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List:       lyx-users
Subject:    Re: Help for paper about LaTeX/LyX and the meaning of life
From:       Typhoon <typhoon () aanet ! com ! au>
Date:       2009-03-24 21:52:55
Message-ID: 20090325085255.559b0680.typhoon () aanet ! com ! au
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<SNIP>

This has been an interesting discussion. I agree with Stefano that it
seems to have divided the "publishers" from the "authors" - and I am
aware that this is not an entirely fair description of the two
approaches.

I was Professor of Law at the University of Sydney before my
retirement. Not exactly the Humanities :-). But maybe the academic
problems are similar.

What the academic needs most is what I call "author support". Clean
planning tools like outlines, good bibliographic citing support, good
cross-referencing support and good indexing support, all wrapped up in a
package that stays well in the background. LyX is good at this,
although I personally think that the tools provided by Emacs + Auctex +
Reftex are slightly better.

Academics have not traditionally been concerned with the mechanics of
publishing, but I think that is changing and will continue to do so.
The statement that a LyX/LaTeX produced book is still substantially
inferior to a "professionally" produced book is now true only if you
are lucky enough to have one of the top-ranked publishers. Even the
top-ranked ones in my own area produce books that are inferior to
my LaTeX produced product (which they never see since they insist on
Word documents).

Self-published books have always been scorned by the academic world.
This has been circumvented in the past by academics who set up their
own publishing company. Not many, but I know of some outstanding and
famous examples. That was not an easy thing to do in the past, but it
is now, and I expect to see more academics doing that.

"Publishing" also takes on a wider meaning. Most academics would profit
from "publishing" material on a web site. Easy conversion to (X)HTML
should be added to the requirements of author support for academics.

All of this means that the "publisher" vs "author" views are likely to
converge, or at least each individual will find that his or her needs
will draw from both camps.

LyX is very good as a tool for such a person. We have already had
discussions about the conversion problem. It's not easy, I know, but we
do need better tools for producing *and controlling the appearance
of* .doc and .html files.

Regards,
Alan
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