Re: getting out of LaTeX

On 29 Aug 2006 05:31:11 -0700, "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:1156854671.785353.70960@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
in sci.lang:

Felix Rawlings 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.

It's used much more widely than you seem to realize, and
certainly not just by software engineers (or even 'software
engineers'). There is, for instance, a LaTeX class, sffms,
for typesetting science fiction and fantasy manuscripts, and
I know several writers who use it, as well as others who use
LaTeX but not sffms. It is of course used by a great many
scholars; it's standard now in mathematics (though I've
managed to avoid learning it so far) and in physics, a lot
of linguists use it, and it (and variants) are slowly
spreading even into the humanities, though Word remains much
more common there.

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.

Of course they can, just as mathematical examples can. For
instance, in math mode the string '\alpha_j' generates a
lower-case alpha with a subscript 'j'.

Brian
.

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