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Old 10th November 2008
DrJ DrJ is offline
ISO Quartermaster
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Gold Country, CA
Posts: 507
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I agree with what OKO wrote.

The irony is that if you deal much with text, you just have to know a lot about all the various software. Regularly I use Word, WordPerfect, troff, TeX, Acrobat, ghostscript, Acroread, Evince, Imagemagick, various graphics programs (like grace and clones), Refbase, bibtex and a whole lot of others that I have not mentioned. It is its own world.

On top of that you should know the grants submission systems (they vary from US department to department) and the input formats accepted by the publications in which you are interested. And what the people with whom you work use (invariably, Word).

And others if you want to do OSS documentation.

There really is no *right* answer.

That said, knowing both troff and TeX is worthwhile. They are both tool chains that have integrity, and both are worth knowing. They are similar in concept, different in execution, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses.

Would you give up PHP to know Ruby?
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