Re: getting out of LaTeX



Brian M. Scott wrote:
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.

More relevant to Peter, it has reasonable Arabic support- and most importantly, automatic transliteration into encyclopedia Islam style (and one other style) (this is probably extensible if you're a tex wizard, also). I just wrote my senior thesis on 'i3raab in Latex, and while the initial learning curve was steep, it paid off and looked much more professional(and was much easier) than if I'd used microsoft word. I used the transliteration method of inputting Arabic (i.e. for the bismallah, it looks like: bism-i al-llah-i ar-ra.hm_an-i ar-ra.hIm-i.) While this might seem counterintuitive at first, my typing speed in Arabic is abysmal, so it was much easier for me to use this encoding, and required no switching keyboard layouts or anything. Macs have XeteX which has even better Arabic support.

On another note, if you insist on using Word, and are affiliated with a university, they often offer "Writing academic papers and theses in Microsoft Word" classes at universities for free or a nominal fee. These will teach you how to handle sections, references and everything in a way that will be more consistent with what you want. Most people think Word is an awful program- this is like saying that manual cars are horrible if you can't drive them. People need to be trained to use Word properly, and when they're not, that's when frustration sets in.

Alex

PS- I personally prefer latex to word in that less is hidden from me. When I say, \section{Section Name}, I know exactly what it will look like, and I know it will be 100% consistent with every other sections header. In Word, I always fear a backspace will remove some hidden tag, sending everything into 72 point Comic Sans MS. However, if I knew Word better, I don't think it would be as much of a problem.



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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