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Probably because "The motivation behind this article was to find a better way specifically for liberal arts authors".

I can easitly see a liberal arts author spending the four or five hours it'd take him to learn what he needs to know about Lyx to get the job done.

On the other hand, while I dearly love LaTeX, I'd much rather see an author concentrate on writing content, rather than spending the weeks it'd take to learn what he'd need to know about LaTeX.

On the other hand, while I dearly love LaTeX, I'd much rather see an author concentrate on writing content, rather than spending the weeks it'd take to learn what he'd need to know about LaTeX.

Well, it took me one afternoon to get the first 30 pages of my thesis from OpenOffice to TeX. Main reason to do that was that I was wasting too much time fighting the way OpenOffice dealt with embedded images. TeX produced an excellent layout without me even worrying about layout at all, instead focussing on the content.

LaTeX is not at all prepared for book writers, in fact it is not prepared to be used by any content-creator unless he/she needs to:

a) create a content in an already set framework (eg. using dedicated style for a publisher accepting LaTeX entries)

b) create very complicated maths / music score (I mean he REALLY knows what he is going to achieve).

TeX/Latex is _typesetting_ machine, so it _typesets_ a content, nothing more. It's up to an author to provide the structure of content, and there are no aids/handicaps.

In fact if one uses basic classes, he just gets nice output. But if you want to get REAL BOOK (I mean good typesetting on bookstore level) you must break with creating content and work with low level non-structural typesetting commands/macros. This work is to be done on editor's side --- in fact it is my job, I earn by typesseting books with LaTeX, not creating them , absolutely not on writer's/author's side.

> I'd much
> rather see an author concentrate on writing content,
> rather than spending the weeks it'd take to learn what
> he'd need to know about LaTeX.

I agree it takes much time to learn LaTeX, but it pays off in time. Even short 20 page articles are hard to maintain with wordprocessors like Word if the output must be professional quality (consistent style and references), but with LaTeX it ends up to be fast and easy to change style and have professional quality with both styles.

Whatever the tool, doing layout manually is waste of effort in the long term. Earlier this year we composed a book of 450 pages from 40 different authors. Almost everyone submitted us their work in LaTeX ( http://samos.et.tudelft.nl/samos_v/ ), and it was enjoyable to edit those documents because we could get professional look almost automatically. Some authors submitted their document with wrong style, but with LaTeX it was possible to correct that by editing just a few lines on each document :-)

These days I like Lyx and LaTeX because they save manual layout work. Anyway, I've been thinking to write my documents in Wiki too :-) With a good browser and nice fonts it's almost enjoyable to write articles.

Regards,
Heikki Orsila

"On the other hand, while I dearly love LaTeX, I'd much rather see an author concentrate on writing content, rather than spending the weeks it'd take to learn what he'd need to know about LaTeX."

Weeks? Why would it take weeks? What on earth would they be trying to learn that would take more than ten minutes? It would still be a sadly impractical choice but not for learning curve reasons. Perhaps someone may write a literary extension like the musical musitex.

Actually I'm a liberal arts writer and I use Latex. Admitedly I started with LyX on Linux, but changed to LaTeX, with TexShop as the editor,when I switched to OS X.

The most likely reason the writer did not include LaTeX, is that LaTeX is a mark-up language, not an editor. The usefulness of LaTeX to an author will be affected by the editor they use and it is therefore more appropriate to review available editors.

TexShop is good, but not available on Linux. There is a Qt based editor I tried on OS X, which is also good and I presume available for Linux (can't remember write now). It had good structure layout and included tabs, which is handy for editing multiple chapters at a time (each chapter a different document).

"There is a Qt based editor I tried on OS X, which is also good and I presume available for Linux "

Can you remember what it was? Not texmacs presumably, which supports clone views but not I think tabbed views. The tabbed view aspect sounds very interesting. I have looked but haven't come on any obvious candidates

Yes yes yes. I cannot live without Subversion. I can prepare my materials on 6 different desktops in two different, remote places + ssh on server. Everytime up to date, everytime knowing there are at least 2-3 nearly complete safety copies on different disks in different computers in different buildings.

"There is a program called NewNovelist which helps facilitate outlining and other writing preparation. It's pretty cool, but as I said, I don't really write like that. "

I see lyx not by itself, but fitting into a larger workflow. Imagine NewNovelist at the top of the pyramid, and latex near the bottom. This works even better when you have writers collaborating.

Wow!

That Ulysses application is pretty neat. Didn't take me so long to figure out the interface either. I particularly like the full screen mode. Thanks for the tip!

Yeah, the full-screen mode is awesome -- no interruptions, just simple, sexy yellow text on a black screen.

No problem, by the way.

just simple, sexy yellow text

Do you have the yellow text fetish?

Oh yes.

I also have a whole collection of stuffed Tux penguins ... they touch me at night.

> MS Word is good, but handling several hundred page
> document it just doesn't do well at it.

True, but typically one doesn't write entire books in a single file. They are usually one file per chapter to facilitate easier editing, and allow editors and authors to work at the same time (editors can be editing existing chapters which will then be sent back to the author for revision while the author is cranking out new chapters at the same time).

It's only after the book is entirely written that a single file of it is produced by batch processing all of the chapter files. And that file will usually be a PDF proof. Not a Word document.

Edited 2005-12-20 22:32

I wish that everybody would use styles correctly no matter which program that choose to use... I'm always the evangelist when it comes to that as I can't hardly stand to edit a document produced by anybody who doesn't use them.

That said, MS Word 2003 has a horrible memory leak or other bug where when you're using styles it becomes VERY slow, stops responding, and stops updating (or even updates incorrectly) when using styles in a large document. I have to close the program every 1/2 hour at the least if I'm using styles. Sad. Makes it hard to convert people. I prefer OO.org myself. I believe that OO does a better job of separating style & content than MS Word. I also prefer to have to double click (as in OO) to apply a style (ooops!). I also dislike how Word automatically creates styles form other people's manual changes and then they sometimes won't go away when you apply a style correctly.

Very true. Sometimes Word 2003 even "forgets" the structure in the document, and I have to restart Word to fix it.

"It isn't clear why lyx qualifies but vim+latexsuite or emacs+auctex doesn't."

Technically yes, far more powerful. But can you teach it in a reasonable period to the particular people? And can you feel safe leaving them to use it with phone support?

Don't think so. Its not stupidity. You can be dealing with the world's leading expert on the evolution of the English Common Law in the Middle Ages. Its just minds that work in a different way, and the important thing is, giving them stuff that they can and will use, and be relatively independent of you once they are using it. They will accept Lyx. I don't think there's any chance of teaching them Vim.

Similarly Kile. Really want to keep them away from Latex source.

Scribus: isn't the problem that it is true page layout? Whereas what we want is to separate the logical structuring of the docoment from page layout? I don't know Scribus however, so this may be wrong.

Texmacs, as someone suggested, yes, a real alternative. Maybe not quite as familiar in look and feel as Lyx.

The problem with an Emacs/LaTeX setup is actually mostly getting it set up well, with working LaTeX, AUCTeX, RefTeX. Once it is well-configured, most people get along reasonably with it, even from a non-technical background. Hand them some printed intro into LaTeX. Sure, you'll be surprised at some of the mistakes they'll make, but you'll also be surprised at their ability to dig themselves out of holes again.

I'd much sooner do phone support for such a setup than for any word processor: the good thing about this is that all the information is on-screen. "I did nothing different" is the _standard_ phone support cry, and since you always have the source file on-screen, there is always a way to pinpoint what happened. You can give sensible advice seeing screenshots, you can get sent sensible extracts, and so on.

And you don't need to worry about what buttons to press: when in doubt, you can always just type in LaTeX commands letter by letter. This is faster than trying to navigate by phone through half a dozen menus.

Emacs does not have much of a learning curve before you can use it nowadays. You'll never get to the state where you think you know it inside out, but that does not keep it from being workable.

LaTeX is awesome for research papers. The ability to manage the support materials that go into a paper are astounding.

That probably means that the people who wrote those articles either didn't know LaTeX very well or that they chose to have their figures in the end of the document. Though I think the default LaTeX handling of the figure/table placement could be much better, it's actually very easy to "tweak".

For each figure, you have a placement option which tells LaTeX where it should be placed. For instance "h" means "here", "!h" means "here, pretty please", and "H" means "here, damnit!". You can also set your preference for placing the figures on the top ("t") or bottom ("b") of a page, or indeed on a separate page in the end ("p").

I don't know what typesetting/word processing software you use, but I generally recognize articles written in MS Word by their poor typesetting, especially when it comes to equations. Even with MathType, equations in Word don't look very good, IMO. Also, my personal experiences with long reports in Word haven't exactly been very good; in one instance I ended up with all the figures in the end of the document, after about 30 blank pages.

That probably means that the people who wrote those articles either didn't know LaTeX very well or that they chose to have their figures in the end of the document.

That's a very cool way to say that these people where completely ignorant and stupid. The first thing you learn in working with images in LaTeX is how to place them, as it's included as an option in the command that allow that.

I don't know what typesetting/word processing software you use, but I generally recognize articles written in MS Word by their poor typesetting, especially when it comes to equations.

Don't have to go as far as equations. For any document, just look at text layout. You will see that it looks like crap on every Word document, because, depending on your alignment style, every line has some big spaces or ends of lines are too short or too long.
That's one of the reason LaTeX looks immediately more professionnal, it uses things like hyphenation. A good hint to recognise a LaTeX document is that you will find hyphens, but not in a Word document.

That's a very cool way to say that these people where completely ignorant and stupid.

No, not at all. In fact, I sincerely doubt that any of them are ignorant or stupid. I still can't see any other way to explain the OP's gripe with LaTeX than I did, however.

It might be that they indeed favored having the figures in the back of the document. I personally don't like that, but some probably do. After all, the LaTeX figures do have an option for doing exactly that.

If that wasn't the case, why you you think that lack of proficiency with a software tool equate ignorance or stupidity? Maybe they had a lot of large figures, and weren't aware of the float package? In such a case, the figures will get pushed off to the end. (As I found to my dismay until I discovered the float package.)

Anyway, you shouldn't be so quick to jump to conclusions about the intent of what people write.

Renox wrote:
> either all the images ended up at the end of the section,
> or (in the good case) the images were only put the page after the reference.

I don't know how much LaTeX has improved since then, but using current versions that would mean authors had instructed LaTeX to put figures into wrong places. The best default policy is not to instruct where the pictures are put.

Regards,
Heikki Orsila

"First of all, it is simply false that most publishers prefer Word documents. Many publishers prefer camera-ready copies or PDF files. This gives authors and editors pretty much freedom."

That hasn't been my experience at all. Because typically PDF files are not editable. And I have actuallyy never worked with a publisher who wanted camera ready copies. In fact, most of them specifically say they *do not* want camera ready files. They have their own layouts that are common for their imprint ect, and they have people whos job it is to make sure your manuscript conforms to that layout. So typically they will give you Word templates with tags. The Word documents end up looking nothing at all like the actual product would look.

The publishers I have dealt with have been in the IT field, and the entire process has been completely paperless until publication. All the writing and editing was done in Word. The final proof was a PDF (that was camera ready) where I had to note incorrectly placed figures and all that. But nothing left Word format until the final proof which was PDF.

"In *my* experience WYSIWYG word processors are really bad for formatting books. It is hard to get the layout consistent and tidy. Besides that the WYSIWYG interrupts writing and editing, since it is pretty distractive."

No publisher I have ever worked with wants you to do your own formatting. They have templates with special tags they want you to use for various level headings, figures, etc. The Word document is not at all WYSIWYG and looks nothing at all like what the final product will look like.

Edited 2005-12-21 04:25

That hasn't been my experience at all. Because typically PDF files are not editable. And I have actuallyy never worked with a publisher who wanted camera ready copies. In fact, most of them specifically say they *do not* want camera ready files. They have their own layouts that are common for their imprint ect, and they have people whos job it is to make sure your manuscript conforms to that layout.

Interesting! Maybe this differs per country or field of science. Maybe the books you submitted were part of a series with a uniform layout? At any rate, the change that we have noticed is that publishers have started to offload more and more over time. Editing and making the layout is not done by them anymore, they basically print it, and that's all. For them, it gives a wider margin. And no, these are not cheap publishers, but established and well-known academic publishers.

Then again. Most good UNIX books were typesetted by the authors, and submited as a camera-ready copy.

No publisher I have ever worked with wants you to do your own formatting. They have templates with special tags they want you to use for various level headings, figures, etc. The Word document is not at all WYSIWYG and looks nothing at all like what the final product will look like.

I have no experience with such templates.

"Maybe the books you submitted were part of a series with a uniform layout?"

Well, most common publishers (at least in IT) have specific formats for specific series. O'Reilly for example has a certain way they want headings to look for their animal books, and certain formatting conventions for tips, warnings, code listings, new terms, commands to be typed, etc. They also, of course, have certain icons that they use for tips, warnings, and so on. Their Developers Notebook series, and their Head First series, of course, have other stylistic conventions. If you saw a few inside pages from an O'Reilly book, and you didn;t know what series it was from, chances are you could guess just from the stylistic conventions without even knowing the title.

Part of what makes a Head Start book, a Head Start book, or an animal book an animal book, are those formatting, layout, and style conventions. So they generally don't want authors giving them camera ready art, or WYSIWYG documents.

Some of the layout and formatting would probably be almost impossible for authors to do unless they were desktop publishing experts. For example, people with thought bubbles coming out of their heads are common in the Head Start series. That kind of thing is not easily done in any of the tools mentioned. (And even for authors that do decide to do it on their own, it usually requires a fair amount of experience and skill to make this kind of thing look right, so the publishers will typically have their own design staff redraw them anyway).

Typically, in my expierence, writing IT books has been more like writing HTML the way we used to do it. We just use tags to say what we want, even in Word, without worrying about what it actually looks like. Example, [H1] for a level 1 heading [H2] for level two [Li] for list item, and so on. The Word templates often have macros that the publisher can then run to look for these tags and remove them, while converting the following text to the desired style and such.

Current versions of AUCTeX, the prevalent LaTeX mode for Emacs, can fold footnotes using either a source-based folding approach or by using preview-latex (which typesets the footnote marker as an image and places that in the source text).

In addition, footnote and other macros get auto-wrapped on entry or reformatting in a manner setting them off nicely when reading the source.

People always bitch that WYSIWG is bad because you are formatting as you write, but goddamnit! you can't get a good sense of where your writing's at if you don't have a decent visual feedback.

BS. The "decent visual feedback" is the text, not the formatting

This is no different than working on a typewriter: you did formatting and content at the same time

No you were forced to. If a program can do it for you, and correctly as a matter of fact, it's way better.
Sorry to tell you that you could not easily edit your text on your typewriter.

Using latex is no different: you still put the italics and bold while you type

No you don't, so it's different. You do that when it pleases you, which may be as you type or not.

But instead of seeing bold{blahblah}, I'd rather see it properly formatted onscreen

Use a proper LaTeX editor then. There are some good ones even on Windows.

Footnotes in latex are in the middle of the text, so you need to read

No they're not. You put them that way, because you are stupid.
I put mine like this :
text text text text text text text text footnote{text text text}
text text text

This seems like being rocket science to you ...

Whereas having
text text text text text text (1) text text text text text
(1) text text text text
Is much more practical and easy to apprehend.


I disagree, especially when "text text text" spans so much space that your footnote is now on another page than its mark, so you can't read it right away when editing.
What you talk about is practical when viewing the document, and the fact is that with LaTeX, you can choose where you want to place your footnote, so it's a plus.

I wish for a real model/view writing system, a bit like LyX, where you can see approximate formatting, but keep a strong structure that you can abstract from the view. However, LyX has an ugly UI, and I'm not going to limit myself to MLA latex bib style.

LaTeX with a good editor provides that, and groups like GUTenberg provide big libraries of styles to their members, which may contain what you want. Some of it is also available on the Web.
When you are a member, of course, some of their guru can tell you where to find what you are searching for.

>What would be nice is a LaTeX editor like Kile with a >split window, one showing the raw LaTeX code, the >other showing a WYSWIG version of the same code - >interpreted and updated in real time, or, if that is >too much of a cpu hog, updated every few seconds.

Real Time Updates of LaTeX Documents will hardly ever work. Even on an up-t-odate computer a complete LaTeX run will take 100% CPU and 100% load on hard disk for severel seconds.

What emacs + auctex however do, is to do real time previewing for selected parts.

Matthias

I must second that.... used in on solaris and have found nothing that comes even close

I currently use texmacs to write all my papers

" On linux, Kword is the closest I've come to Frame on linux."

Have you tried Scribus?

Once upon time, was FrameMaker. Its available on Windows and Solaris Sparc. It's hands down the best writing tool I ever used. On linux, Kword is the closest I've come to Frame on linux.

Also it used to be available (and perhaps still is, depending upon whom you ask) for AIX, HP-UX, and other UNIXes.

I believe that there was even a Linux version kicking around at one point.

Of course there was also a Mac version, but Adobe killed that off as part of it's apparent systematic destruction of FrameMaker. Now that it's no longer fully cross-platform across the three main platforms that big publishing houses need, it's not as viable a product anywhere.

I really get the impression that the Adobe folks just don't "get" the idea behind FrameMaker. Anyone wishing to write an open source app to create books would be well advised learning the ins and outs of Frame though to see how to do things properly.