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Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!sean
From: sean@castle.ed.ac.uk (S Matthews)
Newsgroups: comp.text,comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: Why learn Tex?
Message-ID: <2547@castle.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 1 Mar 90 13:04:19 GMT
References: <E5f$a51@cs.psu.edu>
Reply-To: sean@castle.ed.ac.uk (S Matthews)
Distribution: comp
Organization: Edinburgh University Computing Service
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In article <E5f$a51@cs.psu.edu> melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) writes:
>
>What advantages are there in learning troff or Tex?  Aren't their days
>numbered?  Everyone in the non-Unix world is using word processors.
>Why aren't Unix people?  I read in a book about Unix(that black
>paperback book from Byte) that the major disadvantage in using a word
>processor was that it couldn't handle large documents.  It seems to me
>that this limitation has been overcome.
>
>-Mike

There have been a couple of answers to this that seem to have missed the
point, a little.

1. TeX is not a word processing tool.
2. Word processing tools (wysiwig) are not capable of handling
   large documents satisfactorily (even if you think they are).

To enlarge on 2. a little further, you may think that the results of
your favorite wysiwig wp are up to TeX standards, but in larger
documents you quickly start to lose stylistic coherence.

To keep that coherence, you need a markup language, be it troff, sgml or
TeX. 

The difference is analogous to the difference between compilers and
interpreters (don't push the analogy to far, though).  If you need a
quick ten line program, then an interpreter such as awk is ideal, and it
comes with all sorts of powerful facilities.  If what you have in mind
is for general consumption, and you expect it to come in at ~100,000
lines, then you would use a compiler, even though a compiler is not
nearly as user friendly as a well designed interpreter. 

Using TeX to write a one page letter is overkill of resources and
effort---Use word or even Macwrite.

Use Macwrite to produce camera ready copy for a book and the result will
be a mess.

Use Word to produce crc for a book and the result will be satisfactory
but amateur.

Use TeX (intelligently) and the result will be professional (I know from
experience).  Use TeX badly and the results will be horrible (like
Fortran written in ML---is that even possible?). 

The point is that markup languages will always be better for big jobs,
even though (because?) they demand a lot more discipline.

Sean