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Martin Vermeer -- Follow the Scientists! Mar 17th, 17:22:57 by Martin Vermeer Professor Vermeer argues against the notion that word processing must be forever a species of finger painting voodoo and the province of proprietary software developers. His principle counter example is the TEX, LATEX, LYX family of applications for structured document layout. A funny place, this world we live in. Everybody sends me MS Word attachments and assumes I can read them. I've given up preaching and just use Star Office. No luck this time though, not even with genuine Word, until the sender exported to Word 6.0 format to match my dusty old Windows partition. As you guessed, the document contained only text. The world is massively wasting resources attempting to exchange documents in multiple incompatible closed formats, even from different versions of the same software. Human adaptability as a curse. Why this unquestioning acceptance of document exchange as black magic? Compare this to the Internet; there things are so much better. HTML is the standard language for Web pages; MIME the standard for email; and so on. Of course, it all works well: Scientists designed it for their own use! Little could Tim Berner-Lee foresee that some day the turnover of e-commerce would dwarf funds budgeted for high-energy physics research, when at CERN, Geneva, he thought up the World Wide Web. He just followed his scientific instincts for building something that works for the community: a file format based on a pre-existing specification, SGML (Standard General Mark-up Language); and a text-based client-server protocol over TCP/IP. Open standards, text based, legible, editable, portable. And doing what it should: allowing timely worldwide publication of research results in multimedia form. HTML has limitations. It allows too easy visual-only mark-up to make pages just look good without concern for the document's logical structure. Therefore, we see developments that separate document creation and document layout style definition, like Cascading Style Sheets and XML (Extensible Mark-up Language). A lesser known, similar chain of events happened a decade before the www. Don Knuth of Stanford designed TEX, a computer typesetting language that garnered fame for the visual quality of documents produced with it. Then Leslie Lamport (DEC) based a macro library, LATEX, on it, to address the same problem as with HTML: TEX is too visual a language. A typesetting engine, not a document processor. With LATEX, you can code and structure your document without concern for the final layout; then you combine it with a document definition or class file, and out comes the printed version. Guaranteed pixel identical everywhere -- no publisher complaining about a nine page doc when you sent him only eight pages. The importance of "structured document authoring" cannot be overstated.
LATEX encourages this practice. While most modern
word processors support it through "style sheets", too few people use
it. A colleague, a gifted professional, sent me a Word document where section
headers had been produced by "finger paint": twice For years, LATEX has been the Lingua Franca of
scientific document exchange. Journals accepted it. As a plain text mark-up
language like HTML, it is robust, portable, "hackable" and compatible across
platforms and versions. Scientists are used to the programming-like activity
of writing mark-up code. However, general users are not. No problem
in principle -- LATEX could be for scientists only.
But a colleague's experience tells me that the Huns are at the
gate. He got his article delayed by a year because a scientific journal
couldn't handle his LATEX manuscript! So, if we want
the open, structured document tradition to survive, we'd better make
it accessible for non-scientists also.
Fortunately, an excellent initiative along these lines, LYX,
has been ongoing for three years now. Most of the developers are scientists.
LYX should be seen
to be believed, especially the equation editor. If you thought MS Word's
equation editor was good -- think again. The rest of this visual document
processor is of similar excellence.
Nearly everything in LATEX
is supported now: sectioning headers, figures, tables, live links to numbered
objects; even BibTEX, the great bibliography database manager
by Oren Patashnik (Stanford). On-screen, the text looks roughly like
on paper, including sectioning, formulas, tables, graphics etc., a bit
like Word's "normal" mode.
"View mode" means clicking the xdvi or GhostScript
renderer. Even "outline mode" exists, the table-of-contents window containing
live sectioning links.
With LYX, the pain of writing LATEX
mark-up is no more. Also, LYX is ready for the Internet
age with its SGML (i.e. XML) DocBook export. What is still weak, and needed
to make LYX competitive, is support for easy setting up of document
type definitions. Currently only basic, document level properties are
configurable, plus, surprisingly, the choice of bullet list symbols. A nice
selection of classes is available: the base classes, those of the
American Mathematical Society, the beautiful Komascript classes, and more.
It all has a scientific
slant. Besides business letters, there is one nonscientific document format --
for film/movie scripts. If you want nontrivial deviations from these provided
classes, you may browse for a suitable option or style file on the Internet.
But at some point you'll find yourself grinding out LATEX
code. For example, if you want to change the indent of bullet lists, you'll be
embedding ERT (Evil Red Text,
LYX
geekspeak for raw LATEX) into your doc. A no-no for
dummy users and a sales argument for commercial word processors.
It has been argued that the open source development model is suitable
only for producing infrastructural, "plumbing" type software, not end user
friendly, high-useability applications. If the validity of this argument
interests you, you should closely follow LYX, a great software
that has been
developing
at a spectacular pace. This could be a white raven
disproving the assumption. And again, scientists doing it!
Martin Vermeer mv@liisa.pp.fi
File translated
from TEX by TTH,
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