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From: hugo@chocorua.dartmouth.edu (Peter Su)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.applications
Subject: Re: Mac's Microsoft Word
Message-ID: <1991Jan16.135301.27836@dartvax.dartmouth.edu>
Date: 16 Jan 91 13:53:01 GMT
References: <1991Jan15.031444.5@csc.canterbury.ac.nz> <1991Jan14.222837.20284@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu> <1991Jan15.214938.13706@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
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Reply-To: hugo@chocorua (Peter Su)
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In article <1991Jan15.214938.13706@Neon.Stanford.EDU> torrie@cs.stanford.edu (Evan J Torrie) writes:
>  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.

What is this myth that TeX is hard to learn?  Grad students here learn
enough LaTeX to do just about everything in about 2 days.  Problems
crop up when they need fancier formatting, or when they decide that
they want to change the default styles...but doing that kind of thing
should be left to real TeX hackers.

Just for fun, let's do a comparison.  I want to make a "section"
style that skips down on the page, and puts out a section header in
bold roman, then skips a bit more and formats the first paragraph of
the section with no paragraph indent.

In TeX, the macro is roughly like this:

\def\section#1{\medskip\noindent{\bf #1}\smallskip\noindent}

Then to use it, *bang* you just type this:

\section{foo}

You can fine tune the macro to avoid bad page breaking...but that's
for hackers.

Compare this to Word, where you have to create 2 styles, using 4
dialogs, and you have to remember to link the styles together using
the 'next style' hook, and then you have to be real careful about
applying styles because for some ungodly reason, applying style A to
something already formatted in style B gives you text in style A+B,
rather than just A.  *And*, if you want the style to number the
section, or later, you decide that the section title should be inlined
rather then a separate paragraph, you lose.  You can't do it (I
think).

So, which system is easier to use?  Hmm?

BTW, Nicus is better, but has many of the same problems as Word.  But,
I can get it to number sections using macros.  Nice.

Pete

P.S.  Similar troff macros are just as trivial.

hugo@sunapee.dartmouth.edu