[Nottingham] [NLUG] Last nights talk

[Joshua Lock]

Thought I might pip Martin L to the post and write about last nights talk.

We had a very intimate (projector woes) talk by Jonathan (and others)
about LaTeX.
Jonathan explained a bit about the history of LaTeX, showed us some of
it's features, some example "scripts"(?) and told us why he likes it.
I found it very interesting and am keen to have a play with LaTeX,
further discussions where had comparing LaTeX to the likes of DocBook
(which I also intend to play with).

For me personally I'm looking for solution whereby I can write
(non-structured/plain) text and easily apply a pre-defined style to it
later on.
Suggestions where made for using LaTeX and find/replace: write the
text, adding in simple character patterns to represent paragraphs etc,
and have the find/replace substitute the appropriate LaTeX commands.

I'll have a go at writing a relatively simple (1 A4 page) document and
converting it to both LaTeX and DocBook to see which suits my needs
best. I'll let you know how I get on!

We also had a bit of KDE vs GNOME rivalry. It appeared that there was
about a 50:50 split of Gnome:KDE users when we did a very technical
show of hands poll.
Further discussion revealed that the two KDE users I spoke to about it
(Roger and Martin L) seem to use KDE as a window manager rather than a
full desktop suite. In Rogers case using on KDE's advanced
configurability for window placement and in Martin's case running
Firefox and Thunderbird on the KDE desktop.
During the discussion I volunteered to try KDE for at least 3-4 weeks
and report on my findings. Being a GNOME (and OS X) user I expect to
be overwhelmed by the configurability but look forward to sampling the
oft touted integration.

Now we just need to coordinate getting the backlog of slides published
on the NLug webspace.
There's a couple of talks I missed and I'd also like to look at
Jonathan's slides, especially their source.

Fun had by all!

- J

P.S: apologies in advance for any grammatical errors ...