Writing documents (Was Re: [MLUG] Linux *really* hits the big-time)

[Rob Judd <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

I have one word to say about this: "LaTeX".

The LaTeX documentation has a few more, which I think you'll appreciate:

"The purpose of writing is to present your ideas to the reader.  This
should always be your primary concern.  It is easy to become so engrossed
in form that you neglect content.  Formatting is no substitute for
writing.  Good ideas couched in good prose will be read and understood,
regardless of how badly the document is formatted.  LaTeX was designed to
free you from formatting concerns, allowing you to concentrate on
writing."

>From "LaTeX : a document preparation system", Leslie Lamport
All errors are mine.

If you are not familiar with LaTeX, then suffice to say that LaTeX
documents may be written using any plain text editor and TeX/LaTeX has
been ported to just about every computer system there is.  For more
information see http://www.mlug.missouri.edu/~rjudd/textalk3/ or
http://www.ctan.org/

Cheers, Rob

On Sat, 6 Oct 2001, Igor Izyumin Jr. wrote:

> Well, I'd say M$ puts in a GREAT DEAL of marketing to keep the products
> viable and actually make people think that they need the extra functionality.
>  I see nothing in Word that I cannot do with a text editor like Pico or VI or
> Emacs or whatever.  There's absolutely no point in making the text be all
> kinds of weird fonts, colors, farting noises, animations and other funkified
> things.  There's no point in having a word processor.  You have two things:
> content and presentation.  You are the one writing content.  A good
> word-processor should take care of the presentation itself, using a
> predefined set of templates/whatever.  You should not be the one managing the
> layout if all you're doing is writing a report or something.  The program
> should do it by itself.  Microsoft does it exactly the opposite way, by
> pushing the burden of creating the layout on to the end user.  And they
> actually advertise this as being good, while it only
> wastes employees' time.  This also doubly applies to PowerPoint.  People
> waste time creating powerpoint presentations when they would not have created
> if they actually had to put some effort and money into it (like creating it
> on actual slides).  This only decreases productivity, instead of increasing
> it.  There is no point in creating powerpoint presentations - it's just a way
> to impress someone's boss.  However, lots of employee time is WASTED on
> creating those.  I'm not even going to talk about putting more useless
> features into Word and other programs.  Anyone who actually USES grammar
> check, readability check, the spellchecker (for more than catching typos),
> and whatever else they've put in there probably doesn't deserve to have a job
> related to writing documents, because it means they don't know how to write.
> The same applies to PP's "features."  The purpose of business is not to
> impress managers, it is to make money.  Business only loses money on
> powerpoint presentations.  Just think about it: a research department has two
> goals (actually research stuff/make a report/whatever and make an impressive
> presentation) instead of just the first one and a fixed amount of time and
> money to spend on both tasks, they will spend time on creating the
> presentation but not on research.  Therefore, money is wasted.  It only takes
> some common sense to understand that office programs with lots of features
> will NOT improve productivity.  If I were a manager (not that I would ever be
> one :), I would specify the font sizes, typefaces, letterheads, whatever,
> that the employees must use, so they don't waste time on layout.  I would
> also ban all use of powerpoint and similar stuff within the company.  That
> way, I won't be paying for employees wasting time picking fonts or clipart or
> whatever.
>

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