LaTeX vs. Framemaker?
qt...@my-deja.com
This spring, I wrote my thesis with Wordperfect. It was such an
aggravating experience that, after finishing, I decided that I
absolutely must convert to something else. I had long heard that LaTeX
was the standard for technical writing, so I bought some books,
downloaded MiKTeX, and started to work on it.
A month and a half later, I'm just as much frustrated as I was with
Wordperfect. I can't believe how much effort you have to go to in order
to do the simplest things; like rotate a table or put a figure in one
spot and make it stay there. The books I got aren't much help. *LaTeX
Line by Line* always seems to tell you just 80% of what you need to know
in order to do something and *The TeXbook* is not a learning aid, it's
an instrument of abuse. Finally, the products that you get out of the
standard classes would embarrass anyone with a knowledge of good
typography.
Nevertheless, I thought I had no alternative, so I just kept at it ...
until this week when a friend introduced me to Adobe Framemaker. I was
stunned to find that all of the things I wanted to do were available
intuitively and at the click of a button. I was chagrinned to find that
I could get the academic version of Framemaker for about the same cost
as the TUG distribution plus the most popular manuals for LaTeX.
Naturally, my inclination is to switch to Framemaker. But I'm still
interested in being able to handle TeX files because I interact with a
lot of people who do use LaTeX. So I wanted to ask, are there reasonably
priced commercial editors for TeX that make things as easy as
Framemaker? Basically, I want it for doing all of the things one
normally needs for technical papers, articles, and books.
Also, can anyone say whether Framemaker (and perhaps its rival,
Interleaf) lacks any important abilities of LaTeX?
Cheers,
Tom
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Axel Reichert
> I can't believe how much effort you have to go to in order
> to do the simplest things; like rotate a table
\usepackage{lscape}
...
\begin{landscape}
\begin{table}
...
> or put a figure in one spot and make it stay there.
\usepackage{float}
...
\begin{figure}[H]
(I do not like or use this at all)
> The books I got aren't much help
Get Lamport's manual or the LaTeX Companion.
> the products that you get out of the standard classes would
> embarrass anyone with a knowledge of good typography.
Why? Please be more specific about the flaws.
> are there reasonably priced commercial editors for TeX that make
> things as easy as Framemaker?
Well, many people like XEmacs/AUC TeX, but this is neither commercial
nor reasonably priced. You get it for free. But probably not the thing
you think about.
> can anyone say whether Framemaker (and perhaps its rival, Interleaf)
> lacks any important abilities of LaTeX?
Typesetting of mathematics is poor. No BibTeX-like support of
bibliographies. Line breaking is poor.
Happy TeXing!
--
Axel Reichert -- http://www.axel-reichert.de
Javier Bezos
> A month and a half later, I'm just as much frustrated as I was with
> Wordperfect. I can't believe how much effort you have to go to in order
> to do the simplest things; like rotate a table or put a figure in one
> spot and make it stay there. The books I got aren't much help. *LaTeX
> Line by Line* always seems to tell you just 80% of what you need to know
> in order to do something and *The TeXbook* is not a learning aid, it's
> an instrument of abuse. Finally, the products that you get out of the
> standard classes would embarrass anyone with a knowledge of good
> typography.
Wow! Have you tried learning Framemaker by reading its source code?
;-) These references are _very_ technical, and definitely not for the
beginner. Try before:
ftp://ftp.dante.de/tex-archive/info/lshort/english/lshort.pdf
and
ftp://ftp.dante.de/tex-archive/usergrps/uktug/faq/newfaq.pdf
> Also, can anyone say whether Framemaker (and perhaps its rival,
> Interleaf) lacks any important abilities of LaTeX?
Many. On the other hand, Frememaker has many capablities missing
in TeX, but of little interest in technical writings (they are
more useful in magazines, papers, and the like), where LaTeX
is usurpassed.
\bye
________________________
Javier Bezos
jbezos at wanadoo dot es
Charley Hamilton
date. Alternatively, the fact that I now (still) use latex may
answer the question.
ABSTRACT: (yeah, well, anyway...)
LaTeX = non-gui. If you like GUI, you might like Lyx or one of the commerical
variants. Check out www.ctan.org for a list of LaTeX distributions. Most have
screen shots & some have demo
versions. I haven't tried more than two, & those I didn't like.
But I'm not GUI. LaTeX is really not for the GUI-inclined. That
said, here's my piece on why LaTeX over Frame.
Frame used to require point-n-drool to get a symbol inserted, or an
ugly series of keystrokes. I much prefer simple commands like \alpha,
which is both easy to remember and reliably what I want. I like the
ability to tool on my dissertation over a dialup (text-only)
connection. This (text-only) is another advantage to LaTeX.
Although viewing is kinda rough. ;-)
Non-proprietary interface is another plus. If my advisor wants a
copy of chapters 2 and 14, and he's in New Zealand & I'm at home,
I can email him the tex file and his complaints come back (via email)
almost ready to latex (as long as he has a text editor). If I sent
him framemaker, he either needs frame, or a lot of patience reading catcodes.
;-) Seriously, latex is more widely available than frame,
in that it is free and can be edited using something as simple as M$
notepad or vi. It's highly platform independent, and can be sent
around as ASCII text. If you want a latex distribution for any
platform, it's basically as simple as downloading the binaries from
your local CTAN. Well, I'm not sure about Mac. That may only be
$$-ware, but I don't use Macs.
The ability to print to several formats (dvi, ps, pdf) without
proprietary add-ons is another advantage. I'm not sure if this still
holds for later frame variants. I suppose you can print to ps
using a ps printer driver in frame, too, but still....
I'm also not a GUI sorta guy, so having a compile-as-you-go
interface is fine by me. The idea of defining exactly what you want
to happen (font family, weight, indentation, etc) is attractive and
useful to me. Trading-off such features as auto-mistake and grammar-redirector
(M$ Wurd) is a plus to me. If I can't identify
a grammatical mistake, I probably shouldn't be using the construction
in the first place. Of course, I'm a grammatical snob. ;-) I also
spend a lot of time reading my text out loud to decide if it sounds
right.
The academic version of frame is $150 here. The TeXBook and Lamport's
LaTeX book are ~ $75 together, with another $40 thrown in for the
Companion. Plus, the folks at c.t.t. are so friendly. ;-) I
guess the price is close, and I've never checked out the frame
newsgroup (I assume it exists). It's also a question of what kind
of support exists on your campus. We have non-existent support for
latex (well, for any particular program, really), but this is an M$
campus. My undergrad was a unix-campus, with excellent support for
latex.
These advantages may or may not be relevant, or even true anymore.
As I said, it's been a while since I used frame.
Charley
--
Charles Hamilton, EIT Graduate Student Researcher
Department of Civil and Phone: 949.824.8694
Environmental Engineering FAX: 949.824.2117
University of California, Irvine Email: cham...@eng.uci.edu
Robert McDonald
I'm also a Wordperfect refugee (I used it from version 4 to version 8). I
haven't used Framemaker, but I have a couple of comments.
First, some of your questions suggest that you're still thinking you want
WYSIWYG. If you really do, LaTeX is not for you. However, since using Latex
I've completely revised my thinking about the desirability of WYSIWYG, and I
believe I am much more productive focusing on content, not layout. I have
decided I am trying to convey thoughts to others, not so much achieve a
particular graphical design. (A good design, yes, but I don't care exactly
what it's like as long as it looks good.)
Second, IMO LaTeX works best if you're willing to let the styles do the
work. Yes, you can get packages to perform various tweaks (I use a number of
them), but fundamentally you need to let the styles do the work, especially
at the beginning. I can't address your comment about typographic
inadequacies, but I will relate an anecdote. I am writing a book and I let
the standard book class handle the layout for the sample chapters. When I
met with the various publishers I received uniform praise both for the fact
that I was using LaTeX and for the appearance of the sample chapters. (I
have to say that I was shocked by the positive reactions of the some of the
publishing people. But, to my untutored eye, the chapters do look great. It
was all LaTeX, no self-compliment intended.)
Third, a lot of what I find valuable about LaTeX is not directly related to
the appearance of the final product: Bibtex for citations (I *love* this
tool), the fact that I don't have to worry about corruption of a binary
file, and the ability to use emacs for editing, combined with Auctex and
reftex (makes cross-referencing a snap). To be fair, I dislike graphics
handling in a PC environment -- I'm sure Framework excels in this dimension
-- and I use Scientific Word ($$$) from time to time to make that part
easy.
Finally, I hate to say this but 6 weeks is not a lot of time. LaTeX is
fairly complicated and I would tell anyone to buy 3 reference books, have
them close at hand, expect to consult them often, and ask questions of
colleagues if you're lucky enough to have around you some who speak Latex. I
would not expect to really get comfortable with it for a while. You're
making an investment in a powerful tool which excels at certain kinds of
documents. (Of course, 6 weeks would not be a lot of time for Wordperfect
either :-) )
Whatever you choose to do, good luck.
Bob
Rolf Marvin Bře Lindgren
| have to say that I was shocked by the positive reactions of the some of the
| publishing people. But, to my untutored eye, the chapters do look great. It
| was all LaTeX, no self-compliment intended.)
to the trained eye, it's the line breaking/uniform grayness of the page
that astonishes. the formatting of subtitles leaves (in my opinion) a
lot to be desired, but everybody understands that that can be fixed.
--
Rolf Lindgren http://www.uio.no/~roffe/
ro...@tag.uio.no
Robbie Pickering
> If you want a latex distribution for any
> platform, it's basically as simple as downloading the binaries from
> your local CTAN. Well, I'm not sure about Mac. That may only be
> $$-ware, but I don't use Macs.
The Mac implementations CMacTeX and OzTeX are $$-ware, but don't cost a
lot of $$ (not counting Textures). If you're a member of DANTE (don't
know about TUG) you even get OzTeX for free!
Alun Moon
Both are considerably better than M$.
I was initially seduced by the WYSIWYG of Frame, but as time progressed, I did
become infuriated with the maths editing especially. As well as needed a number
of mouse clicks or keystrokes to get the template inserted, it did insist on
*its*way*of*doing*things*!
I wanted to do the equivalent of $W^+$ simple enough, but noooo...
Anyway, Framemaker is large 64Mb, though MikTeX comes in at 57Mb with all the
options.
The great thing about TeX/LaTeX is the ease of generation, a simple text file.
Use your text editor of choice, put documents under version control, ....
And,
You get a built-in bibliographic database system,
As for graphics, I'm only begining to discover METAFONT and MEAPOST, but wow!
Extensions,
Need to draw timing diagrams...CTAN
need to draw circuit diagrams...CTAN
ditto networks...CTAN
(you can tell I'm an electronics engineer)
ditto project plans...CTAN
ditto Chemical formula, or structures...CTAN
UML... well theres expressg, but I could (try) to write my own, METAPOST to the
resuce.
The posibilities of extending teX/LaTeX are *huge*, and cost only your
development time, or the download time from CTAN.
I like to get "close to the machine" when working with hardware and software,
LaTeX has that comfortable attribute of letting you see what's going on.
And if you want to spend the time "getting under the lid" you can.
In my opinion, for flexibility, extensibility, openness, (cost) you can't beat
the set TeX/LaTeX/METAFONT/METAPOST.
(much praise to Donald Knuth who started it all, what an inspiration)
Dr Alun Moon
Sven Utcke
> Extensions,
> Need to draw timing diagrams...CTAN
> need to draw circuit diagrams...CTAN
> ditto networks...CTAN
> (you can tell I'm an electronics engineer)
> ditto project plans...CTAN
What do you use for that?
Thanks
Sven
--
_ __ The Cognitive Systems Group
| |/ /___ __ _ ___ University of Hamburg
| ' </ _ \/ _` (_-< phone: +49 (0)40 42883-2576 Vogt-Koelln-Strasse 30
|_|\_\___/\__, /__/ fax : +49 (0)40 42883-2572 D-22527 Hamburg
|___/ http://kogs-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/~utcke/home.html
Alun Moon
>
> Alun Moon <alun...@ncl.ac.uk> writes:
>
> > Extensions,
> > Need to draw timing diagrams...CTAN
> > need to draw circuit diagrams...CTAN
> > ditto networks...CTAN
> > (you can tell I'm an electronics engineer)
> > ditto project plans...CTAN
The TeXProject package, part of /tex-archive/graphics/dratex (on www.tex.ac.uk
CTAN mirror). Its quite good, you write a project description, and then can
produce one of several forms of graphic from that.
Dr Alun Moon
University of Newcastle
Michael P. Soulier
>qt...@my-deja.com writes:
>
>> I can't believe how much effort you have to go to in order
>> to do the simplest things; like rotate a table
>
>...
>\begin{landscape}
> \begin{table}
> ...
I believe that the poster was referring to the difficulty in finding this
information. Personally, this newsgroup is my main resource, as there are
mountains of documentation that may or may not just waste your time to read
while trying to find one obscure line.
>Get Lamport's manual or the LaTeX Companion.
Lamport's manual covers the basics, but I found her coverage of graphics
very incomplete. I had to buy the Graphics Companion. I'm thinking of buying
the LaTeX Companion too. All in total, the books get quite expensive, which is
part of the poster's argument.
>Typesetting of mathematics is poor. No BibTeX-like support of
>bibliographies. Line breaking is poor.
I personally have made use of FrameMaker+SGML, and I find it extremely
rigid. While it's a fine tool, and it at least conforms to open standards in
file formats (as opposed to M$ Word), I find it very heavy-handed for doing
simple things. Just FrameMaker isn't nearly as bad, but it's not capable of as
much as LaTeX. I have found that using the advanced features of Frame, such as
defining your own tags, takes as much education as using LaTeX, which is why I
still support LaTeX.
Mike
--
Michael P. Soulier, 1Z22, SKY Tel: 613-765-4699 (ESN: 39-54699)
Optical Networks, Nortel Networks, SDE Pegasus
"...the word HACK is used as a verb to indicate a massive amount
of nerd-like effort." -Harley Hahn, A Student's Guide to UNIX
Nortel Linux User's Group Ottawa: (internal) http://nlug.ca.nortel.com:8080
Rolf Marvin Bře Lindgren
| I have found that using the advanced features of Frame, such as
| defining your own tags, takes as much education as using LaTeX,
and they haven't even been able to do it right, as Microsoft has,
e.g. styles can't be based on other styles.
Michael P. Soulier
>Many. On the other hand, Frememaker has many capablities missing
>in TeX, but of little interest in technical writings (they are
>more useful in magazines, papers, and the like), where LaTeX
>is usurpassed.
I'd love to see LaTeX and TeX plugs these gaps actually. Is anyone working
on this? I use it for technical documents, but I'd love to see it used in more
general applications as well.
Chris Lott
I'm producing a poetry chapbook (and next a volume of short fiction)
that I had planned to use TeX or LaTeX for. I've been investigating
XML and TeX, etc., but it seems a bit too much to get into. I want, of
course, the holy grail: portable document, exquisite typesetting, and
an easy route to PDF and HTML down the road.
TeX/LaTeX seems ideal for this, though the existing styles don't much
deal with what I am doing. Has anyone else used either of these for
this kind of publication?
c
--
Chris Lott <ch...@itdev.elmer.uaf.edu>
John Culleton
You can get to pdf or even html from LaTeX, but the results in
html at least may not be optimal.
A novel is a pretty simple thing to do in TeX. You have to come
up with macros for the headlines and the chapter page. After that
its just a question of keying in text. In LaTeX using book class
and fancyheaders it should be even simpler, but you need to be a
bit clever if you need to customize your chapter headings.
I crib from the file gentle.tex (in its unconverted form) for
ideas for the above macros.
Poetry is not difficult if you use some of the verbatim
styles/macros that are available. The package eplain has a
verbatim verb. The \obeylines command in plain TeX may also be
used.
John Culleton
-----------------------------------------------------------
Got questions? Get answers over the phone at Keen.com.
Up to 100 minutes free!
http://www.keen.com
Chris Lott
>>>>> "John Culleton" == John Culleton writes:
John Culleton> Portable to what? You can get to pdf or even html
John Culleton> from LaTeX, but the results in html at least may
John Culleton> not be optimal.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that LaTeX files are not
locked into a proprietary format like Word or PageMaker and much
easier to edit with a bunch of people in different enironments...
John Culleton> A novel is a pretty simple thing to do in TeX. You
John Culleton> have to come up with macros for the headlines and
John Culleton> the chapter page. After that its just a question of
John Culleton> keying in text. In LaTeX using book class and
John Culleton> fancyheaders it should be even simpler, but you
John Culleton> need to be a bit clever if you need to customize
John Culleton> your chapter headings.
I do want chapter headings to be customized (at least in the
"Traditional" manner, since they should reflect the story currently
being read). I assumed it would be fairly simple, but having never
done anything outside of the standard document classes, I am always
looking for more help.
I'm figuring that LaTeX will be easier with fancyheadings packages and such?
John Culleton> I crib from the file gentle.tex (in its unconverted
John Culleton> form) for ideas for the above macros.
I'm reading through that now.
John Culleton> Poetry is not difficult if you use some of the
John Culleton> verbatim styles/macros that are available. The
John Culleton> package eplain has a verbatim verb. The \obeylines
John Culleton> command in plain TeX may also be used.
I'll look into this more. I was under the impression that verbatim
always looked like computer code. I need a ragged right, with
verse-style formatting for wrapped lines...
I'm even considering moving a print journal I work with from PageMaker
to LaTeX or similar... glutton for punishment, I guess. But I just
like the quality of the output and have been quite happy with PDF and
TeX4HT output in my limited playing with them...
Fred Bartlett
So long as you don't want a magazine-style layout (text wrapping around
figures, a different font on every line, etc.), you can do anything you
want in TeX (probably even LaTeX). However, as your layout requirements
increase, TeX becomes a poorer and poorer choice. It's still _possible_,
of course -- but terribly inefficient.
Fred
Lee Rudolph
...
>Poetry is not difficult if you use some of the verbatim
>styles/macros that are available. The package eplain has a
>verbatim verb. The \obeylines command in plain TeX may also be
>used.
Well, 25+ years ago when I was actively involved in publishing
and printing poetry, we took professional (book-designing) advice,
which by the look of what I read today is still felt to hold:
some poems have lots of short lines, and some don't, and in
*most* cases you want to have different margins for the poems
that have lots of short lines and the poems that don't. I
haven't looked into (La)TeX styles/macros for poetry, so I
can't say whether or how well they address that issue (or
any of several others), though certainly (La)TeX could do a
very good job if anyone's taken the trouble to make it do so.
Lee Rudolph
Axel Reichert
[see Subject]
Have a look at http://www.axel-reichert.de/richter.html. I did
something like "optical centering" for these poems.
slu...@nevada.edu
> I'm producing a poetry chapbook (and next a volume of short fiction)
> that I had planned to use TeX or LaTeX for. I've been investigating
> XML and TeX, etc., but it seems a bit too much to get into. I want, of
> course, the holy grail: portable document, exquisite typesetting, and
> an easy route to PDF and HTML down the road.
>
> TeX/LaTeX seems ideal for this, though the existing styles don't much
> deal with what I am doing. Has anyone else used either of these for
> this kind of publication?
>
> c
> --
> Chris Lott <ch...@itdev.elmer.uaf.edu>
My wife has been using LaTeX for poetry for several years, and in fact
just recently released a chapbook (sort of, it has multiple chapters)
with 3 other local poets <http://www.geocities.com/lasvegaspoet/>. I
feel that LaTeX is extremely well suited to this kind of work, and
would be interested in being involved in any project to explore it
more although I'm probably just barely out of larval stage as a LaTeX
hacker.
One drawback with LaTeX is that there are few decorative TeX fonts,
even though there are, for example, two independant Klingon fonts ;-)
We used Pandora, and like it quite a lot, but it's not appropriate for
everything. An alternative is to use Postscript fonts instead, but I
haven't yet investigated exactly what's involved in getting a
purchased Postscript font from disk to TeX to xdvi to printer.
I'm including the preamble from my wife's chapbook at the end. We
used mostly just stock LaTeX, only three packages one of which just
changes the font. I think the twoup package is indispensable for
making a chapbook assuming you want to use the usual saddle stitch. I
was originally planning to just use psnup, but that shrinks the font
too much. The twoup package changes the geometry of the page so you
can use certain switches (which twoup gives you) to psnup and keep the
font at the correct size.
It's easy to make a PDF with PDFLaTeX, and I'm planning to do just
that so they can put actual page samples on their web page. On the
other hand, I'm skeptical about being able to get any acceptable
output from a LaTeX to HTML converter for verse, but they all seem to
work fine for prose.
Steve
\documentclass[letterpaper,10pt,titlepage]{book}
\usepackage[nobottomtitles*,clearempty]{titlesec}
\usepackage{pandora}
\usepackage{twoup}
\setcounter{secnumdepth}{0}
\titleformat{\chapter}[block]
{\normalfont\Large\filcenter\bfseries\sffamily}{}{0pt}{}{}
\titlespacing{\chapter}{0pt}{0pt}{*3}
\titleformat{\section}{\normalfont\filcenter\bfseries\sffamily}{}{0pt}{}
\newcommand{\tab}{\hspace*{2em}}
\newcommand{\theauthor}{}
\newcommand{\newauthor}[1]{\renewcommand{\theauthor}{#1}}
\newpagestyle{main}{
\sethead [\thepage]
[]
[\small\textsf{\chaptertitle}]
{\small\textsf{\theauthor}}
{}
{\thepage}
\headrule}
\begin{document}
[. . .]
qt...@my-deja.com
LaTeX. I think I could do no better than refer you to a book by Knuth
himself:
Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science, by Graham,
Patashnik, & Knuth
Each page of that book is an assault on the eyes. I noticed that even a
reviewer at Amazon commented on it. For the worst example of LaTeX
layout that comes to my mind, see:
Speech and Language Processing, by Jurafsky & Martin
On the other hand, one should give credit where due. Here is an example
of a beautiful book set with LaTeX:
The Haskell School of Expression, by Hudak
I would guess that I've read a couple dozen books that were set by the
authors in LaTeX and only about a third of them were done reasonably
well. The most common problems seem to be with the choice of fonts and
the layout of tables.
Computer science folks dismiss Framemaker too easily. Here are two
examples of books from CS Ph.D's using Framemaker:
A Theory of Objects, by Abadi & Cardelli
Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk, by Welch
Both books are complex typographically and it would be worth looking at
them and contemplating why the authors chose FM.
My impression is that this is largely a matter of personality. LaTeX
users enjoy wrestling with the source code of a document; favoring emacs
over a more polished front end. I noticed that none of the posters here
answered my question about commercial implementations of LeTeX. That is
just not something that appeals to the average TeX user. But for me, I
view my choice of authoring software as a case in optimization. I want
to minimize time and effort needed for an acceptable product.
By the way, BibTeX *can* be used with Framemaker:
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~citemaker/
Bob Tennent
>One poster asked me to give examples of poor typography coming from
>LaTeX. I think I could do no better than refer you to a book by Knuth
>himself:
>
>Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science, by Graham,
>Patashnik, & Knuth
>
>Each page of that book is an assault on the eyes. I noticed that even a
>reviewer at Amazon commented on it. For the worst example of LaTeX
>layout that comes to my mind, see:
>
>Speech and Language Processing, by Jurafsky & Martin
>
be criticising the respective authors' bad use of LaTeX's flexibility,
not "poor typography coming from LaTeX".
Bob T.
Robert McDonald
Scientific Word, which has TrueTeX as a LaTeX engine. I found it a great
(albeit expensive) way to get started with LaTeX, but after a few months I
was half using SW, and half using Emacs. and I find I now gravitate more
toward emacs. The reason is that SW has certain inflexibilities and does a
bad job with basic editing tasks, for example undoing a deletion (this is
apparently improved in version 3.5, which I don't have). Now I find I am
using Emacs more and more. I tell everyone considering SW to expect to have
to learn LaTeX eventually.
I totally agree with you about the need to minimize time and effort. However
I have not regretted for a minute my investment in LaTeX. As I implied in my
earlier post, it meets my needs very well, and WYSIWYG control over the
appearance of the document is not one of those needs.
Like Framemaker, it's a tool. It can be used well or badly.
qt...@my-deja.com wrote:
<snip>
> I noticed that none of the posters here
> answered my question about commercial implementations of LeTeX. That is
> just not something that appeals to the average TeX user. But for me, I
> view my choice of authoring software as a case in optimization. I want
> to minimize time and effort needed for an acceptable product.
>
<snip>
> Cheers,
> Tom
>
> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> Before you buy.
--
Bob
r-mcd...@nwu.edu
Christian Stapfer
...
> Computer science folks dismiss Framemaker too easily. Here are two
> examples of books from CS Ph.D's using Framemaker:
>
> A Theory of Objects, by Abadi & Cardelli
> Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk, by Welch
> Both books are complex typographically and it would be worth
> looking at them and contemplating why the authors chose FM.
Now, Welch's book is an absolutely laughable example: he had *no*
difficult typesetting problems to solve at all: *no* mathematics
of any importance, i.e. way beyond 1 + 1 = 2. He *does* have a lot
of relatively *simple* tables, and some *pictures*, that is all.
(I know what I am writing about: I have Welch's book handy, and
have just been scanning its pages to assess its wonderfully
"complex typography".)
I do not mean to denigrate Welch's book, I just mean to say
that it is certainly *not* the kind of book that would convince
anyone who has got some, at least moderately complex mathematics
to typeset, that Framemaker is the way to go.
I don't know about Abadi and Cardelli's book, but I will have
a look at it next time I happen to visit the university library.
Christian Stapfer
P.S: You are not, perhaps, doing marketing for Framemaker,
are you?
Anselm Lingnau
> One poster asked me to give examples of poor typography coming from
> LaTeX. I think I could do no better than refer you to a book by Knuth
> himself:
>
> Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science, by Graham,
> Patashnik, & Knuth
>
> Each page of that book is an assault on the eyes.
This may be arguable (de gustibus etc.) but what cannot be argued
about is the well-documented fact that the book was not produced using
LaTeX. TeX, of course, but *not* LaTeX. Read the colophon.
Anselm
--
Anselm Lingnau ......................... lin...@tm.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de
A politician who portrays himself as `caring' and `sensitive' because he wants
to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's
willing to try to do good with other people's money. -- P. J. O'Rourke
qt...@my-deja.com
"Christian Stapfer" <chst...@nospam.bluewin.ch> wrote:
> Now, Welch's book is an absolutely laughable example: he had *no*
> difficult typesetting problems to solve at all: *no* mathematics
> of any importance,
Yes, but even so, there is a lot of variety of stuff on those pages and
I think it would have been considerably easier to do it in FM than
LaTeX. Inputting math isn't the only thing that can take a lot of time.
>
> P.S: You are not, perhaps, doing marketing for Framemaker,
> are you?
LOL. Not at all. I am just pressing the point because I'm irritated at
how I think LaTeX ease of use is really oversold. I would much rather
use a free and open standard.
Some posters have made the point that if a product doesn't look good,
you should blame the user, not the software. But the main benefit that
people claim for using LaTeX is that you aren't supposed to have to
worry about the formatting. Actually, you have to spend quite a lot of
time on it.
I know TeX/LaTeX is something that a lot of people really love and I'm
not trying to start a flame war. But from time to time, I run across a
book where the author was allowed to do his own setup and the result is
so harsh on the eyes that I'd rather not read the book. I would just
like to see more active concern paid to good style, not just raw
features.
Two good books that discuss the issues I'm thinking of are:
Elements of Typographic Style, and
Looking Good in Print
The first book is more theoretical than the second.
Regards,
Bill Harris
must, you've found what I've been looking for over the last few weeks.
Bill
--
Bill Harris 3217 102nd Place SE
Facilitated Systems Everett, WA 98208 USA
http://facilitatedsystems.com/ phone: +1 425 337-5541
Bob Tennent
>
>Some posters have made the point that if a product doesn't look good,
>you should blame the user, not the software. But the main benefit that
>people claim for using LaTeX is that you aren't supposed to have to
>worry about the formatting. Actually, you have to spend quite a lot of
>time on it.
You don't "have to"; but some people do, and sometimes they don't
do a great job.
Fred Bartlett
<<snip>>
> I'm irritated at
> how I think LaTeX ease of use is really oversold. I would much rather
> use a free and open standard.
But LaTeX _is_ a "free and open standard": you can produce any package
you want -- and you're guaranteed that it will work on every TeX
implementation.
> Some posters have made the point that if a product doesn't look good,
> you should blame the user, not the software. But the main benefit that
> people claim for using LaTeX is that you aren't supposed to have to
> worry about the formatting. Actually, you have to spend quite a lot of
> time on it.
Well, _someone_ has to spend a lot of time on it -- it doesn't have to
be you (if you're the author). Computers don't do aesthetics well, so a
human has to be involved. However, STM publishers are no longer willing
to pay for the time it takes to produce a first-class job for monographs
whose total sales will barely rise into the thousands.
My ideal -- especially in my capacity as a TeXnician at Springer-Verlag
-- is that authors use LaTeX as if it were SGML. Our style file solves
most monograph-type problems well enough for authors to produce a usable
draft (and, often enough, well enough to produce acceptable camera
copy); any advanced formatting techniques should be applied to the files
after the author is finished writing the content.
It is not clear to me that Frame et al. support as clean a separation of
content and format. (Not that LaTeX is as clean as I would like ...)
I should say, though, that you are quite right to criticize the standard
LaTeX styles. When I was a freelance TeX consultant, they constituted
the single largest obstacle to getting work: publishers see that crappy
output and assume that that's all that TeX/LaTeX is capable of. (Books
produced in plain TeX were usually even worse, though ...)
I like to think that the books I have written styles for are not
recognizably TeX books; they are merely good books.
> I know TeX/LaTeX is something that a lot of people really love and I'm
> not trying to start a flame war. But from time to time, I run across a
> book where the author was allowed to do his own setup and the result is
> so harsh on the eyes that I'd rather not read the book. I would just
> like to see more active concern paid to good style, not just raw
> features.
Your argument may well be more with the corporate beancounters than
either the author or the publisher's production department. Remember,
not too long ago, books with very limited audiences were printed from
IBM Selectric typescripts.
Fred
<<final snippage>>
Victor Eijkhout
> I am just pressing the point because I'm irritated at
> how I think LaTeX ease of use is really oversold. I would much rather
> use a free and open standard.
What's not free or open about TeX/LaTeX?
--
Victor Eijkhout
"When I was coming up, [..] we knew exactly who the they were. It was us
versus them, and it was clear who the them was were. Today, we are not
so sure who the they are, but we know they're there." [G.W. Bush]
Alun Moon
>
> Thanks for the pointer to dratex! If that does what it sounds like it
> must, you've found what I've been looking for over the last few weeks.
Glad to help,
My graphics needs go a little further that dratex, but I do need the project
plans.
Dr Alun Moon
Research Engineer University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Javier Bezos
>Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science, by Graham,
>Patashnik, & Knuth
>Each page of that book is an assault on the eyes.
True.
>I would guess that I've read a couple dozen books that were set by the
>authors in LaTeX and only about a third of them were done reasonably
well.
That's neither the LaTeX nor the authors faults but publisher's, which
did not provide the necessary support.
Bad books may be produced with any program--yes, even with TeX/LaTeX--,
good books with a few programs: mainly QuarkXPress for Mac for
magazine-like ones, and TeX/LaTeX for technical works.
>Computer science folks dismiss Framemaker too easily. Here are two
examples
>of books from CS Ph.D's using Framemaker:
>
>[...]
>Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk, by Welch
As I noticed inmediatly because of irregular letter and word spacing
(eg. on p. 58, that's one of the strengths of LaTeX), lacking of
ligatures, etc. There are very, very fine books typeset with LaTeX from
Prentice-Hall. One of the reasons they use LaTeX is because it's a very
easy to tranlate them to other languages due to the markup oriented
philosophy of LaTeX--preserving a fine and consistent layout in many
languages and in several editions is a trivial task (and even inside
the book itself).
>My impression is that this is largely a matter of personality.
Definitely true.
>LaTeX users enjoy wrestling with the source code of a document;
>favoring
>emacs over a more polished front end.
Not so true. Many LaTeX users prefer WYSIWYG front-ends like Lyx or
Scientific Word. But an aged person I know has began to use computers,
and he's found WYSIWYG system difficult to use because he is unable
to see if a comma in an italic text is properly placed after the
preceding word (except if the magnification is changed continuosly);
he also complains on the differences in size of Times and Helvetica.
I've introduced him to TeX with a StarTeX-like format which handles
only the basics, and he is impressed of how easy and clear is writing
a properly formatted text now!
>I noticed that none of the posters here answered my question about
>commercialimplementations of LeTeX.
Oops! None? I pointed to a FAQ where this question is answered. Have
you ever read it?
>That is just not something that appeals to the average TeX user. But
>for me,
>I view my choice of authoring software as a case in optimization. I
>want to minimize time and effort needed for an acceptable product.
For me, just acceptable is not enough, but if it's for you, go ahead
with Framemaker, even if IMO it does not minimize neither time nor
effort. I'm pretty sure that you took this decision even before sending
the first message.
\bye
________________________
Javier Bezos
jbezos at wanadoo dot es
Javier Bezos
> qt...@my-deja.com writes:
>
> > I am just pressing the point because I'm irritated at
> > how I think LaTeX ease of use is really oversold. I would much rather
> > use a free and open standard.
>
> What's not free or open about TeX/LaTeX?
And what's free or open about Frame??!!
Jay Belanger
> qt...@my-deja.com writes:
>
> > I am just pressing the point because I'm irritated at
> > how I think LaTeX ease of use is really oversold. I would much rather
> > use a free and open standard.
>
> What's not free or open about TeX/LaTeX?
Maybe he means that for him, the big selling point of TeX/LaTeX is the
free and open standard rather than the ease of use.
Jay
David Steuber
' Your argument may well be more with the corporate beancounters than
' either the author or the publisher's production department. Remember,
' not too long ago, books with very limited audiences were printed from
' IBM Selectric typescripts.
Suddenly, I flash back to my first reading of K&R's ``The C
Programming Language''. This was before a second edition was even
anticipated, so it wasn't called The First Edition like some Pokemon
movie.
Paul Graham's ``ANSI Common Lisp'' was typeset with LaTeX and a custom
macro package. I think the book looks quite nice, and it is not what
I would consider to be in your face TeX. It is the best typesetting
of all. You read the book and don't even think about the formatting.
--
David Steuber | Hi! My name is David Steuber, and I am
NRA Member | a hoploholic.
All bits are significant. Some bits are more significant than others.
-- Charles Babbage Orwell
The ``From'' address is a valid e-mail address.
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=hoplite&submit=Look+it+up
John Culleton
The syles of presentation for poetry on the printed page are so various
that I doubt if a "style" in the Latex sense of the word could be
devised. The key point is that prose is oriented toward the paragraph
and in TeX/LaTeX the presumption is that the text is even margin
justified prose in paragraphs.
Poetry is quite different. The unit is the poetic line and two lines of
poetry are never mixed together in a line of type. Ideally each line of
poetry occupies just one line of print. If a few words overflow one
convention is to print them on the next line right justified.
Some poets like e. e. cummings and Lawrence Ferlingetti (sp?) actually
paint a picture in type with all kinds of wierd placements of the
characters on the page. So we are not talking any kind of predetermined
LaTeX style or TeX macro. Commands like \hglue can be used to put the
type exactly where the poet specified.
It would be a fun project but a lot of hand crafting would be required.
John Culleton