Why do HTML/CSS/JS coders use WYSIWYG document tools?

[clay]

Why do so many web programmers scoff at WYSIWYG HTML tools for their clumsiness and praise the precision and power of direct markup editing with their favorite editor or IDE, but then turn around and use the same type of clumsy WYSIWYG tools for creating documents and slide show presentations such as OpenOffice, Word, PowerPoint, or Apple Pages/Keynote rather than the powerful and precise markup tools like LaTeX, Sphinx, etc?

[Mark Fortner]

Basic economics.  Everyone and their grandmother knows HTML, and can get paid for knowing it.  No one can get paid for knowing LaTeX.  That and the fact that if your Word document has a bunch of extra tags in it and takes an extra second to open, no one cares.  The same can't be said of a slow loading web page.

Regards,

Mark

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 9:23 AM, clay <clayt...@gmail.com> wrote:

Why do so many web programmers scoff at WYSIWYG HTML tools for their clumsiness and praise the precision and power of direct markup editing with their favorite editor or IDE, but then turn around and use the same type of clumsy WYSIWYG tools for creating documents and slide show presentations such as OpenOffice, Word, PowerPoint, or Apple Pages/Keynote rather than the powerful and precise markup tools like LaTeX, Sphinx, etc?

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[Ricky Clarkson]

We just don't care about Word.  We use it because somebody demands Word documents, whereas we care about the programs we produce and their maintainability.

On May 22, 2012 1:23 PM, "clay" <clayt...@gmail.com> wrote:

Why do so many web programmers scoff at WYSIWYG HTML tools for their clumsiness and praise the precision and power of direct markup editing with their favorite editor or IDE, but then turn around and use the same type of clumsy WYSIWYG tools for creating documents and slide show presentations such as OpenOffice, Word, PowerPoint, or Apple Pages/Keynote rather than the powerful and precise markup tools like LaTeX, Sphinx, etc?

[phil swenson]

It's their job/core skill set to know HTML inside and out. Who wants
to become an expert in Latex?
And Powerpoint/Keynote make it easy to make an attractive presentation quickly.

[Fabrizio Giudici]

On Tue, 22 May 2012 18:50:25 +0200, Ricky Clarkson
<ricky.c...@gmail.com> wrote:

> We just don't care about Word. We use it because somebody demands Word
> documents, whereas we care about the programs we produce and their
> maintainability.
> On May 22, 2012 1:23 PM, "clay" <clayt...@gmail.com> wrote:

Well, I've just received the pre-prints of my first photo book; while
photos have been postprocessed with Adobe Lightroom, typesetting and page
layout has been done with Apache FOP and Maven :-) It's a photo book and
text sections are very small, in any case they are formatted in a very
simple HTML. This project is an incremental one (I mean, I've been working
on it for some time, and I'd still work in future for improvements) and I
prefer to have command line and reproducibility at the cost of giving up
WYSIWYG (furthermore, fixed layouts such as "description on even page,
full size photo on odd page" are much simpler to do with batch than any
WYSYWIG that would often screw up things). And I want to commit changes in
Mercurial, so I really need ASCII based "source" files.

On the other hand, a presentation is done quickly and (at least for me) is
never edited back once it has been used for a presentation. It's something
that I don't want to spent a lot of time on, and animations are very
important (if well done). Thus I'd never do that in LaTeX, or HTML 5 or JS
(*) or FOP, even in the case I was extremely proficient with those
technologies. KeyNote just delivers in a quicker way - consider that I
think twice before using a product that is not open source.


(*) For the record, at JUG Lugano I've just seen the first presentation
made with Google Dart (figure out, it was about Dart).

--
Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect, Project Manager
Tidalwave s.a.s. - "We make Java work. Everywhere."
fabrizio...@tidalwave.it
http://tidalwave.it - http://fabriziogiudici.it

[clay]

Who wants to be expert in LaTeX or Sphinx? If you've seen the gorgeous output from those tools, and you enjoy producing a resume, paper, or presentation slides that look a cut above the norm and you appreciate how much more logical the entire editing/creation process is, and how much easier it is to maintain, reformat, or integrate with version control, then you want to be an expert user of LaTeX/Sphinx/etc.

Basically, web programmers are passionate about building web sites and have their career centered around that, while documents and slides are peripheral tasks that they don't put a lot of thought or effort into.

[Cédric Beust ♔]

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 11:43 AM, clay <clayt...@gmail.com> wrote:

Who wants to be expert in LaTeX or Sphinx? If you've seen the gorgeous output from those tools, and you enjoy producing a resume, paper, or presentation slides that look a cut above the norm and you appreciate how much more logical the entire editing/creation process is, and how much easier it is to maintain, reformat, or integrate with version control, then you want to be an expert user of LaTeX/Sphinx/etc.

These claims used to be true maybe ten years ago but Word has come a long way since then and the outputs of the two tools at this point are probably close enough that only die hard typesetting enthusiasts would notice.

Myself, I can spot a LaTeX document immediately because all the figures are at the top of the page :-)

Joking aside, here is a counterpoint that defends Word over LaTeX:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/874576/is-latex-worth-learning-today

Also, Word has some outstanding collaborative support, which is critical when you are writing a book (invaluable for co authors and during the reviewing phase).

-- 

Cédric

[Fabrizio Giudici]

On Tue, 22 May 2012 21:00:44 +0200, Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com>
wrote:

> Myself, I can spot a LaTeX document immediately because all the figures
> are
> at the top of the page :-)

In contrast, Word seems to be putting images wherever it wants...

[clay]

"These claims used to be true maybe ten years ago but Word has come a long way since then and the outputs of the two tools at this point are probably close enough that only die hard typesetting enthusiasts would notice. "

No... even in 2012, I've gotten many compliments from strangers on the formatting of my LaTeX documents. And these are engineering types who normally keep to themselves and wouldn't verbally comment on formatting. Math equations, in particular, look far better in LaTeX than they do in Word.

Collaboration? LaTeX source is text which integrates with source control systems. Also, there are sites like sharelatex.com that facilitate real time collaboration and a Google Docs style workflow.

[Cédric Beust ♔]

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 2:39 PM, clay <clayt...@gmail.com> wrote:

Collaboration? LaTeX source is text which integrates with source control systems.

Good luck with that with book reviewers working for traditional book companies such as APress or Addison Wesley.

Even so, the review GUI and flow is far, far more advanced and easier to use in Word than in any source control tool you can find.

-- 

Cédric

[Fabrizio Giudici]

On Tue, 22 May 2012 23:50:46 +0200, Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com>
wrote:

I disagree. Or, better: if you're referring to using a GUI, Word does it
better than any markup-based approach. But I don't feel I'm in control.
With markup I can apply all the usual procedures I know, for instance
computing a 'diff'. Not mentioning the fact that I can easily see the
differences among committed versions in the past, which I think it's
almost impossible with Word.

Sure, with a markup based text in order to have a manageable diff you have
to keep the markup itself formatted in a canonical way. It's not always
easy to do.