[plug] Star Office and 5.1 and the registration

[Peter Wright]

On Fri, Jun 04, 1999 at 03:47:00AM +0000, Christian wrote:
> Greg Mildenhall wrote:
> 
> > Excuse me??? You're seriously considering not writing your thesis in
> > LaTeX? They _let_ you write in something else? How quaint.

I must agree here.

> >  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)

I pretty much learned everything I know about LaTeX from "A Short Guide to
LaTeX 2e", which should be included in your tetex documentation. Good free
docs are a wonderful thing :).

> is that it's very much like hand-coding HTML - which I dislike only
> marginally less than using some poxy generator.

Actually, LaTeX is (IMO, of course) nicer than hand-coding HTML. There are
a few aspects of it that make it more "natural" than HTML for writing (eg.
a paragraph marker is just a blank line, rather than an explicit <P>
marker).

> 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.

Ahh, but that's where you've missed the point, albeit slightly :). 
You're not supposed to think too much about how it's going to look - just
concentrate on the writing and the structure of said writing.

Much like HTML, you're not supposed to try to micro-manage things. Or at
least you shouldn't be doing it too often. 

> But LyX looks like it might have potential.  I very much dislike their
> choice of GUI toolkit

Yeah - Xforms I believe - it certainly ain't too pretty when compared to
Qt or gtk or Tk or motif. However, it's a lot prettier than the Athena
widget set, and there are a lot of very useful X apps that use that w/set.
Once you get past the initial "urgh" instinct, you find it's quite usable,
and you quickly get used to it. 

I wrote my Honours dissertation with vanilla vi in LaTeX, using wonderful
Athena-based :) programs like xdvi, ghostview, xfig and gnuplot. That was
about 40 pages, from memory. I also recently used the wonderful latex2html
program to convert it to HTML, which works quite well. 

If you're interested, you can have a look at it at
http://cygnus.uwa.edu.au/~pete/honours/

> 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 haven't used LyX for anything serious, but the reports I've read indicate
that it is a pretty good 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.

Yeah - I heard the initial conversion of LyX to KLyX was done in a matter
of days, and KLyX took advantage of the superior Qt widget set to provide a
few extra features. Unfortunately, it looks like it's not being actively
maintained at the moment :(.

> 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. :)

Sounds very wholesome :).

> Regards,
> 
> Christian.

Pete.
-- 
http://cygnus.uwa.edu.au/~pete/