[Nottingham] Text terminal working

[Michael Simms]

Martin via Nottingham writes:
> 
> OK, this is a good excuse for an anti-WYSIWYG rant! :-)
> 
> 
> Similarly so for gaining vastly greater productivity using LaTeX to do
> all the *formatting* for you. I've used that myself from DOS, and then
> from Linux terminals, with a DVI viewer to check the final result 
> before
> committing to some very expensive physical printing.
> 
> All this WYSIWYG is even less applicable in "word processor" software
> than possibly all other aspects of GUIs and it is hellish distracting
> from being able to focus purely on _what it is_ you are trying to say.

As someone who has actually written and published things (I don't know 
how many others here have), I couldn't agree less.

If I want to be sure of my layout, I use framemaker. It gives me a real 
wysiwyg isntead of the 'kindof almost just about' that you get from most 
word processor packages. This is essential if you need to know what 
pages things are on, and you need to lay out images and text in a useful 
way, and it's ideal for print-ready stuff.

If I want to write with less care than that, I use OpenOffice. I tried 
using EMACS - after all I use it for everything else - and it just 
doesn't work for proper word processing. You have to worry about too 
many fiddly things, such as if you tell it to auto-wrap text, then you 
add in a word in the middle, it'll give you an extra line with one word 
in it, and you then have to go and fiddle with every other bloody line 
in the paragraph to fix it. If you're using plain ascii, you lose bold, 
you lose italics, you lose a title font, all valuable tools in 
constructing what you're writing.

As for LaTeX, that's patently absurd to say it'll be quicker than a word 
processor for 99% of tasks. LaTeX is better when you have formulae, 
possibly it can be used for complex layout work, but for basic word 
processing, it's going to be slower. You don't immediately see if that 
larger font title you made is going to be more than one line long, or if 
you need to reword it or change the font size. Oh look, you have to 
effectively compile it, whereas I with my almost WYSIWYG word processor 
am already half way through the next paragraph.

Word processors are absolutely and completely applicable for this. It 
means you CAN focus on what you're trying to say, instead of screwing 
around writing, compiling, rewriting, compiling, yeah it's almost 
done...

They all have their place, and each one of them is better than the other 
in various ways.

Plain text: Better for emails, brief messages, things where formatting 
isn't important.

DTP (framemaker etc): Good for exact layout ready to go to print (maybe 
1% of documents)

LaTeX: Good for complex layout and formulae. (maybe 1% of documents)

Word Processors: Good for anything else