Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
> > One example of why LaTeX is better than WYSIWYG.

> ...so LaTeX is better than WYSIWYG for exactly the same reason that SDL 
> is "better" than a traditional modeller then? [i.e., you can easily 
> script in new behaviours to add features that aren't already there.]

  I suppose that's basically it. LaTeX is a bit like a scriptable HTML on
steroids.

  What I like about LaTeX, something which I can't find eg. in OpenOffice
Writer, is that it allows generating much nicer page layouts for many
things. For example, assume that you are writing tons of text with the
following format:

- Some key concept
  Explanation text for the key
  concept above.

- Another key concept
  Explanation for this other key
  concept.

etc.

  You can create text like that just fine with OO Writer. Its problem is
that the layout becomes ugly when page breaks happen at inconvenient places.
More precisely, when this happens:

- Some key concept
<new page>
  Explanation text for the key
  concept above.

  The "title" and its explanation end up in different pages, which is ugly.

  It is possible in LaTeX to define special boxes where you can tie these
"titles" and their explanation texts together and specify some properties
for them. For example, "at least two lines of the explanation part must
be in the same page as the title, else put a page break before the title".

  Not only that, if the condition is triggered and an "early page break"
is created, instead of leaving an ugly empty space at the end of the
previous page, LaTeX will just slightly increase the line spacing of that
previous page to fill up that empty space, making it look nicer.

  LaTeX does this by default with chapter/section/subsection titles
(ie. it never happens that a subsection title ends up at the end of a
page, while the contents of the section begin at the next page), and
you can configure how it behaves. You can also create your own blocks
which behave in this same way.

  Of course this doesn't mean that there aren't things which end up looking
a bit ugly in LaTeX or that there weren't things which are very difficult
or awkward to do, but I just wish eg. OO Writer had this type of feature.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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