Re: Documentation in OpenOffice format

[Sašo Kiselkov]

Quoting Stefan Urbanek <stefan@agentfarms.net>:

> Well, I see no difference in functionality in OO and TeX: in OO you have
> styles for that. It is not about marking heading as '14pt
> Helvetica-Bold' but about marking heading as 'Heading 1' style. I never
> set direct fonts in my documents, I use styles - as I was doing in LaTeX
> few years ago (at uni).

There is a significant difference in functionality: where in OO you say "This is
formatted in Heading 1" in TeX you can say "This is a title", "This is a
section", etc. TeX allows you to better structure and re-structure your text
(for example I put every chapter into a separate file and then create an
"include chain" from a main file - reordering chapters is a matter of moving a
single line).

>
> Moreover, advantage of WYSIWYG is that you do not have that disturbing
> tag-noise while you still have look abstraction layer (styles).
>

Well used TeX markup can be as sparse as a couple of commands on a terminal-full
of text. And sometimes you don't even have to do that - if you were writing a
novel with tons of paragraphs of text, all you have to do is write the text -
no disturbances at all. True, though, is that TeX's HTML output is far from
complete.

What is most important, however, is to realize about TeX is the following: TeX
is for those who care about how their documents look like. If you just want
something passable then any other tool should do. However, if you want
something that looks really great, then you need to pay special attention to
details. And this is where TeX gives you much more control and yet already does
many things for you.

If you don't understand what I'm talking about then you should at least read the
table of contents of the TeXBook. ;-)

--
Saso