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I agree with you - LaTeX is absolutely amazing. And free, too.
I have looked into the features and functions of most low- and high-end
programs for complex long-document typesetting the last few years and
very few of them can handle the complexity & typographic quality of
LaTeX. If they can, they usually have a high four or five digit price
figure.
If someone is interested to see what LaTeX can do, take a look at 1000+
page "The LaTeX Companion" (2nd ed.), which was entirely typeset in
LaTeX. Impressive.
Anyway, I see a few reasons why LaTeX may be neglected by technical
writers:
- Installation of new fonts is quite difficult and is not for the faint
of heart. Few people are willing to write a couple of hundred lines of
typescript to install a complete font, with small caps, old style
figures, ligatures etc. There are, however, commercial TeX systems that
automates this (e.g. Visual Tex etc).
- As long as you use the existing templates it's quite easy to work in
LaTeX, but once you want to change the design & appearance of the
document it becomes difficult. Even with easy-to-use packages it
requires some understanding of programming to get the document to look
exactly as you want it to look.
- Technical writers perhaps feel reluctant to write text that is
interspersed with (La)TeX code.
- Technical writers perhaps feel reluctant to work in a system that is
not WYSIWYG.
- Another reason (for aficionados, perhaps) may be that you can not
typeset on a grid in LaTeX (but you can in ConTeXt, which is another
macro package).
User-friendliness is, alas, not the first thing you come to think of
when you talk about (La)TeX. I think that is the most important reason
why this excellent typesetting language has not spread outside the world
of academics & enthusiasts.
Best regards,
Mats Broberg
Technical Documentation Manager
www.flirthermography.com
Isaac Waisberg wrote:
> I find LaTeX an amazing tool and I often wonder why is it
> neglected by technical writers. The main motivation for its
> development was the need to present technical information
> clearly and beautifully. In Knuth's words, TeX is a
> ``typesetting system intended for the creation of beautiful
> books---and especially for books with a lot of mathematics.''
>
> I found very few references to LaTeX in techwr-l among them:
> ``LaTeX, a professional typesetting program, is free
> software, but, like QuarkExpress, is a poor choice for
> documents that will be frequently revised''
> (http://tinyurl.com/69nx9).
>
> Why do you think LaTeX is neglected by technical writers?
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