On Saturday, 14 February 2015 at 18:15:09 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> On Saturday, 14 February 2015 at 17:04:24 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
>> Obviously XeLaTeX is the
>> correct medium, but AsciiDoc is acceptable as a second best.
>
> During the editing of the Russian translation of TDPL, I've worked in MS Word as well. Probably its main advantage is its collaboration tools: you can see who added or deleted which parts, and toggle between visible edits and final text easily. You can also add comments to a text range; by passing the document along, this made possible even short conversations.
>
> What would be the equivalent of such collaboration in a non-MS-Word-based workflow?

Well, if you do the document with Latex on git (or some similar
version control), you get most of the same stuff.  Latex has a
comment tool where you can do margin comments if you wish, and of
course you can also do comments in the 'code' if you want - they
don't show up in the document at all.  Heck, I am sure there is
a package for everything in Latex if you look hard enough.

A MS-word document with 'track changes' on, edited by multiple
people, is the greatest eyesore known to humanity. I still don't
understand why anyone who had a choice between Latex and MS-Word
would pick MS-Word for anything longer than 25 pages...

Just my personal opinion as one who recently finished a 200 page
thesis in Latex, and is now working for a company where we do all
our internal documents in Word. Latex certainly has its ugly warts,
but it is so nice for lengthy document1.

On Sat, 2015-02-14 at 10:21 -0800, Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
> 
[…]
> Many publishers may allow you to provide camera-ready copies.

Sadly not. The big publishers (well the three I have had dealing with in the last 5 years) feel they have this need to keep all their design and typesetting staff employed and so enforce the "authors write with Word and then we do all the page design, typesetting, etc., etc., author do not need to worry themselves over the presentation of their content, we do that". The words arrogant and condescending spring to mind.

Also the one sub-editor in the UK who was prepared to work with LaTeX source retired. All the others will only work with Word. Which of course ruins the workflow with anyone using LibreOffice. Which I don't except for presentation slides.

> > Any
> > suggestion of DocBook/XML as authored source is generally met with
> > derision, especially given there is AsciiDoc.
> 
> You'd be surprised to hear the tooling at the Pragmatic Programmer is all XML based and quite inflexible. Our negotiations broke down over that, in spite of their really beefy financial offering.

Hence my comment about AsciiDoc. O'Reilly and Pragmatic Programmers seemed to have Git and DocBook/XML sorted, but then totally forgot about author usability. AsciiDoc fixes that by being a reasonable markup language that feeds into the DocBook/XML toolchain. So if I am not allowed to use XeLaTeX for authoring, my only option is AsciiDoc. If that is not acceptable, I don't write books.

> > I have to admit, doing a Go or D book, is kind of appealing. Technically I am supposed to be doing "Python for Rookies, 2e" but it isn't happening for reasons I would rather not let the NSA know about.
> 
> Go? Urgh. As they say: Come for the concurrency, leave for everything else :o).

I think you severely mis-quote John Graham-Cummins there. But I suspect by design.

Go is gaining massive traction. I need income. Go is where the income is.

And anyway, I like Go. OK So I also like Groovy, Kotlin, Ceylon, and D.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On Sat, 2015-02-14 at 18:15 +0000, Vladimir Panteleev via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
> On Saturday, 14 February 2015 at 17:04:24 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> > Obviously XeLaTeX is the
> > correct medium, but AsciiDoc is acceptable as a second best.
> 
> During the editing of the Russian translation of TDPL, I've
> worked in MS Word as well. Probably its main advantage is its
> collaboration tools: you can see who added or deleted which
> parts, and toggle between visible edits and final text easily. You
> can also add comments to a text range; by passing the
> document along, this made possible even short conversations.
> 
> What would be the equivalent of such collaboration in a non-MS-Word- based workflow?

Git, Mercurial, Bazaar, …

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On Sun, 2015-02-15 at 04:38 +0000, Craig Dillabaugh via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
> […]
> Well, if you do the document with Latex on git (or some similar
> version control), you get most of the same stuff.  Latex has a
> comment tool where you can do margin comments if you wish, and of
> course you can also do comments in the 'code' if you want - they
> don't show up in the document at all.  Heck, I am sure there is a
> package for everything in Latex if you look hard enough.

(Xe|Lua)LaTeX or AsciiDoc
Git or Mercurial or Bazaar

Publishers have, however, seemed to have decided that sub-editors must work on the original source document files directly. If this is an integral part of the publisher workflow and the sub-editors cannot deal with DVCS or the markup languages, then the publishers refuse to use those tools.

Still as long as some half-way decent authors are prepared to use Word and abdicate their responsibility for the content once initially created, the publishers win.

> A MS-word document with 'track changes' on, edited by multiple people, is the greatest eyesore known to humanity. I still don't understand why anyone who had a choice between Latex and MS-Word would pick MS-Word for anything longer than 25 pages...

And who has the current master version, which  file is the master, etc., etc.

> Just my personal opinion as one who recently finished a 200 page
> thesis in Latex, and is now working for a company where we do all
> our internal documents in Word. Latex certainly has its ugly
> warts,
> but it is so nice for lengthy document1.

Luxury. I typed my thesis (including the maths equations) using a broken portable manual typewriter. ;-)
-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On Sunday, 15 February 2015 at 11:36:22 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Sun, 2015-02-15 at 04:38 +0000, Craig Dillabaugh via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
>> […]
>> Well, if you do the document with Latex on git (or some similar version control), you get most of the same stuff.  Latex has a comment tool where you can do margin comments if you wish, and of course you can also do comments in the 'code' if you want - they don't show up in the document at all.  Heck, I am sure there is a package for everything in Latex if you look hard enough.
>
> (Xe|Lua)LaTeX or AsciiDoc
> Git or Mercurial or Bazaar
>
> Publishers have, however, seemed to have decided that sub-editors must
> work on the original source document files directly. If this is an
> integral part of the publisher workflow and the sub-editors cannot
> deal with DVCS or the markup languages, then the publishers refuse to
> use those tools.
>
> Still as long as some half-way decent authors are prepared to use Word
> and abdicate their responsibility for the content once initially
> created, the publishers win.
>
>> A MS-word document with 'track changes' on, edited by multiple people, is the greatest eyesore known to humanity. I still don't understand why anyone who had a choice between Latex and MS-Word would pick MS-Word for anything longer than 25 pages...
>
> And who has the current master version, which  file is the master,
> etc., etc.
>
>> Just my personal opinion as one who recently finished a 200 page thesis in Latex, and is now working for a company where we do all our internal documents in Word. Latex certainly has its ugly
>> warts,
>> but it is so nice for lengthy document1.
>
> Luxury. I typed my thesis (including the maths equations) using a
> broken portable manual typewriter. ;-)

And you tell new students these days, and they won't believe you :o)

One other nice thing about LateX is that since you prepare
your content in a text editor, it lets you focus on your content and
not be distracted by fiddling with formatting as you go!  In theory
you should do the same in MS-Word, but its sometimes hard to focus with
all the pretty buttons :o)

Of course, TeX is also a programming language, so for developer types
it does present its own distraction.  Luckly TeX coding is so obtuse
it is never a serious temptation.

On Sun, 2015-02-15 at 15:37 +0000, Craig Dillabaugh via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
> On Sunday, 15 February 2015 at 11:36:22 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> > 
[…]
> > Luxury. I typed my thesis (including the maths equations) using a
> > broken portable manual typewriter. ;-)
> 
> And you tell new students these days, and they won't believe you :o)

There is one wonderful upside to this story, the examiners appreciated the complexity associated with changing anything, that they took considerable effort to find the minimum changes necessary that could be done with Snopake and a pen.

> […]
> Of course, TeX is also a programming language, so for developer types
> it does present its own distraction.  Luckly TeX coding is so obtuse
> it is never a serious temptation.

Uuuurrr… like m4, once you get into it it isn't so bad.
-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On 15 February 2015 at 17:56, Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d-announce <digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 2015-02-15 at 15:37 +0000, Craig Dillabaugh via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
>> On Sunday, 15 February 2015 at 11:36:22 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
>> >
> […]
>> > Luxury. I typed my thesis (including the maths equations) using a
>> > broken portable manual typewriter. ;-)
>>
>> And you tell new students these days, and they won't believe you :o)
>
> There is one wonderful upside to this story, the examiners appreciated the complexity associated with changing anything, that they took considerable effort to find the minimum changes necessary that could be done with Snopake and a pen.
>
>> […]
>> Of course, TeX is also a programming language, so for developer types
>> it does present its own distraction.  Luckly TeX coding is so obtuse
>> it is never a serious temptation.
>
> Uuuurrr… like m4, once you get into it it isn't so bad.


Hmm, yeah.  Depends on the application use of m4 though.  I've been at a company who used m4 to generate all their DNS zone files.  In which you'd get high marks for having a way to add/remove records that was relatively low maintenance cost, but low marks for complexity of adding features/debugging bugs in the wiry maze of macros. :)

Iain.

On Sunday, 15 February 2015 at 04:38:08 UTC, Craig Dillabaugh wrote:
> Just my personal opinion as one who recently finished a 200 page
> thesis in Latex, and is now working for a company where we do all
> our internal documents in Word. Latex certainly has its ugly warts,
> but it is so nice for lengthy document1.

Isn't latex for document restyling? What you would use it for? There's little time to only write the text, let alone fiddling with styles and typesetting. Word is better in this sense that it gets the end result just by saving the document.

On Wed, 2015-02-18 at 09:56 +0000, Kagamin via Digitalmars-d-announce
wrote:
[…]
> Isn't latex for document restyling? What you would use it for? There's little time to only write the text, let alone fiddling with styles and typesetting. Word is better in this sense that it gets the end result just by saving the document.

(Xe|Lua)LaTeX (or LaTeX 3) is an authoring tool, but then using the same
source form it becomes a typesetting tool. No need to change the tools
to change the role.

LaTeX (and AsciiDoc) files are mergeable and hence can be stored in a VCS repository very easily. Word files are just binary blobs. Perhaps for individual working there is a "who cares" possibility, but for joint authoring a VCS repository provides a shared, managed store. VCS and binary blobs are a waste of time, so if you author with binary blobs you can't really do joint authoring, unless you impose sequential access. I have tried using a wrapper around FrameMaker files to achieve locking, technology works, authoring process sucks. Think using SCCS or RCS.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

Well, Word can diff and merge documents, though, it works with sharepoint, not vcs.