🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1762@naucse.UUCP> jdc@naucse.UUCP (John Campbell) writes:
>One of the professors I admire here teaches a technical writing course
>(through the English department).  I took it upon myself to try to show
>him LaTeX--since he bemoaned the fact that his students couldn't typeset
>documents.
I think this is unusual because many teachers of technical writing stress
content so much that they ignore form.

>He was incredibly negative about all the hieroglyphics required to make
>LaTeX function.  He worked last year (on sabattical) with a *very* 
>expensive typesetting package on a dedicated micro-vax.  (I'm sorry, but
>I forgot the actual name of the other package--it was probably one of the
>best on the market.)
Like someone else said, WordPerfect is pretty nice, especially for technical
writing that does not include too much in the way of equations and the like
for which TeX was designed.  The ease of use of mass market (millions of
users) of systems like WP and MS Word would make them my choice for anything
but the most technical of technical writing.  Advetising that I saw on
WP 5.1, now in beta test, promises ALL greeks and special mathematical
characters.  MS Word should not be far behind.  WP 5.1 also promises
tables and mouse support.

>Anyway, I wasn't sure I convinced him that it was worth even a single
>class session to introduce students to this technical writing tool.  He
>was pretty adamant that such a program was a "dinosaur" and would no
>longer be part of any technical writing shop by the time his students
>graduated.
There are some things that mass market word processors are not too goo at.
Although they do provide "styles" (basically macros), they do not allow
all the transformations that you might want from a Turing machine.  For
example, I still use troff for my lecture notes because it makes it easy
for me to have one version with big text for overheads and another version
for me, with my personal notes interspersed.  The technical help people
at WordPerfect had trouble understanding why I would want to have an
"invisible" display attribute.  Still, WP does 95 percent of what I want
for most technical writing at 1/10th of the effort, and WP is an improving
system, while systems like troff and TeX, which have a far smaller market,
are stangnant.

I think promoting LATeX in a writing class would direct student attention
away from more important issues.  Finally, the support tools like spelling
corrector and thesaurus, not to mention a variety of WWB-like tools on
PC's and Macs designed to work with WP and Word, make TeX seem like an
even poorer choice for educational purposes.  If anyone can enlighten me
of the educational benefits of a macro language (not the overall flexibility)
based on real experiences, I would like to hear about them.  My own
experiences have been that students get swamped in a hurry in any language,
and that they can produce pretty documents in little time with word
processors.
--
Name:  Gary Perlman               | Computer and Information Science Department
Email: perlman@cis.ohio-state.edu | Ohio State University, 228 Bolz Hall
Phone: 614-292-2566               | 2036 Neil Avenue Mall
Fax:   614-292-9021               | Columbus, OH 43210-1277  USA