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Isaac Waisberg wrote:
>
> I find LaTeX an amazing tool and I often wonder why is it neglected by
> technical writers. The main motivation for its development was the
> need to present technical information clearly and beautifully. In
> Knuth's words, TeX is a ``typesetting system intended for the creation
> of beautiful books---and especially for books with a lot of
> mathematics.''
>
> I found very few references to LaTeX in techwr-l among them: ``LaTeX,
> a professional typesetting program, is free software, but, like
> QuarkExpress, is a poor choice for documents that will be frequently
> revised'' (http://tinyurl.com/69nx9).
>
> Why do you think LaTeX is neglected by technical writers?
>
For me, it's mainly that modifying templates is such a pain. I've done a
little bit of that, getting hubbie's dissertation to meet his
university's formatting guidelines. That was minor tweaks like changing
the page header for TOC continuation pages. I didn't even try to touch
the fonts or the basic layout.
There are graphical editors for LaTeX, such as Scientific Word ($$) and
LyX (free), which aren't exactly WYSIWYG, but claim to be WYSIWYM (what
you see is what you mean), in that they show the structure of the
document. But I'm not aware of any graphical tools that help with LaTeX
style or package modifications.
At a previous contract job, the engineers chose Doxygen to generate API
documentation. I considered using the LaTeX output from Doxygen to
generate PDFs, but it would have been a huge challenge to match the
house templates (for Word and FrameMaker), and nobody else there would
have been able to maintain the LaTeX styles after I left. So I chose not
to use it, even though the alternative was a somewhat convoluted process
involving HTMLDOC, Word, and Acrobat; I could at least be confident that
other tech writers would be able to handle the pieces of that puzzle.
My current employer sponsors an open source library of scientific
functions. A few months back, the user community voted to adopt LaTeX as
the format for documentation for the library; this is not too
surprising, as the users are engineers and scientists, mainly academics,
who are already familiar with LaTeX. (Also, handling equations well is a
major requirement in this case.) OTOH, none of them has actually
contributed any docs since that vote was taken. ;-)
For those who might be interested, Jack Lyon's Editorium newsletter
recently had a series of articles on how to take content authored in
Word and typeset it in LaTeX.
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