Le_Forgeron wrote:

> You know that you should concentrate on your actual text rather than
> playing with the fancy gadget, unless you are in design mode.

Indeed. That's one of the dangers of using something that looks as 
lovely as TeX.

> That's why I like lyx: when you create a text, you do not change the
> model; and when you create a model, you are not writing actual text.

When I tried LyX, I found it to be rather nice to use, but you can't 
change *anything* at all. At least with using TeX directly, there is 
some chance of altering things.

Anyway, this is one of the things I like about HTML. If I want my source 
listings in green, I can say in the document "this bit is source", and I 
can say in the stylesheet "please make source green", and it's done in, 
like, 20 seconds. In TeX you have to spend hours faffing around trying 
to get it to do that.

What all this means is that HTML lets me concentrate on the structure of 
my document, not how to format it. I can experiment with formatting 
later. I can with TeX too - it's just 400x harder. On the other hand, 
HTML documents aren't very attractive to look at, while TeX documents are.

>> If only you could take the beautiful fonts and wonderful typesetting
>> engine of TeX and stick it in a modern, modular, extensible framework. :-P
> 
> WYMIWYG, not WYSIWYG !

I'm not going to pretend to be able to decipher that.

> Good works remain good works under a better presentation.
> Hiding bad works within good presentation is just B*S*ing the readers:
> fine for marketing, bad for scientific publication.

Sure. But the presentation I'm trying to achieve is hardly elaborate. I 
just want to visually distinguish program identifiers from prose.

> If you need a specific presentation, either you are a template designer
> or you are wasting your productivity on minor details.

Perhaps. It just irritates me that something this trivial is so 
difficult to do.

> Prepare your template, then write all your documents; Do not make the
> "template" at the same time than the documents, think beforehand!
> The time spend in the preparation will be factored in the ease to write
> the documents later (and staying away of eye-candy at that time).

That only works if you know what you're going to write before you write 
it - and *that* is a whole other debate. ;-)

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