texlive

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Thu, 2013-03-07 at 11:07 -0800, Joe Zeff wrote:
> On 03/07/2013 10:56 AM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > That might work for some projects, but generally speaking people using
> > TeX/LaTeX are concerned about finer control of typesetting, especially
> > when it comes to mathematical material. TeX/LaTeX is the gold standard
> > for this. To paraphrase Brian Kernighan, the trouble with WYSIWYG is
> > that it usually means What You See Is*All*  You Get.
> 
> You may find this interesting, then.  PDF files created by Scribus are 
> considerably larger than those created by Adobe.  This is because Adobe 
> sets the position for a line, then inserts a string of characters for 
> that line.  Scribus sets the position for each character as it goes. 
> That makes very precise positioning of specific elements possible, far 
> more than in Adobe.  Of course, it takes work to learn how to do this (I 
> haven't, as I don't need it.) and to get it right.  However, if you're 
> happy using TeX, and it does what you want the way you want, that's all 
> that's important, isn't it?

Not really sure why you're bringing in Adobe. TeX/LaTeX have nothing to
do with PDF (sure, they can optionally generate PDF output, but that's
not the point).

What I was really getting at is that TeX/LaTeX has a widely accepted
encoding for mathematical material, plus an extremely sophisticated
typesetting algorithm that makes it looks nice. No other tool even comes
close (GUI or not).

poc