>> Riiiiight. Tell me, how do I
>
> Use your brain?

I fail basic English. :'{

>> TeX does not "understand" colour or graphics.

> indeed. Lots of packages to handle the most diverse needs. A reasonable
> on-line index and books with examples.

Like I say, after hacking away at it for years, they've got it to 
sort-of work, most of the time. That's not the same as TeX *actually* 
supporting these things.

>> 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.
>
> If you mean that you wanted to change global behaviour in a heading, you
> deserve nothing better than a broken output.

No. If you just want to change the colour of one word in a seciton 
heading. Pretty easy with CSS (you can even have it apply only to the 
section heading and not the TOC listing, for example), but does evil 
things to TeX.

>> Oh, and I forgot to mention hyperlinks. But then, TeX is for /printing/,
>> primarily, so that's excusible.
>
> I think I have even seen those.

Yes. They're kludged in the same way as colour and graphics.

>>> 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?
>
> Bloody easy. My theses was in Garamont (IIRC my student decide that 9.5
> points would be ideal). Noticed that too late in the process to change
> it to something

...something...? Perhaps it is not only me that fails English. ;-)

>> 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.)
>
> ?? LaTeX can, haven't used plain TeX enough to have noticed any
> instances where it didn't work. Unless instantly is your operative word.

If I decided, for some insane reason, that I wanted section headings to 
be set vertically in the margin rather than how a sane person would set 
them... well, technically it's /possible/, but it would be damned /hard/ 
to do it.

>>> 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?
>
> Yes, what did you expect else? Somewhere I have this nagging feeling
> that you try to treat TeX as a something similar to Word. Just a program
> to convert raw text to nice output.

Well, that's what it *is*. It's a program that converts your markup into 
something that looks nice.

(Word, of course, is more about *editing* text than actually making it 
look good...)

It's just baffling when a seemingly unrelated change causes part of the 
page flow to change for the worse. Or when you say "put this figure 
HERE" so LaTeX puts it five pages later. Or whatever.

>> 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.
>
> You mean messing with the standard tabbing environment or when creating
> a new green environment.
>
>> 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.
>
> Correction: you can not handle it. If I understood what you wanted to
> accomplish, I might feel tempted to try.

I merely wanted to create a new tabbing environment where all the text 
comes out green, set one quad in from both margins. (Apparently there's 
no way to prevent it flowing off the right edge of the page though...)

First I found that only the /first/ line came out green. So then I added 
a group around the body. That worked fine... until the environment went 
over a page break, at which point it broke again. Not to mention that by 
flipping from page to page, I actually managed to break the DVI viewer 
as well. (At one point the entire document turned green, just by me 
manipulating the view...)

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

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