Grub versus Boot Manager

[Tim Hunt]

Joe Malin wrote:

> You may be right. I pinged a fellow tech writer who knows something 
> about LaTex, and he was amused that someone suggested it as a 
> replacement for FrameMaker. On the other hand, LaTex seems to be very
>  popular in academia.

Well, the 'killer app' for LaTeX is equations. I have never found a way
of entering equations that was as quick as typing the LaTeX markup. A 
lot of commercial (academic) publishers use LaTeX for producing science 
books.

> One thing I can't figure out is what *editor* people use to create
> LaText documents. As far as I can tell, LaTex is a markup language
> not an editor. Can you get an editor that has menus/dialogs/function
> keys/whatever for inputting LaTex?

Aha! I finally understand your question. Sorry for being so slow.

I don't know what the state of the art is. I last extensively used LaTeX 
myself 5 years ago to do my PhD thesis. I believe that most people 
author LaTeX by typing the markup in their favourite text editor, which 
will probably be one that syntax-highlights it, and provides one-click 
(or key-press) to generate and preview the finished product.

Where I work, (www.open.ac.uk) LaTeX is used for producing Maths and 
Physics teaching material. The way that tends to work is that academics 
author the content in whatever form they prefer (which tends to mean MS 
Word or LaTeX) and then hand it to specialist staff who convert it to 
the "right" LaTeX format. Then proof reading is done with red biro on 
hard-copy and sending it back to the specialists who edit the LaTeX.

The thing about LaTeX is that the markup source is very little more than
the plain text, so hand-authoring the markup is not very onerous. True, 
you don't get WYSIWYG, but if you are authoring a large, structured 
document, is that important? You need to author the right structures in 
the mark-up (which is easy to see in LaTeX source) and then apply the 
stylesheet to that structure to get the finished product.

Some LaTeX users go further, and are violently anti-WYSIWYG, claiming 
that looking at the final styled output actually hides the document 
structure from you and causes you to think only about presentation, not 
structure. They are the sort of people who talk about WYSIAYG (what you 
see is all you've got).

I am not saying that your view point is wrong. I have never seen 
FrameMaker, so am not qualified to compare the two. I am just trying to 
explain the orthodox LaTeX view point to you, since you are expressing 
interest in it. It is the right tool for some jobs, but certainly not all.

Tim.


-- 
Principal bassoonist to the Steeple Bumpstead village pantomime.