If ODF breaks the .doc stranglehold, then it'll be the other way
around: Word will have to do a good job of supporting ODF, or Word
will become even more irrelevant.

Michael