[XeTeX] XeTeX in lshort

[Philipp Stephani]

Am 02.10.2010 um 21:52 schrieb Paul Isambert:

> Le 02/10/2010 21:22, Alan Munn a écrit :
>> On Oct 2, 2010, at 2:47 PM, Philipp Stephani wrote:
>> 
>>> Am 30.09.2010 um 09:36 schrieb Tobias Schoel:
>>> 
>>>> Hi,
>>>> 
>>>> there are three kinds of people who should learn TeX&Co:
>>>> - those who absolutely need TeX, because no other system let's them produce the documents they have to (all this linguistis and co. [don't take offense, I have no idea of the professions around this topic])
>>> 
>>> Please elaborate on why they should use TeX. Personally I think that TeX is quite inappropriate for linguistics.
>> 
>> I'm not sure that this discussion should really continue, but what do you know about linguistics that would give you such an opinion?  LaTeX is very appropriate for linguistics, and many working linguists are using it (not to mention that it is used to typeset various linguistics journals.)  As I mentioned in a previous message it provides  many concrete advantages: automatic numbering/referencing of linguistic examples, automatic aligning of foreign language words/translations, automatic syntactic tree drawing; a full range of logic symbols, easy access to phonetic fonts etc., not to mention other basic academic requirements such as citations and bibliographies.  Doing most of this in Word is either not trivial or not possible.
> 
> And I'll add: printing a corpus with annotations that don't show up but are fed to LuaTeX for statistics, and returned as tables. What I'm doing right now. With reference from main work to example number, mention of origin, etc.
> 
> At the very least, I'd concede TeX is not mandatory for linguistics, as anything else, but ``inappropriate'' lets me wonder, and I'd require an explanation,  if transient trollism wasn't an option, as suggested by Alan.

Well, I hope you accept lack of information as valid reason. I'm not a linguist and don't know much about the exact requirements in that field, but I haven't seen much LaTeX usage outside of the world of math and natural science, that's why I was a bit surprised.