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From: sdlee@cs.hku.hk (Lee Sau Dan ~{@nJX6X~})
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.linux.networking,comp.os.linux.setup,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.bsd.misc,comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy
Subject: Re: Word vs Latex
Date: 07 Mar 1997 19:00:02 +0800
Organization: Computer Science Dept, University of Hong Kong
Lines: 46
Sender: sdlee@phoenix.cs.hku.hk
Message-ID: <7fends9dcd.fsf@phoenix.cs.hku.hk>
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In-reply-to: somsky@dirac.phys.washington.edu's message of 6 Mar 1997 18:39:07
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>>>>> "William" == William R Somsky <somsky@dirac.phys.washington.edu> writes:
William> That's one of the big disadvantages of WYSIWYG setups.
William> People have a tendancy to fool around pushing buttons and
William> pulling menus until they end up with a kludge that looks
William> more or less right, rather than finding the proper way of
William> doing something, like using a style. And since all that
William> you see is what the result will look like, and not what's
William> actually there, it's hard to track down these misusages
William> to clean up something that someone else has done.
Can't agree more! I've the same experience. I told my colleagues to
use style, for formatting consistencies. However, they simply ignore
my request. They set the typeface, font-size, bold/italic/underline,
etc. directly. Finally, I have to spend hours going through what
they've written, turning back the formatting into styles. That's
boring, tedious and time-wasting (in terms of both my colleagues' time
and my time).
I've never had such problems with LaTeX. With LaTeX, I worked will my
colleagues well. All of us are <forced> to markup our text logically,
according to the structure of the entire document. Each of us have a
better view of both the global document as well as the local parts we
are responsible for. The joining of the different parts of the
document has never been smoother. Moreover, we were really able to
concentrate on the contents, and hence the document is much richer in
content and flow.
William> And that's one of the reasons why I prefer a YAFIYGI (you
William> asked for it, you got it) system, where WYSIWYS (what you
William> see is what you _said_) rather than WYSIWYG (what you see
William> it what you _get_).
Agree! Many so-called WYSIWYG systems are, according to my own
opinion and experience, not WYSIWYW (what you see is not what you
want). Without WYSIWYW, what's the point of having WYSIWYG? It is
very frustrating to work with non-WYSIWYW systems.
--
Lee Sau Dan §õ¦u´°(Big5) ~{@nJX6X~}(HZ)
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