From: davis@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu ("John E. Davis")
Subject: Re: A Better WordProcessor Idea
Date: Mon, 24 May 1993 04:27:15 GMT
In article <C7IFDD.509@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz> physadm@phys.canterbury.ac.nz
(Andrew McGregor, rm ,ext ) writes:
Moral: the learning curve for LaTeX, emacs and unix in general can be
drastically shortened. But, you HAVE to have X to do this.
You are probably right but you have to be careful. I do all my
``wordprocessing'' using LaTeX and nothing else. It usually lokks like this:
\documentstyle[12pt]{article}
\begin{document}
Lots of text here with {\em some} font changes
and maybe
\section{A section}
or
\section{Two}
This type of document is trivial and the learning curve is
almost nil.
\end{document}
At the same time, I use LaTeX for complex, often multi-line mathematical
equations. I suspect your physics students fall in this category. Again, TeX
and LaTeX are unbeatable in this domain.
However, often I want to format complex tables or simply modify my resume.
This is such a pain to do in *TeX. My resume is full of parboxes, hfills,
vspaces, etc... It looks very ugly. I have used the newcommand function but
it still looks ugly. It gets very old fast running tex on the document
followed by viewing the dvifile. In my opinion, WYSIWYG really shines here.
My point is that I think you would come to a different conclusion if you gave
your students a series of tables to format--- especially if the tables were
such that they had to use boxes, etc...