From lyx-users Wed Mar 25 08:32:56 2009 From: Manveru Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2009 08:32:56 +0000 To: lyx-users Subject: Re: Help for paper about LaTeX/LyX and the meaning of life Message-Id: <936b14d20903250132n3ba6554ctf89e36f82ebdf650 () mail ! gmail ! com> X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=lyx-users&m=123797000527203 MIME-Version: 1 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="--0015174c17a8acaa890465ed58e5" --0015174c17a8acaa890465ed58e5 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit I would like to drop a cent to the whole discussion. I am terrified reading about way how some publishers treats publication. Leaving layout to the author is the worst scenario from readers point of view. Author is responsible for content - the knowledge or scenario - and only small group of them may have enough knowledge about publishing standards and the printing culture. Historically the art work connected with printing has been developed through last six hundred years. Honestly saying, we cannot reduce that six hundred years to one or second piece of software. And author concentrated on his/her text cannot design coherent typeset template. With all the respect to authors and programmers. Word is a piece of crap in terms of typesetting, there was even time when moving .doc between computers may influence formatting. In professional typesetting every glyph on the page has is position, size, angle and so on. This cannot be solved in program based on simple flow of text on page. TeX was Knuth's solution to preparation of good quality scientific documents in scientific world when most popular way of publishing articles was exchanging poor photocopies of text entered on typewriter machine. You can still find articles authored by professors like Dijkstra and Wirth scanned and put in the internet databases. Knuth's TeX solved that very well. So well, that many scientists do not know/accept other way of writing their texts than in TeX/LaTeX. Regards, prof. Knuth! Regars, Lamport. But from artistic perspective, from point of view of all that people that study art for couple of years before they start designing professionally, LaTeX products are really far from ideal - it is beacause when you writing software it is mathematically impossible to cover all boundary conditions that may happen during typesetting. All that and previous discussion leads me to the conclusion, that every publisher preparing books for the market (in does not matter wheter it is a book for bookstore or some publication for professors), who does not invest in professional human-driven typesetting do the assassination of the six hunderd years history of typesetting. Please keep than on mind. All above is my private opionin and was not my intention to offence anyone. -- Manveru jabber: manveru@manveru.pl gg: 1624001 http://www.manveru.pl --0015174c17a8acaa890465ed58e5--