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Science Forum Index » Optics Forum » Where have all my sci.optics friends migrated?
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| Phil Hobbs |
 Posted: Fri Apr 18, 2008 9:32 pm |
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John Devereux wrote:
Quote: Phil Hobbs <pcdhSpamMeSenseless@pergamos.net> writes:
Powerpoint was a knockoff of Lotus Freelance. And Project is
horrible--last time I used it it had no keyboard shortcuts, which
makes it dog slow to enter tasks and do updates. It's Timeline 5 for
DOS for my money. Similarly, for writing books and articles, I
recently upgraded from Wordperfect 5.1+ for DOS (circa 1990) to LaTeX
2e, circa 1985. I still miss WP, even with its occasional
peculiarities of placing figures, but none of the publishers take WP
format any more.
Was your book (...making it all work) written with Latex?
The second edition (due to be submitted to Wiley in July) is in LaTeX,
but the first edition was all done in Wordperfect for DOS. I used a
shareware document converter called WP2LaTeX, and cleaned it up by hand.
(I'm still cleaning.)
DOS Wordperfect can take two complete versions (about 300k words), do a
diff, and display redline and strikeout in about 10 seconds, and it
never crashes. Every GUI word processor I ever tried that on, crashed.
I'm told that FrameMaker was better, but I just baled out and switched
to LaTeX, because (a) I'm comfortable with markup languages, (b)
everyone understands LaTeX, and (c) the publisher had a set of macros
that allow me to basically produce the formatted book. The nice thing
about that is that I can get accurate page counts.
Quote: I used to use word for technical manuals, but it would get confused
with documents 100th the complexity of that. Major bugs
(e.g. subdocuments) remained unfixed after more than a decade.
With writing especially, I hate binary formats because you can't debug
them--DOS Wordperfect has 'reveal codes' mode, which allows debugging,
but if Word gets confused, good luck pardner. Hope you had good
backups.
Word has that too. It's still useless for anything but simple
documents AFAIK.
The Word version doesn't let you get down as far into the structure of
the document as the Wordperfect version, or didn't when I looked at it last.
Quote:
I use context now for writing anything - it's a tex macropackage (as
is latex) that I found more flexible to use.
Great--LaTeX does have some peculiarities.
Cheers,
Phil Hobbs |
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| Phil Hobbs |
| Posted: Fri Apr 18, 2008 9:46 pm |
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Helpful person wrote:
Quote: On Apr 18, 11:59 am, John Devereux <jdREM...@THISdevereux.me.uk
I don't know how well you know the features of Word but I have used it
for 10+ years writing 100 page documents with minimal problems. This
includes automatic numbering, table of contents, paragraph references,
chaper numbering, numerous pictures etc. I particularly like the way
it nicely keeps track of all the references when text is moved from
one part of the document to another.
Every word processor in the universe does that, and has done since at
least 1986. (WP 4.1 was where I first noticed it, I think.) I used MS
Word for Macintosh (512K!) back in 1987 for writing my thesis, and it
had all of that as well, unless I misremember very badly.
I'm not saying you shouldn't use Word if you like it, of course. It's
just that word processor 'improvements' have been mainly eye candy and
lard for nearly 20 years, and I for one think the result is more rococo
than functional. It's certainly abysmally slow. (DOS WP on a fast
machine *flies*.)
One thing that MS has worked hard to get right is the integration
between the various bits of Office. If I had to pull a lot of
spreadsheet data into word processor documents, say, and didn't feel
like writing a script, that could be quite useful. I've occasionally
used it that way, but for me it doesn't come up much.
Cheers,
Phil Hobbs |
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| Skywise |
| Posted: Sat Apr 19, 2008 12:47 am |
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