[mdlug] [OT] Perspective

[Michael Corral]

2007-07-23, Monsieur M. D. Krauss a ecrit:
> 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...

If your boss is doing all that, then I think you have bigger issues to
worry about. ;)

> I would have no problem making
> those adjustments quickly in real time, so he could see the results?

You could do that if you used LyX to handle the LaTeX, I believe.

> Going to a text editor, changing numbers around, recompiling, and
> loading the results in to a Postscript viewer does not cut it there.

Well, I guess it comes down to how much your boss cares about quality
work. If he can't wait a few seconds while looking over your shoulder(!)
for something that will look good when done...well, I can't help you
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.

The best way to learn LaTeX is to get the book "The LaTeX Companion",
2nd ed. There are also lots of good tutorials and documentation at
http://www.ctan.org.

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

PGF is a good graphics package for LaTeX, there are lots of examples here:
http://tug.ctan.org/tex-archive/graphics/pgf/doc/generic/pgf/version-for-pdftex/en/pgfmanual.pdf

Metapost and PSTricks are also good for graphics, search on CTAN for
those.

> 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.

I've never seen any difficulty doing that. YMMV.

Michael