[OS X TeX] Publicon today

[Claus Gerhardt]

Comparing Latex (or Tex) with other software, especially those for  
writing sophisticated documents, I find it almost perfect, and I  
cannot think of anything I would need or  want to improve.

I am still running a tetex installation from last year (This is  
pdfeTeXk, Version 3.141592-1.20b-rc5-2.2 (Web2C 7.5.3)  
(format=pdflatex 2005.8.26)  12 MAR 2006 16:26) suiting me fine.

Many, if not most, problems and questions aired in this forum are  
caused by not reading the proper documentation, which is neither  
incomprehensible nor buried in unknown places. The Latex Companion  
e.g., is in my opinion more than sufficient to answer the questions  
an average user might have, and it is well written and easily  
understandable.

Though I only use (sometimes customized) AMS classes (amsart,  
amsbook), I don't think that using the standard latex classes would  
make much of a difference.

Claus

On Mar 12, 2006, at 16:47, Bruno Voisin wrote:

> Le 12 mars 06 à 15:32, Daniel Flatin a écrit :
>
>> I have been happy with TeXShop so far, but I find myself  
>> struggling with customizing document formats. There are so many  
>> different solutions within LaTeX in general, and in many cases the  
>> solutions are small, purpose specific, and supported by a single  
>> author. The fancyhdr package by Piet van Oostrum comes to mind.  
>> Any complete LaTeX working environment is a pastiche of different  
>> packages, each with it's own documentation, and perhaps second  
>> order documentation about how two packages interact. It seems  
>> endless.
>
> While I cannot offer any solution to your problem, I feel exactly  
> the same about LaTeX and wish that, at some point, the LaTeX  
> maintainers or community would, once and for good, decide what  
> additional functionalities should go inside LaTeX, investigate all  
> the add-on packages that offer these functionalities, select one  
> (and only one) for each functionality, ensure they all play nice  
> together, standardize their commands and approaches, incorporate  
> them inside LaTeX itself, and then merge all their documentations  
> into a unique documentation for this whole enhanced LaTeX system  
> (or at least make it so that all the documentation is in the same  
> format).
>
> Alas, I fear that will never happen, and feel pretty pessimistic  
> about the future of LaTeX. At one point I hoped LaTeX 3 would allow  
> that to happen, but now I feel pessimistic about LaTeX 3 as well.  
> With the LaTeX 3 project progressing so slowly (at least when  
> viewed from outside), and the pace the computing world progresses  
> being so high (with Unicode, HTML, MathML, XML, etc.), I wonder  
> whether LaTeX 3 will be able to catch up with this moving target.
>
> One of my dreams, for example, would be to have a complete self- 
> consistent TeX-like system that could be taken in some house in the  
> countryside for a month say, without any connection to the  
> internet, and to be able to work from there using this system. With  
> gwTeX you do have LaTeX + packages and their documentation, but at  
> point or another you're looking for something outside core LaTeX  
> and don't know which package to look at, or do not manage to use  
> one satisfactorily, so that in the end you do need to turn to this  
> list or another and interrupt your workflow.
>
> With commercial software you would probably feel more limited in  
> what can be done, or would experience more bugs, but at least you  
> would have a complete consistent system, with single consistent  
> documentation, and could proceed from that point on.
>
> Just some moody Sunday afternoon wanderings...
>
> Bruno Voisin ------------------------- Info --------------------------
> Mac-TeX Website: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
>          & FAQ: http://latex.yauh.de/faq/
> TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
> List Archive: http://tug.org/pipermail/macostex-archives/
>

------------------------- Info --------------------------
Mac-TeX Website: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
          & FAQ: http://latex.yauh.de/faq/
TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
List Archive: http://tug.org/pipermail/macostex-archives/