[Long] [OT] That Big Shadow Over Your Shoulder, Part 2, was Re: [Coco] Re...

[Brett K. Heath]

On Mon, 1 Mar 2004 KnudsenMJ at aol.com wrote:

> In a message dated 2/29/04 12:17:34 PM Eastern Standard Time,
> wdg3rd at comcast.net writes:
>
> > I have yet to see a smooth transition from one release of Windows to
> >  another via upgrade in-place (even something as theoretically trivial
> >  as Windows 3.1 to Windows for Workgroups 3.11).  It's usually easier to
> >  get a new machine and sneakernet the files to it.
>
> Or what I did last time -- build a new machine and transplant the working HD
> into it.  Well, that was a hardware upgrade.  I did upgrade in place from
> Win95 to 98, more or less hassle-free (except for an old ZIP disk driver that had
> to be updated before it would stop hanging 98).  By "in place" I mean I put
> the Win98 upgrade CD in my old 95 box and it replaced the Win95.
> Not clear if later Win versions will upgrade so smoothly.
>
> Dennis has not said so, but he's pointed out the divide between modern GUI
> WYSIWYG editors for word processing, DTP, and music scores on one hand,
> and on the other hand the "dot processors" for words and music and graphics,
> which include Nroff, Tex, LilyPond and another command-text driven music
> typesetter called MUP that some guys I knew at Bell Labs invented.  Oddly, HTML
> keeps dot-processing alive, at the expense of those horrid angle brackets instead
> of periods.
>
> Tex is apparently still strong in academic circles, probably wherever Pascal
> is still used.  Bell Labs hung on to dot-processors well into the late 80s,
> then went to FrameMaker on Sun Solaris UNIX, and has probably succumbed to NW
> Word by now -- some management types were already using it heavily when I left 6
> years ago.

I wasn't going to get into this, but there is a graphical "front-end" to
LaTeX called Lyx that gives a very intuitive interface to most of the
LaTeX facilities (I don't really know enough LaTeX to say exactly how
complete it is, but it does a lot), including things like indexing and
cross-references (internal or external). It isn't exactly WYSIWYG, you
have to open a seperate viewer to see the final typsetting, but it does
give you a good picture of the layout and you can link the viewer input to
the source changes and update it with a click. If you know the macro names
you can type them in rather than going through the menus (which is _very_
nice when doing math) and it does nice things like automatic section and
list numbering and a clickable TOC window that is automatically updated as
you move stuff around in the document (also very handy!). I haven't used
Word in years so can't really say how they compare, but I wouldn't dismiss
TeX out of hand. Lyx was available on a number of platforms, including
Windows and Macs the last time I checked, and is included out of the box
on several distributions of Linux. It includes menu selections to output
everything from LaTeX and PS to PDF or even  html (html that is much
cleaner than anything I've ever seen coming out of Word) as well as hooks
to pipe to external custom formatters.

There's more, but the point is it provides an easy to use and effective
LaTeX GUI for the uninitiated without handcuffing the gurus, and this is
_all_ out of the box.

> It would seem WYSIWYG is winning everywhere.  I certainly wouldn't want my
> music composing any other way.
>   --Mike K.

Don't know if it can do music directly through the GUI, but it's a godsend
for doing math.

Brett K. Heath