General issues

[Raúl Núñez de Arenas Coronado]

    Hello Efraim :)

>and it is natural to wonder whether the
>non-interactive approach will survive at all.

    These days is very common to do everything with a mouse, but this
is not necessarily better. For example, when I need to do autoedition
I prefer Lout or even TeX, because I'm more concerned about the
contents and its logical structure than about its physical layout.

    I can concentrate in writing and when I need to switch styles I
only need to change a couple of lines. I can do that in my old 386 or
in my workstation at work. The advantages are (IMHO): better
placement precision, better handling of structures, lesser resources
needed and, overall, better quality and maintenance.

    With markup languages its very easy to update documents
automatically, or even *generate* automatic documents.

    Obviously people may prefer the visual approach. I don't.

>I'm not trying to start any arguments, I just am uninformed and know of
>nowhere else to ask this.  If anyone, especially the moderator, thinks
>this is irrelevant, I will be happy to be quiet.

    I find this very interesting, since the vast majority of people
seems to be convinced that document preparation can only be done with
visual tools, and this is not true (at least for me...). When I'm
documenting I find easier to use tools like Lout, TeX, HTML
preprocessors, etc... Moreover, I like Lout. A lot O:)))

    Raúl