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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: AW: KWord: Text formatting
From:       Reginald Stadlbauer <reggie () troll ! no>
Date:       1999-12-03 22:48:32
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On Fri, 03 Dec 1999, claus wilke wrote:
>> <snip>
>> Quite a good idea. But..aehm..what is TeX ?
>> Is it the TeX that came with my distribution SuSE 6.3 and that is to be seen in the
>> context of LaTeX / Lyx / KLyx ?
>> Well, iŽll try that out. Give me a short hint.
>
>Yes, you are on the right track :-).  TeX is a typography program, LaTeX is a
>macropackage that makes it easier to write texts with TeX, and Lyx/Klyx are
>graphical front ends to LaTeX (plain TeX/LaTeX just reads in an ASCII file
>with text and typesetting commands and writes out the formated text
>into something that is known as a DVI file).
>
>If you want to see the difference in the layout algorithms, just take some
>text (preferably German, the longer the words the more difficult the
>typesetting), throw it into Lyx (so that you don't have to struggle with any
>TeX-commands) and into KWord, MSWord, Star Office, or whatever, print it, and
>compare the result. In almost all cases, the TeX-generated output will look
>better, because TeX is averaging the white space over 5-6 lines, instead of
>simply breaking the line whenever it is full.
>
>On the long run, it might be worth while to have a similar algorithm in KWord,
>although there is probably more urgent stuff to be done right now. 

Well, for TeX the time it needs to do the formatting is not too critical while
this is the case for a WYSIWYG WP like KWord. So TeX can use a bit slower
algorithms which give a better result than a WYSIWYG WP. That's why TeX has
always a better output than a WYSIWYG WP.

-- 
Reggie

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