Linked by Alcibiades on Tue 20th Dec 2005 18:40 UTC
In order to see what is needed in book writing applications, you need
to look carefully at the desk of someone who is actively writing a
book. You will most likely see piles of paper, often cut up and marked
with pencil, and if you examine those of the papers that are in piles,
you will see that the pagination is all over the place because pages
have been reordered. Read on...
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Member since:
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> 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