[PLUG] Going back to Hardy

Jeme A Brelin jeme at brelin.net
Wed Apr 8 04:16:02 UTC 2009


On Thu, 2 Apr 2009, m0gely wrote:
> Jeme A Brelin wrote:
>> On Wed, 1 Apr 2009, John Jason Jordan wrote:
>>> I am not smart enough to learn TeX.
>>
>> Then why on Earth do you think you have anything worthwhile to add to
>> world literature in writing a book?
>
> Wow. Just wow. And no books were ever written until $SomeTeXApp was 
> created to write them with? All authors out there are their own 
> publishers as well? What an arrogant comment.

There has been a misunderstanding.

My comment was intended to show that John is, in fact, "smart enough" to 
learn anything he'd like.   If he can write a book, he can write it in 
LaTeX.

I'm sure he meant the line as some kind of self-deprecating humor, but the 
humor is there to distract from the strange willfulness that is preventing 
him from learning the best way to do the thing he wants done.   I mean, 
InDesign?  For a whole book?  That's just silly.  It is very much like 
pasting things up with wax, but we now have computers that do these 
tedious tasks for us so we can concentrate our brain power on things the 
computer cannot do (like, you know, generating the sentences that go on 
the page).

John says he can't imagine writing without seeing *exactly* what the page 
will display as he's writing.  The problem here, of course, is that any 
change in the way the information is presented means John has to revisit 
every page and lay it all out again.  With a proper separation of 
presentation from content, a single change in the class definitions 
changes the look of the entire book from cover to cover.   Of course, he 
also misses the dynamic referencing of chapters, formulae, and charts. 
When John wants to add or remove a diagram, he has to go back and renumber 
all of his diagrams.  Heaven forbid he should decide to move an entire 
chapter -- now he has to go back and adjust the content and layout of each 
page that referenced the headings, charts, figures, and formulae in that 
chapter and, potentially, subsequent chapters.  It's a fucking mess.

Larry Wall's concept of "false laziness" applies here in spades.

> He mentioned he put time into learning about it. It didn't click with 
> him. It's too bad you felt it necessary to precede your otherwise civil 
> reply with a remark like that.

I think you're projecting a whole lot.  I don't believe John has put any 
time into seriously considering using LaTeX for his book project.  He 
wrote that he "suspects" there aren't classes for the formulas he would 
like to construct.   Here's the first hit from Google:
<URL: http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/clmt/latex4ling/ >

J.



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