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From: dougcc@csv.viccol.edu.au (Douglas Miller)
Newsgroups: comp.text,comp.text.desktop
Subject: Re: Which is better?  Textprocessing langs or DeskTop publishing pgms?
Message-ID: <1817@csv.viccol.edu.au>
Date: 8 Sep 89 21:25:15 GMT
References: <509@mjbtn.MFEE.TN.US>
Organization: Computer Services, Victoria College, Melbourne
Lines: 39

In article <509@mjbtn.MFEE.TN.US>, root@mjbtn.MFEE.TN.US
 (Mark J. Bailey) writes:
> Can anyone reading this give me an idea of the pros and cons of each 
> approach to laser typesetting/publishing?  In particular where would
> troff and/or TeX be better than Interleaf and where would it be worse
> (other than its complexity)?  Is there some things that troff/TeX can
> do (being a language of sorts) that Interleaf cannot?  Where should I
> channel my efforts?

OK, here are my opinions (with a few facts thrown in :-).

TeX and troff are typesetting languages.  TeX is the more robust and
powerful of the two, and produces the best typesetting of *any* typesetting
software.  For authoring documents, you should use LaTeX, a document
stucturing system implemented in TeX.  You should use TeX only for
implementing LaTeX document styles.

If you are doing one-off designs, like for advertisements or flyers, stick
to a page layout system such as Interleaf.

If you want to write documents, and have them typeset in a consistent and
standard format, use LaTeX.  The advantages of LaTeX over page-layout are:

   o  Your text is formatted by LaTeX/TeX automatically.  Page layout
      systems are based on the procedure of you formatting the text on the
      screen manually.

   o  LaTeX requires you to specify the logical structure of your document,
      which it then formats according to a predefined document style.  This
      helps you to write better, avoid inconsistent formating, and avoid
      typographical mistakes.

Things are not as simple if you need to design your own document styles. 
Depending on how ambitious you this can be a fairly complex task that
requires you to learn a lot of stuff.  On the other hand, I wouldn't
underestimate the amount of learning required to drive a page layout
system, and note also that the extent that you can design a document style
(as apposed to designing a document) is usually quite limited compared to
LaTeX/TeX.