Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ucbvax!pasteur!ames!amdahl!oliveb!sun!msf@amelia.nas.nasa.gov
From: msf@amelia.nas.nasa.gov (Michael S. Fischbein)
Newsgroups: comp.text.desktop
Subject: Re: Yuppie software
Message-ID: <39738@sun.uucp>
Date: 22 Jan 88 20:42:15 GMT
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Distribution: comp
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>desktop publishing:  Yuppie-ism at its finest.  Extravagant, ostentatious,
>conspicuous and expensive, desktop publishing clearly demonstrates that
>personal computing has reached boutique status.

Of course, TeX, LaTeX, their distributions; *roff and their distributions
have enabled the capability of desktop publishing for years.  All that
has happened is that it has gotten easier, so there are fewer excuses for
sloppy, hard to read copy.
-- 
Michael Fischbein                 msf@ames-nas.arpa
                                  ...!seismo!decuac!csmunix!icase!msf
These are my opinions and not necessarily official views of any
organization.

	[moderator's kibbitz: While TeX has been available, it hasn't
	 been available on machines that the average user might have
	 available -- the packages that blazed the trail onto the Mac's
	 and the PC's opened up a market that TeX simply hadn't addressed.

	 Also, TeX is (1) not even remotely WYSIWYG (much as I hate that
	 overused acronym) and has a pretty hefty learning curve. The 
	 advantages of PageMaker or Ready Set Go is that you can make
	 them useful quickly -- if faced with TeX, my belief is that
	 most users other layout packages wouldn't. Even if they aren't
	 WYSIWYG in practice, they're close enough that it helps people
	 who haven't spent lots of time with the program visualize the
	 output. With TeX, you have to know enough about Tex to mentally
	 visualize the output (or run it through a previewer constantly,
	 which is a royal hassle]

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