On Wed, May 18, 2005 at 01:41:00AM +0300, Ville Voipio wrote:
One of the mixed blessings (=curses) brought about by computers is that now you need to be an academic writer, a typesetter, and a graphic artist at the same time. At this point the number of should-knows explodes.
[snip]
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What I am trying to say is that choosing the tool is only one part of the project. Whichever tool you choose, you'll end up in trouble at some point. With some tools (WYSIWYG) you'll end up in worse trouble, but even with *TeX the road is bumpy at best, unless you really have a tested and proven templates which you can use.
Yes, this is exactly the problem. I am laying out my girlfriend's thesis in historic preservation, and it is taking me forever. What a waste of time! The thesis is actually written in XML. Or rather, she has written it in MS Word, which I have converted to XML using a very sophisticated script (http://rtf2xml.sourceforge.net/). I then convert the file to ConTexT, and then to PDF. There are a million stupid details, like making sure the title on the cover page is exactly 3 inches from the top and so fourth. This is a waste of time. Why should we be forced to layout pages when we don't want to? Therefore I think a good argument can be made for universities eventually accepting a thesis in XML format. If they want to be so picky about layout, they should do it; the student should only be required to submit the basic information in a structured form. The assumption of the University is that everyone uses Word. This is a bad assumption. Paul -- ************************ *Paul Tremblay * *phthenry@iglou.com * ************************