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  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@topology.org>
  To  : Dan Shearer <dan@tellurian.com.au>
  Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 14:56:01 +0930

Re: Why use DocBook versus Word

On Thu, Apr 26, 2001 at 12:19:13PM +0930, Dan Shearer wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Apr 2001, Greg Lehey wrote:
>
> > TeX is a royal pain to write in.  DocBook is a different pain.
>
> Nobody seems to have mentioned that nobody uses raw TeX anymore.
>

Dan,

Being an individual, I _do_ use plain TeX (we don't call it "raw"),
and my documents from 1985 still produce the same exact output
as they did then, and I don't need to change any macros in my macro library.

I write lots of documents in plain TeX every year.
The big advantage is that you only have to learn one system for life.
The disadvantage is that it is probably the least user-friendly
langauge I've ever seen, including sendmail.cf language and assembly
language. (Octal core dumps and algol are probably the only languages
worse than TeX.)

> LaTeX is not nearly such a pain. LaTeX is an extensible set of TeX macros
> that effectively avoid anyone needing to see TeX at all. I'm not a huge
> LaTeX fan, but I do know that none of the things I am a fan of (especially
> SDF, http://www.mincom.com/mtr/sdf) are going to to become mainstream.

Most of the mathematics and theoretical physics world is familiar
with LaTeX. TeX and LaTeX are still the only environements which
can produce mathematical typesetting which doesn't make
mathematicians sick.

LaTeX has gone through some really nasty changes in the last 15 years
which have made it difficult to use old LaTeX documents with new
LaTeX macro libraries.
That's the problem with LaTeX - more user-friendly, but suffers
from versionitis like word-processors.

Because TeX and LaTeX are really programming languages, they have
the potential to build up huge style libraries which do really
sophisticated things.

Anyway, I rest my case.
Some people still do use plain TeX.
But you need a good background in programming, and probably some
mathematics too, if you want to succeed with TeX.
And an iron will. And lots of hair to tear out.

Cheers,      
Alan Kennington.

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