Writing a book w/F16?

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Sat, 2011-12-10 at 21:15 +0100, NOSpaze wrote:
> WYSIWYG "is an obstacle to writing"? Damn! I knew it! Tell it to the
> LibreOffice team. They need to know it.

There's writing and there's writing. LO competes with MS Office, which
in turn is aimed primarily at office use (duh). As you go from 1-page
letters to 350-page PhD theses or 700-page textbooks with footnotes, end
notes, bibliographies, figures, tables, contents and indices, all
WYSIWYG systems start to flag, it's just that most people aren't aware
of it because they don't know anything better. In a nutshell: there is a
difference between writing and publishing. WYSIWYG forces you to make
decisions at every turn about what the final result looks like. Markup
systems such as LaTeX or the SGML variants, espcially with good editor
support, let you describe what you're writing (this is a Chapter title,
this is a Figure legend, this is a 3-column table where one of the
entries is a 5-column subtable, ...) and they take care of the rest.
Sure, you can use style sheets with a WYSIWYG system, but it requires
iron self-discipline not to be constantly fiddling with spacing or
margins when you should be concentrating on content. As Brian Kernighan
once said, WYSIWYG means What You See Is *All* You get.

Besides which, most WYSIWYG systems run a poor second to TeX/LaTeX when
it comes to the excellence of the final result, and if there's any
mathematical content there's no contest. There's a reason most
mathematicians and physicists use LaTeX. The irony is that once you
learn a few basics, LaTeX is also easier and quicker for writing those
1-page memos!

poc