[mdlug] [OT] Perspective

[M. D. Krauss]

On Sun, 22 Jul 2007 22:34:34 -0400 (EDT)
Michael Corral <micorral at comcast.net> wrote:

> 2007-07-22, Monsieur M. D. Krauss a ecrit:

> > 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.

Huh.  So if I were working on a spec sheet with LaTeX, and my
hypothetical boss came in and looked over my shoulder and said that
that graphic had to be a smidgen to the left... no not that far... or
maybe put it down below that text... I would have no problem making
those adjustments quickly in real time, so he could see the results?
Going to a text editor, changing numbers around, recompiling, and
loading the results in to a Postscript viewer does not cut it there.

I suspect you mean that LaTeX is better then office suites for the
types of documents I mentioned, not the situations.  In that, you may
be right - I don't know, but I am interested in learning.

> > 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.

Graphics actually created with LaTeX?  That is very interesting. Can
you give me an example of some LaTeX code to draw a picture?

> > 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.

This I can definitely understand.  I hate WYSIWYG HTML editors.

> > 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.

Sorry, not everyone has the luck to work at the same places as you.
Just about every retail chain operating in Michigan passes all sorts of
documents around, with reps, suppliers, manufacturers, everybody
getting in the game.  Small businesses rarely in my experience can
afford to follow "quality management systems".  Businesses that are
more concerned with getting good results then knowing who to blame when
stuff goes wrong pass documents around and edit them all the time.

Also, I have never had a chance to use the Acrobat suite, but it is my
understanding that even then, you can't really edit PDFs all that well.

> > 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.

Your statement is true, but doesn't seem to have anything to do with
the matter.  As long as Word *does* remain relevant, the fact that
people are creating and reading ODFs in Word instead of DOCs in Word
does not allow the average office worker to use software that is not
compatible with DOC or ODF.  Even if Word drops off the face of the
planet to be replaced with OOo, this would still be the case.  No?

Regards,
Matthew