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Re: [stellation-res] (Paper stuff)
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Dave Shields wrote:
On Tue, Dec 02, 2003 at 11:19:04AM +0000, Mark C. Chu-Carroll wrote:
On Thu, 2003-01-02 at 16:09, Jonathan Gossage wrote:
We'll be writing the document in latex.
I would rather strangle myself than try to write a technical
paper in word; not to mention the fact that I don't even own a
copy of it!
This is the key point. Latex is open source, and is free; Word is proprietary, and
is not. Even if Word were superior (which it isn't), we can't require that unpaid volunteers
have to pay their own money to buy a copy of Word so they can work on this paper.
There are a couple of .ltx files in the CVS tree, in misc/doc/specs. They can show you,
by example, much of what you need to know; as for the rest, Mark is a real expert (turns out
in a prior life he was one of the earlier testers of Tex).
Not quite. I'm not nearly old enough :-). The original version of tex
was written in the late 1970s, while I was still in elemantary school.
Latex saw its first release in 1984, which was my freshman year in college.
But I worked my way through graduate school as a systems administrator,
and one of
my main tasks was providing latex support for the department of computer
science.
As a result, I've spent more time plumbing the guts of tex and latex
than I care to admit.
I was an early tester of lout, which is sort of a latex competitor, but
while I find lout
to be conceptually more elegant, the basic document styles in lout are
not particularly
good. The guys behind tex and latex had significant experience with
publishing,
and consulted extensively with typesetting experts in order to design
the basic document. As a result, tex documents just plain look *better*
than anything else I've seen for technical
writing. Most conferences now provide both latex and Word styles; I can
go through the proceedings to a conference, and tell which papers were
written in latex, and which in word,
because the latex ones look better.
-Mark
