Invisible a écrit :
> Ah yes, but for the weird capitalisation, this could look even more
> dangerous than it already does...
> 
> Yeah, the trouble with LaTeX is that you sometimes get so excited with
> how awesome the typesetting looks and writing the intro page and setting
> up clever macro frameworks that you forget to, you know, WRITE SOME
> CONTENT!
> 
> Or maybe it's only me that does this?

Raw LaTex can be disturbing... that's why using a GUI like lyx is
somehow helpful, at least for me.

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Le_Forgeron wrote:
> Invisible a écrit :
>> Ah yes, but for the weird capitalisation, this could look even more
>> dangerous than it already does...
>>
>> Yeah, the trouble with LaTeX is that you sometimes get so excited with
>> how awesome the typesetting looks and writing the intro page and setting
>> up clever macro frameworks that you forget to, you know, WRITE SOME
>> CONTENT!
>>
>> Or maybe it's only me that does this?
> 
> Raw LaTex can be disturbing... that's why using a GUI like lyx is
> somehow helpful, at least for me.

LyX is nice, but it doesn't let you use certain features. (And it 
certainly doesn't let you add custom environments and stuff.) That's why 
I generally use LaTeX directly. Still, LyX certainly has advantages - 
like having some idea what your document is going to look like without 
recompiling it every 20 seconds...

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I love how beautiful the output of TeX is. But I utterly hate the 
trouble and strife of trying to alter how it does its job in even the 
most trivial way.

I guess the fundamental problem is that TeX forces you to write 
imperative instructions describing what actions to perform, rather than 
allowing you to declaratively specify what you want the final result to be.

(And the *other* problem is that back when TeX was designed, you had to 
actually care about whether the character set was ASCII or EBCDIC.)

For example, I want to typeset all my source code examples in dark green 
instead of black. No problem. Define a new environment that inserts a 
"change to green" command right before you start typing.

Oh, wait. Only THE FIRST LINE of text comes out green. The rest is 
black. WTF?

Now I guess I could go digging and try to figure out what deep, dark 
command sequence LaTeX is executing at each line end and start hacking 
away at it. But I'd really rather not. So let's see if I can use 
grouping to apply the colour change to everything...

Ah yes, that works. Now the whole example is green.

EXCEPT when the code fragment just happens to fall on the very first 
line of a page, in which case it unexplicably comes out black again. 
*facepalm*

If only you could take the beautiful fonts and wonderful typesetting 
engine of TeX and stick it in a modern, modular, extensible framework. :-P

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Invisible a écrit :

> For example, I want to typeset all my source code examples in dark green
> instead of black. No problem. Define a new environment that inserts a
> "change to green" command right before you start typing.

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

> 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 !
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.

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


-- 
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.<br/>
Q: Why is it such a bad thing?<br/>
A: Top-posting.<br/>
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?

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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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Invisible wrote:

> Ah yes, that works. Now the whole example is green.
> 
> EXCEPT when the code fragment just happens to fall on the very first 
> line of a page, in which case it unexplicably comes out black again. 
> *facepalm*

And then I spent 20 minutes wondering why a code fragment works just 
fine in the document body, but breaks in a source listing. Of course, 
the tabbing environment redefines the accent commands. *sigh*

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Invisible wrote:

> And then I spent 20 minutes wondering why a code fragment works just 
> fine in the document body, but breaks in a source listing. Of course, 
> the tabbing environment redefines the accent commands. *sigh*

http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=tabacc

I guess this is what you get for using a typesetting system based on a 
1970s-era text macro substitution system written for the PDP-10...

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Invisible wrote:

> Ah yes, that works. Now the whole example is green.
> 
> EXCEPT when the code fragment just happens to fall on the very first 
> line of a page, in which case it unexplicably comes out black again. 
> *facepalm*

This just gets weirder. Apparently this is a DVI previewer thing. If you 
have colour commands near the very top or bottom of a page, the 
following page sometimes changes colour. Sometimes flicking forwards and 
backwards through the pages changes the colour that the text appears in. 
(!!)

PDFTeX seems to have no such issue - but still, this just goes to 
hilight that TeX was never designed to cope with colour in the first 
place. It's a miracle it works at all!

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On 03/25/10 07:49, Le_Forgeron wrote:
> A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.<br/>
> Q: Why is it such a bad thing?<br/>
> A: Top-posting.<br/>
> Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in e-mail?

	Stolen. Thanks.

-- 
Mary had a little lamb, a little beef, and a little ham.

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On 03/25/10 07:15, Invisible wrote:
> I love how beautiful the output of TeX is. But I utterly hate the
> trouble and strife of trying to alter how it does its job in even the
> most trivial way.

	Not what you want to hear, but I try to author most things with Org
mode (emacs) and then output to LaTeX. Org mode allows some
customization with LaTeX commands and headers, but the "meat" of most of
what I want to write is much easier to do so with Org Mode than in LaTeX
directly. Stuff like lists in LaTeX are painful, as is bolding,
emphasizing, sectioning, etc.

-- 
Mary had a little lamb, a little beef, and a little ham.

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