[Nottingham] [NLUG] Last nights talk

[Martin]

Joshua Lock wrote:
> Thought I might pip Martin L to the post and write about last nights talk.

:-)

Well, there's a mailman email from me languishing somewhere timestamped
13:11. Hope mine hasn't been modded out for being too controversial!


> We had a very intimate (projector woes) talk by Jonathan (and others)
> about LaTeX.

OK, so the Mac laptops have gone all modern and posh and sleek and
resplendent with DVI connectors! I'll see if I can conjure up a DVI-A ->
VGA adapter for the next talk.


> 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.
[---]
> 
> 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.
[---]
> 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!

There is also RTF but you lose all the extra formatting and referencing
features that you get with LaTeX. Also, what of the formula formatting?!


> 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.

Although I don't use KOffice, KMail nor Evolution, I do use Konqueror,
KCalc, KGhostview, Kuickview, and various desktop tweaks. Since
disabling the NVidia proprietary drivers for my old GeForce4 card, all
remains stable.


> 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.

Should be interesting!


> 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.

Website hacking required... Volunteers?


> Fun had by all!
> 
> - J

Thanks again to Jonathan.


Cheers,
Martin

-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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