Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!psuvax1!husc6!bochner From: bochner@lange.harvard.edu (Harry Bochner) Newsgroups: comp.text Subject: Re: Why learn Tex? Message-ID: Date: 2 Mar 90 23:35:17 GMT References: <11457@socslgw.csl.sony.co.jp> <924@mti.mti.com> Sender: news@husc6.harvard.edu Organization: Aiken Computation Lab, Harvard University Lines: 21 In-reply-to: adrian@mti.mti.com's message of 1 Mar 90 23:27:38 GMT Two more tidbits for the discussion: 1) Several programmers have commented that they would rather work at the 'high' level of a markup language; also some people have said they find the formatting information distracting when they're writing. So I'd like to express my esthetic preference: I'm a programmer, and when writing I MUCH prefer any WYSIWYG, even a primitive one, to a mark up language. To my taste the markup commands are much more distracting. 2) I think the real competition to TeX may come not from the PC level word processing market, but the new workstation level packages. We've been trying out FrameMaker here, and I'm very impressed with it. The problem with it for our environment is that you need a graphics console to run it, and many of our TeX users have nothing but an ascii terminal. For much of what's done here the big advantage of TeX is that you can run it from a terminal. -- Harry Bochner bochner@endor.harvard.edu