[Wylug-discuss] October meeting......

[Rik Wade]

On 24/09/2005, at 12:21 PM, Dave Fisher wrote:
>
> I would suggest that anyone who was serious about publishing stuff for
> academic purposes should prefer the beautiful typsetting and re-usable
> structural markup of LaTeX over DTP eye candy ... LateX will save you
> time and present your arguments/data more elegantly than any DTP  
> package
> could ever manage.
>
> Indeed, I'd extend that to include any intellectually rigourous domain
> in which the 'meaning of words' was more important than imagery and  
> the
> 'presentation of meaning'.

I work in a small team of people which produces a reasonable quantity  
of documentation using Microsoft Office applications. The documents  
generally consist of text with embedded bitmap, Visio and MS Drawing  
objects. The idea of using LaTeX has been discussed several times,  
the main problem being that our "customers" (internal and external to  
the company) require MS Word files and not PDF. There is also the  
matter of future maintenance of the documentation, which would be  
impossible for non-LaTeX users. In practice, it would be easy to  
replace the typesetting and document creation side of this work with  
LaTeX, just embedding the appropriate objects. Unfortunately, it's  
not a practical problem, but an organisational and cultural one.

One point of note is that some members of our organisation now use  
Open Office on both MS Windows and OS X (NeoOffice in some cases).  
This is certainly a step in the right direction towards open document  
formats.
--
rik