[PLUG] Going back to Hardy

[Jason Dagit]

On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 10:33 AM, John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 2 Apr 2009 10:03:19 -0700 (PDT)
> Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com> dijo:
>
>>    There's more than that involved. LyX/LaTeX allows the writer to focus
>> strictly on content and leaves typography and page layout decisions to the
>> professionals who have designed the classes.
>
> That's what I feared. I suspect there does not exist pre-existing
> classes for the books I do.

I don't mean to be rude, but your above sentence is the opposite of
"being effective".  You should ask your editors/publishers before
making such assumptions.  Let's be honest, it's an excuse based on
ignorance but here you'd do yourself a favor to deal in facts.

>>    I cannot stand to write more than a page in OO.o Writer. It's a time
>> consuming hassle. And the differences in the printed output are striking.
>> Write the same page of text in OO.o and in LateX, export both to .pdf and
>> look; you'll immediately see the differences.
>
> I completely agree that a word processor is not the tool for doing a
> book. But Scribus isn't ready yet, and I don't have the time or
> inclination to learn TeX.

Ahem.  No one is actually advocating TeX :)  Several of us think you
should consider LaTeX or an editor which assists you in generating
LaTeX.  And again, docbook or the even simpler reST may be more your
speed.

> I would kill for a Linux equivalent to Adobe Indesign CS (or CS2 or
> CS3, although CS is enough for me). It does all of that, plus it is
> religiously WYSIWYG. I mean what you see on the screen is exactly what
> will come out of the printer, and exactly what the PDF export will look
> like.

I was in line at Kinkos yesterday and one customer was complaining
that the Adobe design products she was using did not have that
property.  She was using Adobe something and having exactly the issue
that she was not getting what she was seeing on the screen.  I left
with a print out of my thesis, as it appeared on screen, before she
did -- and I had some last minute formatting issues I needed to
resolve unrelated to the markup language I used.

>>    But, John's correct. It takes someone willing to learn and not just click,
>> drag, and wear out a mouse pointing everywhere. It's not for everyone.
>
> A Lyx-Latex-TeX session would be an interesting topic for one of our
> meetings if the presenter had a small project that the group could do
> on their own computers as the talk progressed. Hands-on demonstration
> is the way to sell software.

There is also TeXmacs.  It's about as what-you-see-is-what-you-get as
a latex "inspired" editor can get.  I used it before learning actual
latex.  I used to try things out in TeXmacs and then look at the latex
it would generate.

Jason