> I'll leave correcting you on several EMACS mistakes to the others. I
> just want to point out that you apparently have been looking at an
> *implementation* (under windows?). You should not confuse that with the
> /idea/ EMACS.

Oh, I'm sure a few of the things I couldn't figure out how to do are 
actually hidden away in some command or other that I didn't spend long 
enough trying to find. But anyway...

>> Maybe it's "the best" in the same way as TeX. The output of TeX is quite
>> simply the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. Nothing else even comes
>> remotely close to looking this damned good. Which is just as well,
>> because otherwise TeX would have been nuked from space long ago. The
>> /output/ is delightful. The /input/ is the stuff of nightmares.
>
> It isn't. It is more straightforward than e.g. Word. Everything you need
> to know is in plain sight.

Riiiiight. Tell me, how do I

>> It really doesn't handle colour,
>
> It does. No idea how you got that impression.
>
>> it really doesn't handle images,
>
> It does. No idea how you got that impression.

TeX does not "understand" colour or graphics.

Instead, people have created various packages with insert "specials" 
into the output DVI file, together with programs which interpret these 
specials to generate the appropriate output.

After many years of development, it has now reached the point where this 
kludge mostly works OK. The graphicx and color packages automatically 
detect which backend is in use and generate the correct specials. My DVI 
viewer supports the "dvips" specials, which is what graphicsx and color 
default to producing, while PDF-TeX has special drivers so that it works 
out of the box as well.

The system is still fragile, however. Literally, the colour changing 
commands are classified as "fragile" LaTeX commands, and you're supposed 
to use /protect and so forth. If you, for example, change colour in a 
section heading, that works fine in the section heading, but breaks in 
the table of contents and page running headings.

Basically, TeX has no idea what you're trying to do, and the various 
packages and drivers are desperately trying to work around the problem 
to make it "look like" the system can actually handle such things.

Oh, and I forgot to mention hyperlinks. But then, TeX is for /printing/, 
primarily, so that's excusible.

>> and it most certainly
>> does /not/ handle styling or customisation of any kind!
>
> It most certainly does. Style files are are at the heart of the system.

Sure. In theory.

Now suppose that for some reason I wanted all the document to come out 
in a different typeface for some reason. The body text, section 
headings, table of contents, figure captions, everything. Do you have 
any idea how intractibly difficult that is?

Fortunately, LaTeX has such nice defaults that you don't often /need/ to 
change anything. Which is very, /very/ fortunate, because it's hellishly 
hard to change stuff if you actually want to.

> As a small comparison: a friend of mine had written her thesis in Word,
> after her text was accepted by the committee she needed 3 weeks of hard
> work to convert it from an A4 draft version into a paperback format text
> that she could submit to the printer. I did it, with the help of a
> student, in one evening. And I had different layouts for chapters
> depending on whether it was published before or not.

See, what you just said there is "Word sucks". Which is true, but isn't 
my point.

Try writing a big HTML document. Now by applying some CSS to it, you can 
utterly transform it. Don't believe me?

http://www.csszengarden.com/

Click a few of the stylesheets. Watch the entire page radically 
transform instantly. TeX can't do that. (Recent versions of Word almost 
can... but don't expect it to work properly.)

>> Oh, and don't try debugging it.
>
> If you want to debug TeX

I have never found it necessary to do that, and I doubt I ever will. TeX 
may be old and crufty, but it's reliable as hell.

> If you mean debugging your text or layout, that is more simple than in a
> wysiwyg editor.

The page breaks look just fine. Then I write some more text, and the 
page breaks move. Wuh?

> If you mean debugging style files or bibstyle files you are correct,
> that is a nightmare if you don't know what you are doing. Simple advise:
> don't touch them.

Do you have any idea how much trouble I had trying to get it so that any 
text put inside a "tabbing" environment comes out green? In the end I 
was forced to give up. It just WILL NOT work consistently.

If this was HTML I was talking about, changing the colour of one block 
of text would be laughably simple. But TeX just can't handle it.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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