Re: getting out of LaTeX

On Tue, 29 Aug 2006 05:31:11 -0700, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

Peter, when are you going to take the trouble to learn just a little
bit of TeX/LaTeX, and thus stop making a fool of yourself when, from
your deep ignorance of this system, you criticize it at every possible
opportunity?

I see its output; that's all I need to know that it's crap. When I also
see that in order to format anything you basically have to program every
change, that confirms that it's crap. It's for "software engineers," not
scholars.

For reasons unknown you have selected TeX/LaTeX as the object on which
to discharge your frustrations. That's OK - I do something like that with
Microsoft. The difference is that, in my case, I know what I am talking
about. You, on the other hand, just insist in staying in the hold of your
deep ignorance of everything TeX/LaTeX. Please reread your paragraph
above; if you have a minimum of intellectual honesty, you'll acknowledge
that it reads as though it had been written by a stubborn, opinionated
yahoo.

TeX/LaTeX files are saved as text files - so that you can edit them
with any simple text editor. If the stuff that you are interested in
was indeed typeset with LaTeX, the examples should be available as
ASCII text (unless they were originally in some sort of graphics format
imported into LaTeX, that is).

Linguistic examples cannot be "available" as ASCII text. ASCII text has
no diacritics, for instance.

Another proof of your lack of understanding of TeX/LaTeX (not that more
were needed). In TeX/LaTeX, such characters are encoded as commands, that
can be represented in ASCII all right. The actual character is only
produced when printing out.

How much longer are you going to persist in your assinine, ignorant
attitude? Or is it that you lack the courage to admit that you are wrong?

.