Re: LaTeX plug-in for Word

En réponse à Maarten van Beek <dungeonmaster@...>:

>
> Well, I am happy about it. I will check it out and see if it doesn't
> throw
> overboard all my precious Word layout. Btw, on what you said in a
> previous
> post: the WYSIWYG part of Word is exactly why I prefer it over LaTeX.
> I
> _want_ to worry about the layout, and LaTeX works a bit too linearly for
> me.
> I study Theoretical Astrophysics here in Utrecht, and most of the
> lectrue
> notes for my various classes have been made in (La)TeX. Teh result: they
> all
> have the same, dull layout, which is soooo unappealing, that I must
> force
> myself to read it.
Well, it's a problem of taste. What you find dull I find resting. The normal
LaTeX layout has been designed to minimize reading tiredness, and it works
great! (at least with me) Fancy layouts tend to push me away. I have for
instance an article on my desk that I have to read for my work, but I can't
manage to read more than one page of it per day, simply because its layout is
sooo tiring. And it's an article that dates from the pre-LaTeX days...

 But I must admit that I never made any effort into
> learning to work with LaTeX, since I never came across a good WYSIWYG
> editor. Since I am very visual in my work, I need a WYSIWYG editor,
> since i
> judge all my layout by sight.
>
Well, I worry more about contents. And when I want to make a change in layout I
like it to be everywhere in the file, and Word has the bad habit to make those
changes difficult to make, or deadly for other layout parts. Changing the
layout in LaTeX is not especially easy, but at least it's safe. As for the
Word2TeX plugin, in the settings you have a lot of options to control the
layout of the final LaTeX file.

>
> Well, since you wanted to print the final work as PDF, can't we just
> submit
> PDF directly? You wouldn't have to edit anything, just add the PDF pages
> to
> the journal...
>
That's definitely what I don't want. I *want* to edit the articles for layout,
so that the whole thing looks whole. I don't want the journal to be a patchwork
of different styles, different font sizes, etc... but a whole document. I don't
want the thing to look amateurish, and it would if I let everyone choose a
layout and insist on keeping it. The position of tables, figures, and the shape
of the title, i can understand that everyone wants to keep it the way s/he made
it. But for the rest. especially the margins, tops and bottoms of pages, I
insist on having a single style for that. It's just normal.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.