Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!mintaka!geech.ai.mit.edu!rjc
From: rjc@geech.ai.mit.edu (Ray Cromwell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.applications
Subject: Re: Mac's Microsoft Word
Message-ID: <1991Jan15.230528.8033@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu>
Date: 15 Jan 91 23:05:28 GMT
References: <1991Jan15.031444.5@csc.canterbury.ac.nz> <1991Jan14.222837.20284@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu> <1991Jan15.214938.13706@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
Sender: daemon@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu (Lucifer Maleficius)
Organization: None
Lines: 51

In article <1991Jan15.214938.13706@Neon.Stanford.EDU> torrie@cs.stanford.edu (Evan J Torrie) writes:
>rjc@geech.ai.mit.edu (Ray Cromwell) writes:
>>>1. Style Sheets. Very useful. A style sheet consists of a set of text
>>>formatting commands. Thus if you want to change the font or style of a
>
>>  AmigaTeX, and TeX in general can do this, and has been doing so for years.
>>All someone has to do is hack up a nice GUI for TeX for people who aren't
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
>  If it's so easy, why don't you do it Ray?

 If someone was willing to pay, say $15 shareware I might. Personally,I
don't see the point of it. Its quicker for me to type \section then to
have a menu item pop up a string requester asking for a section name.
Lots of time, I feel the mouse only gets in the way. Having to take my
hands off the keyboard to choose a menu item is a big pain. Keyboard
shortcuts could be used, and a interface that hides the \ TeX language
from the user and displays the result could be created, but thats not the
philosophy behind TeX. TeX is far from WYSIWYG but it gets the job done.

>  Although it would perhaps be possible to do this with some
>super-duper Search/Replace function [probably involving huge regular
>expressions, and extremely complicated semantics], style sheets make
>this automatic.  Please, if you haven't seen style sheets [hell,
>they've been around for over 5 years], you really don't know what
>you're missing.

  I haven't seen them, but they seem trivial. 


>  Yes, TeX can do basically everything that Word can do.  But it
>IS complicated to learn.  The point is that people DON'T have to learn
>about the "workings of computer languages" to get a powerful word
>processor.  Word already exists in a user-friendly form.
>  Incidentally, I consider Nisus 3.0 to be a much more powerful word
>processor than Word, so Word should not be taken as the be-all and
>end-all of word processors.

TeX is hard to learn? Isn't \section,\title,\author, etc intuitive enough?
What person of average intelligence can not look at \section{Introduction}
and guess what it means? I'm glad atleast you don't believe Word is the god
of WP's.
  I guess since I'm a programmer I have a twisted view of the world. In my
mind, a something like TeX, CygnusEd/Turbotext, and Arexx combined together
spells the ultimate in power.

>-- 
>------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Evan Torrie.  Stanford University, Class of 199?       torrie@cs.stanford.edu   
>"I didn't get where I am today without knowing a good deal when I see one,
> Reggie."  "Yes, C.J."