Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 08:49:48 +0200 (MET DST) From: grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey) To: joelh@gnu.ai.mit.edu (Joel Ray Holveck) Cc: chat@FreeBSD.ORG (FreeBSD Chat) Subject: Re: A PostScript editor Message-ID: <199610180649.IAA24784@allegro.lemis.de> In-Reply-To: <199610172253.SAA14398@hill.gnu.ai.mit.edu> from "Joel Ray Holveck" at Oct 17, 96 06:53:23 pm
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Joel Ray Holveck writes:
>
>
> I'd like to write a manual for my software and because
> it should contain charts, schemas and so on it cannot
> be an ascii file. Would anyone suggest any up-to-date
> file format : PostScript, MS Word (forgive my mentioning
> it), HTML, Acrobat, dvi.
>
> I personally recommend LaTeX (or, for the Real Tech Writers,
> TeX... and you can use TECO to edit it. :-) ) LaTeX produces excellent
> output, partially because it's a typesetter, not a WYSIWYG editor.
> That is to say, you can use emacs, pico, teco, vi, Windows notepad, or
> whatever you want to type in a file that says what your document is
> supposed to contain, then run LaTeX over it. LaTeX then produces a
> DVI file, which can be run through dvi2ps to produce your PostScript
> output. It produces better output than MS Word or other popular word
> processors because it can work on the overall pages as a whole, and
> take its time making decisions. If putting a line break here makes an
> orphan line down there, then that can be handled. Word processors
> have to make these decisions real-time, so they don't have the liberty
> of making as many calculations and decisions. Many of the foo.ps
> files you see out there were generated using TeX or LaTeX.
I used to use TeX, and showed considerable resistance when O'Reilly
asked me to use troff for writing my porting book. I did so, however,
and I've been using troff ever since. Nothing (well, nothing simple)
could make me go back to TeX.
While you're right in what you say above, I always have a problem with
documentation formatted by TeX (including LaTeX): it's always
immediately recognizable. The layout and, usually, the fonts (cm) are
very distinctive, and to my way of thinking not the most pleasant.
In addition, I find TeX to be brain-dead. I don't know how much of
this applies to LaTeX, but for example identifiers may contain no
digits; the sequence \fontsize300 is three tokens: the \, representing
that the following token is an identifer (is that the right
terminology), and the number 300. To select fonts, you need to name
them to things like \twentyfourrm, because \rm24 won't work. I still
haven't figured out when to put commands inside braces and when
outside: do I write \indent10mm{foo bar} or {\indent10mm foo bar}?
troff (well, to be more specific, groff) is much easier to handle, and
when you do make a mistake, it at least presents output you can debug.
There are a whole lot of other things; in particular, it's easier to
produce PostScript--you don't need to go via .dvi; it's easier to use
other fonts; it's (barely) easier to read the source files.
> You can actually use any text editor to generate .ps files, but I
> don't recommend it. Most .ps files are generated by TeX or other
> tools.
Occasionally it's quite useful to edit PostScript. But it requires an
in-depth knowledge of the language to do correctly.
Greg
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