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General software and network General OS-independent software and network questions, X11, MTA, routing, etc. |
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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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I personally use LaTeX for most of my documents that are desired for printed form. I almost never print anything, but I consider PDF/PostScript output to be like a "digital paper", so to speak. I generally gave up on word processors and the hole WYSIWYG paradigm - I need a system that I can rely on to print what I want, how I want, and not to require a lot of hand tweaking between different editors, printers, and displays to keep it that way. LaTeX generally offers that, or "close enough" to it, that I can just work on content and structure, without care about final appearance until after the document is written. Not having to (ab)use the M4 macro processor and Perl to maintain larger documents involving indexes and references is also a great help (and why I stopped using HTML/CSS for this). Most of what I do, is built around toolkits. A set of tools that I can use together to create something larger, without a headache in the process; LaTeX has proven to be extremely useful but I would never rule out other tools. For anyone wanting to learn TeX/LaTeX I would suggest buying a good book and finding an online reference. I never bought a book, but you can find some of the links I use on my ma.gnolia profile - the first of which is the main kind of docs I needed to learn. For troff the best I've seen is the old troff users manual and a tutorial by BWK, there's also a few other things on here that DrJ has referenced, and your *nix systems should have documentation on the various macro packages and pre processors. Well spoken ;-)
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My Journal Thou shalt check the array bounds of all strings (indeed, all arrays), for surely where thou typest ``foo'' someone someday shall type ``supercalifragilisticexpialidocious''. Last edited by TerryP; 10th November 2008 at 06:28 AM. |
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What I would most be interested in would not be man pages but more toward publishing, with pretty printing and images, either one-off or magazine publishing, though it sounds like magazines don't all accept that anymore. I had decided that TeX or Latex was what I wanted and it still sounds that way.
This discussion leads me to believe that publication houses have dumbed themselves down to accomodate the masses and their Word systems. As an aside, the well known co-author of a book about mySQL hates Word and prefers OO. |
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docbook, groff, latex, tex, troff, typesetting |
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