Re: Technical Writing with LaTeX

["Simon North" <Simon -dot- North -at- quintiq -dot- com>]

If you seriously want to do technical writing with LaTeX, you will
quickly discover that there are few LaTeX stylesheets that are much use,
and you will want to write your own. This means you will have to learn a
fair bit about TeX too. From there it's a small step to needing BiBTeX,
AMSTeX and a lot of other macro packages ... and then you get meshed up
in font installations, etc. etc. Once you are really hooked you can
delve into MetaFont too. 

It's great fun, but the learning curve is pretty steep and unless
things have radically changed since I wrote the ESABASE documentation
for the European Space Agency using it, there isn't much in the way of
tools. Of course, you can add to the learning curve and use Emacs ... 

As Knuth says, it's a typesetting system ... not an authoring system.
IMNSHO, unless you have a compelling project reason to use it, such as
many pages of intricate mathematical formulas  (I had no choice; I was
given a mainframe tape spool and told that they expected me to install
the TeX software and then use it), it's simply too much effort when
packages like Frame are better for tech writing and a lot easier to use.


My ten cents, 

Simon North.  

 

Quintiq Application Software BV
's Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands

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