Wow. I didn't know people still used TeX/LaTeX a lot any more. I remember having to use it all the time for stuff I wrote when in graduate school in the 1980s, but I thought it had pretty much fallen out of favor except for die-hard users. I haven't used it in years. But what do I know. I still remember (and pine for) the keystroke commands for WordStar. >From reading this discussion, it seems that the primary complaints against LibreOffice are larger scale layout issues. I may have missed it, and if someone has mentioned it earlier, I apologize. What about just importing into a publishing/layout program like Scribus? It seems that this would make it trivial to do various orientations, etc. Of course, just as word processing programs are not the best desktop publshing systems, the desktop publishing apps tend to make poor word processors... Another possibility might be to import the odt file into Libreoffice Draw and use that for layout changes. billo On Wed, 2020-08-12 at 08:44 -0300, George N. White III wrote: > On Wed, 12 Aug 2020 at 02:12, Tim via users < > users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > wrote: > > > On Tue, 2020-08-11 at 15:39 -0700, ToddAndMargo via users wrote: > > > So I put him on LO. He is writing up a book or something. > > > > A word processor, any word processor, is not a particularly good > > choice > > for writing a book. They've long since gone from being a "word > > processor" to being a secretary's all-purpose convoluted typing > > tool. > > > > They're not particularly conducive to writing paragraphs and pages > > as > > just paragraphs and pages, often horrible at very long documents, > > and > > not really good for doing page layout. Probably not a very useful > > format if you were going to take a book to a printing house, > > either. > > > > Many print shops want standards compliant PDF's, some will accept > Word. My wife once needed a fanfold handout, so I created a PDF > using LaTeX. The printer remarked that it had been years since he > had seen formatting of comparable quality. Now Word has a > TeX engine. > > > > Latex is the usual suggestion for real authors, but will be even > > more > > of a bastard to use if you're not into that kind of thing. > > > > LaTeX doesn't have to be difficult if you are working with an > academic > publisher that supports it. Many of the people who found it > difficult > were following bad advice that is all too easy to find on the > internet. > > LaTeX is designed to allow authors to focus on the logical structure > of a document. Details of formatting are handled by a "document > class", and scientific publishers usually provide a document class > that conforms to the style of a particular book series. Authors > need to learn some LaTeX markup commands, usually by > imitating a sample document from the publisher or a colleague's > previous published LaTeX file. At my former work dozens of > students and postdocs who had been using Word were able to > switch to LaTeX with minimal effort. There are sometimes > glitches that need help from an experienced user. In academia > such help is readily available, but there are also many online > sources of help. Unfortunately, the internet also has many > sites offering really bad advice for LaTeX users. > > Many non-science publishers contract out the final tweaking/editing > and rarely contractors who use anything other than Word. > > It is worth noting that LaTeX originated on systems with ASCII > character sets. There has been a big effort to support Unicode > fonts, including work by a consortium of academic publishers and > societies to develop high quality free Unicode fonts (STIX2) with > comprehensive coverage of scientific symbols. Microsoft developed > Cambria Math. These efforts also led to a new "TeX engine", LuaTeX, > so those who need Unicode support are well advised to use LuaLaTeX. > For linux, LuaLaTeX is provided by TeX Live, which is packaged by > linux distros and also available from the TeX User Group (tug.org). > > _______________________________________________ > users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > Fedora Code of Conduct: > https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ > List Guidelines: > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines > List Archives: > https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
