Xref: utzoo comp.text:4895 comp.text.desktop:892
Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!ames!uhccux!lee
From: lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Greg Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.text,comp.text.desktop
Subject: Re: Which is better?  Textprocessing langs or DeskTop publishing pgms?
Message-ID: <4759@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu>
Date: 6 Sep 89 16:55:01 GMT
References: <2650@trantor.harris-atd.com>
Organization: University of Hawaii
Lines: 30

From article <2650@trantor.harris-atd.com>, by chuck@melmac.harris-atd.com (Chuck Musciano):
>In article <509@mjbtn.MFEE.TN.US> root@mjbtn.MFEE.TN.US (Mark J. Bailey) writes:
>>... troff and/or TeX be better than Interleaf ...
>
>...  People will contend that there are certain things you can't do in a
>WYSIWYG tool that you can in troff or TeX,  ...

Let's see, have we discussed this before?  I'm a TeX fan.  Here are some
things worth mentioning in favor of TeX.  (1) TeX is free.  (2) The
source code to TeX is available, both machine readable and in book form
(Knuth's _TeX: The Program_), and it is very well commented. (3) TeX
code can be modified or generated by other programs (as with other
batch formatters).  (4) You can design or modify fonts using TeX's
companion program Metafont, which is also free and also very well
documented.

All of these things are important to me.  I've just spent a few
days modifying a (free) driver program for TeX to do some special
little things I needed to do.  Without the source to the driver,
I couldn't do that.  Without Knuth's exhaustive description of
dvi file format, I also couldn't do that.

I just finished printing up a dictionary a couple of weeks ago that
has narrow columns, which makes it important to get the hyphenations
right.  The dictionary contains text in English, Palauan, Latin,
Spanish, and Japanese -- each language hyphenates differently.
I have pre-processing programs to add the appropriate hyphenation
points.  Maybe I could do that using Interleaf, but I doubt it.

			Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu