[SWLUG] Open Office problems & recovering files?

[Dick Porter]

On Wed, 2003-03-05 at 11:05, Justin Mitchell wrote:
> > It's doubtful, though - Publisher is designed for the likes of mere
> > mortals who want to knock out a newsletter or similar. TeX and LaTeX and
> > lyx are all really designed for people who want to do professional level
> > typesetting.
> I feel that LaTeX was rather designed for those that DONT want to deal
> with all that tedious type setting and layout.
> 
> If you want to knock out letters, articles, books, or papers in a
> simple, clear, pretty* style without twiddling with bits of layout then
> its quite easy. 
> 
> Fundamentally ts a layout language, in the same was as html was intended
> to be, you just declare when new chapters, titles, paragraphs etc start,
> and it sorts out all the formatting for you, and deals with table of
> contents, footnotes, bibliographies and other stuff for you.
> 
> but im sure others can rant on the subject much better than i can.
> 

The problem was summed up by Brian Kernighan when he said that WYSIWYG
_really_ stands for "What You See Is All You Get".  Want to do something
slightly out of the ordinary, that Microsoft or Apple or the GNOME UI
designers didn't think of?  Tough.  You can't.

I recall seeing a study that split a class of students into two groups,
one using m$ turd, the other using latex.  After the first few weeks
(when the novelty factor had worn off), the latex-using students were
getting considerably higher marks than the turd-using ones.  The
conclusion drawn was that latex (like all markup systems) allowed the
student to concentrate on the text, while the WYSIWYG users spent much
more time picking pretty fonts etc.

- Dick