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Re: (La)TeX for a conlanger? Advice sought.

From:taliesin the storyteller <taliesin-conlang@...>
Date:Wednesday, November 16, 2005, 8:53
* And Rosta said on 2005-11-15 03:13:27 +0100
> [..] I got to wondering about (La)TeX, & would be very grateful for > informed advice on this score.
I'm writing my master's thesis in LaTeX, because it already has a lot of packages fine-tuned for linguistics-works like gb4e for interlinears, avm for HPSG/LFG and several packages to draw trees.
> My question is: What is the best document preparation software for > someone who > (i) works a lot with truetype & unicode fonts,
I haven't had a need for this in LaTeX yet. Something else good with fonts is Framemaker, but that is muuuch more expensive than word.
> (ii) is a typography fetishist,
Both LaTeX and Framemaker are all about typography.
> (iii) loathes the frustrations of trying to get complicated software > to work correctly or at all.
TeX (and LaTeX) are programming-languages, so the complicated things are done in unusual ways to you. Table-of-contents and indexes are already handled for instance, and it's all about marking up the text with semantic styles. If you want pixel-perfect control, use TeX, as LaTeX makes *a lot* of choices for you.
> (iv) is reluctant to learn lots of elaborate & radically new ways of > doing old familiar things;
LyX <http://www.lyx.org/> is wysiwym (What You See Is What You Mean) and you can do everything through menus, though I write all my LaTeX in vim (with Latex-Suite) and is happy with that. If you don't use LyX the work flow goes like this: 1) write content 2) compile 3) watch (in a pdf-reader or postscript-reader)
> or, broadly speaking: > > (I) is generally very happy with Word 2003 (bar the cost and the > enslavement to Microsoft) but
Framemaker is a lot better but also much more expensive, but a lot better...
> (II) would like something that gives typographically better results (e.g. > intelligent handling of ff fl fi ligatures; centring diacritics over m & w) > and that doesn't severely degrade when typographical demands start getting > very heavy
Both Framemaker and TeX/LaTeX does this. What I miss in LaTeX is an easy way to make new templates (in Word-jargon), know as documentclasses in LaTeX2e. It's not at all easy to do arbitrary things, like a one-sheet folded brochure, but extremely easy to do what there already are documentclasses for, like (scientific) articles, books, technical reports, presentations (use acroread to run them) and anglo-style letters. Luckily I found a documentclass for Norwegian-style letters (named "brev") or I would have needed something else than LaTeX to write the first page of such. Again, TeX gives *a lot* of control. t.

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Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>