[XeTeX] XeTeX in lshort

[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])
- those who can use other systems but who would have an enourmous 
advantage in time and effort using TeX (mathematicians, other scientist, 
typographers of some kind [see above], ...)

and now the important part

- those who should think structurally (does this word exist?), when 
creating a text document. and that's nearly everybody who creates a text 
document other than a greeting or similar.

To state it clearly:

Every high school student, who wants to continue to university (in 
Germany: jeder Gymnasialschüler) should learn TeX&Co. in order to 
_think_ _structurally_.

It's not about programming vs. using. (I myself don't do anything plain 
TeX. I use packages and create new commands only as placeholders.) It's 
about the order in which to create a document:
1. content
2. structure
3. revise 1&2
4. layout

MS Word&Co. proposes another order:
1. content and layout mixed.
2. structure
3. revision (nearly impossible for large documents if its harder than 
using replace)
Btw: Is the table of contents in word still created from layout forms?

bye Toscho

PS: The high school, where I teach (better: learn teaching) will begin 
to teach LaTeX to the grade-10-students of its STEM-branch.

Am 30.09.2010 03:19, schrieb Mike Maxwell:
> On 9/29/2010 8:39 PM, Andy Lin wrote:
>> lshort needs to be updated, not just because it's missing sections on
>> Unicode and XeTeX. It's also working under the assumption that people
>> will *need* to use the command line in order to process a document.
>> This should be a concern to anyone who's looked at it recently.
>
> I hesitate to jump in, but I think it's worth thinking about (and
> perhaps saying, in this lshort document) why someone would want to use a
> TeX-type program, as opposed to MsWord or some such. I'm not convinced
> it's the right solution for everyone. If all you're doing is writing a
> five page homework paper, for example, do you really need to typeset it?
> By the time the prof marks it up for content (and maybe spelling), any
> typography is going to be obscured by the red ink.
>
> Dissertations are, I think, different; but very few people wind up
> writing dissertations.
>
> My own reason for getting into XeLaTeX is that we write multi-lingual
> grammars, the second of which was Urdu. Trying to produce decent looking
> Urdu text is a stretch for anyone who isn't a calligrapher, so I think
> we had a good case for using XeLaTeX for typesetting. (Probably the only
> other possibility would have been the Middle East version of InDesign.)
>
> I suppose some people use *TeX because they like programming approaches
> to things. (However, I've programmed in at least a dozen programming
> languages, and there are still design choices in *TeX that I scratch my
> head over. But yes, Donald Knuth is much smarter than I am, so I'm sure
> there's a reason.) Maybe a few people use it to produce greeting cards
> or wedding invitations or something. Mathematicians too, maybe, but
> there aren't many of them around.
>
> So: Who is the audience? And who among the not-already-converted ought
> to be proselytized?