casioculture asked:
What's the advantage of using something like LaTex over, say,
openoffice, for ordinary text that doesn't contain scientific formulae
Semantic based markup (See Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient by
Allin Cottrell:
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html)
Programmability (markup for typesetting is pretty much the same as for
editing, so no need to convert to get a nicely typeset book)
Better H&J
Support for rich font features such as automatic ligatures
Better typesetting features such as hanging punctuation
Absolute repeatability and reliability (internal measurement unit is
the scaled point, 1/65,535th of a Printer's Point of which there're
72.27 to an inch and all math is done using integers so no floating
point rounding)
You can see some samples of LaTeX at
http://www.tug.org/texshowcase and
I've some in my portfolio at
http://members.aol.com/willadams
The TeX User's Group has some good information available,
http://www.tug.org
When I started doing publishing work on computers TeX was the first
tool I found which had no built-in limitations --- even now, while
InDesign is wonderful, there're a lot of things it can't do which TeX
can (insert annotations into a typeset .pdf, flexible automatic
numbering of elements, apply optical and physical size to a font with a
single command, place a graphic as part of a style, reliable
inter-version scripting (I've got a script for IDv2 which simply
doesn't work in CS), flexible spacing per specifcation above heads,
character styles in specific parts of index entries or running heads
&c.).
William
