Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!att!pacbell!ames!ncar!gatech!ncsuvx!mcnc!rti!sas!bts
From: bts@sas.UUCP (Brian T. Schellenberger)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: a word-processor for UNIX
Message-ID: <1126@sas.UUCP>
Date: 2 Aug 89 15:55:58 GMT
References: <20306@adm.BRL.MIL> <26558@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <8467@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> <26567@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <1552@garcon.cso.uiuc.edu> <15680@ut-emx.UUCP> <1989Jul28.163816.1527@telotech.uucp>
Reply-To: bts@sas.UUCP (Brian T. Schellenberger)
Organization: SAS Institute Inc, Cary NC
Lines: 26

In article <1989Jul28.163816.1527@telotech.uucp> bsa@telotech.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery) writes:
|Because troff and TeX are optimized for technical books, not for popular ones.
|You'd pretty much have to invent your own macro packages to typeset a GFQ
|(Generic Fantasy Quest) novel, or for "how-to" books, etc.

While it may be true that TeX is, in some sense "optimized" for technical
work, I fail to see how it is "de-optimized" for popular work.  Indeed,
setting novel in TeX is much easier than setting a technical work; setting
a novel is trivial.  No tables, or anything, just straight text, with 
blank lines for paragraph breaks.  What could be easier?

Practically the only coding for most novels would be setting up the margins
and headers, a few pages of front and back material, and trivial macros
for the chapter heads.  And, of course, very occaisonal italics.  The reason
TeX is rarely used for these--or at least for a far smaller percentage of
popular novels than of technical books is because, since the task is so
simple, almost any software can do it.  Also, fewer of these type of people
set their own stuff, being less technically oriented.

But nothing about TeX (and, I suspect, nothing about troff either) makes
setting such works more difficult.
-- 
-- Brian, the Man from Babble-on.		...!mcnc!rti!sas!bts
--
"Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part
that isn't thinking isn't thinking of" -- THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS