Xref: utzoo comp.text:4907 comp.text.desktop:897 Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!accuvax.nwu.edu!delta.eecs.nwu.edu!phil From: phil@delta.eecs.nwu.edu (William LeFebvre) Newsgroups: comp.text,comp.text.desktop Subject: Re: Which is better? Textprocessing langs or DeskTop publishing pgms? Keywords: desktop DTP interleaf tex troff Message-ID: <1132@accuvax.nwu.edu> Date: 7 Sep 89 14:53:57 GMT References: <509@mjbtn.MFEE.TN.US> <2650@trantor.harris-atd.com> <1128@accuvax.nwu.edu> <2652@trantor.harris-atd.com> Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu Reply-To: phil@delta.eecs.nwu.edu (William LeFebvre) Organization: Northwestern U, Evanston IL, USA Lines: 51 In article <2652@trantor.harris-atd.com> chuck@trantor.harris-atd.com (Chuck Musciano) writes: > I suppose you could argue "arcane" but not "programming language". I >would bet that both troff and TeX are Turing-complete. Correct. I was arguing "arcane". TeX is definitely Turing equivalent and troff can be forced into it for argument's sake. Quite amusing to see things like a "towers of hanoi" solution written in TeX: it does not produce a printable document, instead it writes its solutions to the terminal & log file! The programmable nature of TeX has an advantage and a disadvantage: the disadvantage is that it is harder to learn, the advantage is that if TeX doesn't already do something for you it most likely can be programmed to do it for you (unless it's the halting problem, of course). Are any WYSIWYG systems Turing equivalent? Does everyone even know what we mean by Turing equivalent? (It means that it has at least all the functionality of a Turing machine---most easily proved by emulating a Turing machine in the language in question). As for your statement that such systems are, in general, harder to learn than WYSIWYG systems (sorry, I already deleted the exact quote): A system like LaTeX is not that hard to teach a secretary, provided that you confine yourself to producing the types of documents that LaTeX already has "styles" for. What is the most difficult in LaTeX is producing a new style. For this you need someone who is (a) proficient in LaTeX and TeX and (b) knowledgeable about what a good printed document looks like. But for any decent-sized organization, replace "LaTeX and TeX" with the document-processing-system-of-your-choice and this statement is still true! You want someone like that on staff anyway. How easy is it to make a new "form" or "style" in FrameMaker that will produce *good* looking documents? Can you easily teach a secretary how to do that? What this boils down to is this: the primary goal of a WYSIWYG system is ease of use and ease of self-instruction; the primary goal of TeX is producing the best-looking document possible. The emphases are different. But, what we have seen lately from Frame and ArborTeX is systems that try to attain both goals simultaneously. I'm ALL for that! I'll be quiet now...... William LeFebvre Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Northwestern University