Re: general issues

[Valeriy E. Ushakov]

On Mon, Feb 19, 2001 at 12:05:41 -0800, Efraim Yawitz wrote:

> How does Lout (or TeX or groff) compare with such programs as
> QuarkXPress for example?  I'm not really familiar with it, but it
> seems that the GUI programs are very popular, and it is natural to
> wonder whether the non-interactive approach will survive at all.  (I
> was additionally stimulated to think about this by hearing from
> someone yesterday that he might be able to find me a job with a
> newspaper if I knew Quark.)  Do the GUI tools do everything that
> batch programs can do, and vice versa?

Laying out a newspaper is a very different task (AFAIK, QuarkXpress is
considered to be *the* tool for newspapers).  Newspapers have tight
time constraints and the layout is quite volatile.  It's hard to do a
good job for this type of layout algorithmically, significant human
interaction is required and so batch processing is hardly suitable in
this case.

OTOH, books, articles &c lend themselves to batch processing quite
nicely, especially when heavy indexing &c is needed.
 

> I think it's really beautiful to see people producing free software for
> the public, and in particular, this seems to be something that we should
> have hoped that academic computer science would be providing, but is this
> particular branch of free software still alive, or is it just a sort of
> holdback of the academic world?

Most people are perfectly happy with TeX, especially mathematicians.
TeX is really excellent at setting even most weird math.  People don't
hack TeX, The Program, these days.  Well, they do, Omega and pdfTeX
comes to mind - but that the execption that proves the point.  People
take TeX as a framework and concentrate on building packages and
extensions.  Just look at the sheer size of CTAN (of 3413976K more
than the half are extensions, fonts &c as du -k reports on my fresh
CTAN mirror)

*roff is a veteran, but it's a tool you can trust.  Actually groff is
still in development (and one of its maintainers is subscribed to this
list :-).  Unix man pages being a *roff format contributed to its
longevity, but I don't think they are the only factor.  BSD people
actively work on mdoc (extened man format) and mdocNG is about to be
integrated in FreeBSD (as far as I can tell from keping an eye on
cvs-all mailing list); other BSDs are likely to adopt the format as
well.

I have some experience with both *roff and TeX.  In particular in
early/mid 1990's I wrote Russian kits for both of them (I still
vividly remember redefining \dump to undo some of bad things LaTeX did
to Russian letters ;-).


> (As an aside, I think these programs could benefit from a change of
> name, although I guess it's kind of late.  QuarkXPress sounds a lot
> cooler than TeX or Lout, not to mention troff, groff, etc.)

Why bother?  If you ask me, troff is way cooler a name, then
QuarkXPress :-).

SY, Uwe
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