[plug] Star Office and 5.1 and the registration

[Christian]

Greg Mildenhall wrote:

> Excuse me??? You're seriously considering not writing your thesis in
> LaTeX? They _let_ you write in something else? How quaint.
> Just use LaTeX. It really is the only choice. Sure, for a brief letter
> now and then or something, it ain't worth learning, but if you're writing
> a whole thesis, then you want to have something that looks professional at
> the end, and you don't want to have to fight with a word processor to do
> it. Just use LaTeX, you won't regret learning it.

After such a strong response from so many people I guess I have no
option other than to give the thing a look. :)  I upgraded tetex on a
couple of my machines and also downloaded LyX.  The impression I get
from the basic LaTeX docs I've read so far (thanks to Bret for the loan
of the book) is that it's very much like hand-coding HTML - which I
dislike only marginally less than using some poxy generator.  I can't
honestly see myself writing 80 pages of thesis in a text editor and
embedding in the necessary markup codes to make it look a certain way. 
Not because of learning the new "language" but simply because I would be
spending more time thinking about how it was going to look and I would
be distracted from what I was really trying to say.

But LyX looks like it might have potential.  I very much dislike their
choice of GUI toolkit but if it can give me some sort of WYSISYG
front-end to TeX's power then that will probably be an acceptable
compromise.  I'm not sure how it goes with handling images but I guess
I'll have a play around with that and see.  I believe there's also a
KLyx but I don't have KDE (and don't really want it) and plus it seems
to be based upon some pre-historic version of LyX.

Further suggestions/comments/derision are welcomed. :)

> What is your thesis on,
> anyway? Thesis-obsessed minds wish to know. :)

It's basically looking at the approaches taken to security at the
various software development phases.  I'm submitting the proposal on
Tuesday. :)

Regards,

Christian.

-- 
========================================================================
I'm not trying to give users what they want, I'm trying to give them
freedom, which they can then accept or reject. If people don't want
freedom, they may be out of luck with me, but I won't allow them to 
define for me what is right, what is worth spending my life for.
                                                    - Richard Stallman