Subject: Re: [missing subject]
From: <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1993 02:02:06 +0200

Ian Jackson writes:
>Sorry, I meant `customise' rather than `configure'.  It tends to be
>very hard to get LaTeX to do something it doesn't want to, and LaTeX
>has some very particular ideas about how it likes to do things.  See
>below.

Hm.  I had only one real problem with writing the linuxdoc.sty style
sheet for LaTeX, and my problem was a TeX problem, not a LaTeX
problem.  However, I agree to some extent with Lamport about
typesetting...  I really find it easy to compose in LaTeX -- much
easier than anything I have tried yet.  I have not yet tried Lout, but
want to; however, work and email take up almost all my time right now
-- my job ends on the 30th, and I will have more time for Linux
development between jobs.

>>If  LaTeX is not the standard being used by the DOC project then why is all 
>>there stuff in LaTeX (I don't follow the DOC channel but was going on what 
>>looked like some self evident observations).
>
>As I said earlier, just because most people are using it (probably for
>lack of experience of anything better) doesn't make it a `standard'.

To be fair to the original poster, the DOC project *did* adopt LaTeX
with the linuxdoc.sty style sheet as the standard documentation
development environment, to keep a similar look among all the docs.
Nobody is forced to use it, but we did agree at one point to make our
source be LaTeX/linuxdoc.  LameTeX is available for getting text, and
another volunteer is working on a LaTeX-groff converter, and has it
working fairly well.  If we had started with groff, of course, it
would be *extremely* difficult to go the other way.  If Lout is
intentional and grouped, converting both ways shouldn't be too hard.

>However you haven't answered my other point, which was that a
>`standard' document typesetter is unnecessary and irrelevant.

I agree completely.  Give people their preference, and don't put it in
the base distribution, and nobody has to argue.  We're certainly not
going to convince everyone to switch to one or the other...

michaelkjohnson