On Tuesday 23 November 2010 19:25:05 Les Mikesell wrote:
> I'm not exactly a word processing expert, but I always thought the trick
> to make Word tolerable was to never apply raw formatting to individual
> pieces of text but instead make some styles of your own so you can
> subsequently modify the style definitions and have it take effect
> throughout the document.
If you push that idea to its extreme, you'll eventually end up with LaTeX. :-)
>From my POV, the trick is essentially about pain/gain evaluation. If you are
about to write one single document for your boss or someone, it is easier to
fire up Word and use the "quick and dirty" raw formatting. And if you are
facing a task of writing a thousand documents of the same type in the
following year, it makes sense to invest some time and learn how to use styles
and stuff. And yet if you are facing a task of properly typesetting, editing
and publishing a book or a series of conference proceedings or several PhD
theses full of music scores or something similar, it makes sense to invest a
month or two and learn to use TeX.
The problem is that people start with small things, get used to doing things
the "quick and dirty" way, and then are reluctant to change their habits when
these start to backfire on them. And this is not just a word processing
problem, it happens everywhere in life in general.
There is no "easy" way to do word processing --- you either go through a
learning curve of doing things *properly*, or you end up creating lousy
documents, regardless of the software you use. ;-)
:-)
Marko
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