LaTeX for Secretaries

Article dated 2000.

I used LyX (http://www.lyx.org/) and LaTeX to write a technical manual (http://www.whitemagicsoftware.com/books/indispensable/).

LyX is a nice WYSIWYG-ish editor, but for a document of any complexity, LaTeX code must be learned and in-lined.

LaTeX is not a tool for secretaries. I would not recommend LaTeX to even moderately geeky friends. Microsoft Word and LibreOffice do just about everything the average and above-average computer user needs.

If you are thinking about using it, bookmark this invaluable site:

http://tex.stackexchange.com/

I am (or was - much now forgotten) "expert" at Latex/Tex, but recently have taken to using restructured text instead (more exactly, as a precursor to - the RST is used to generate Latex and then PDF). I don't know how it would work for mathematical formulae, but when you're free to use your own layout (ie not writing for some journal) it's pretty sweet.

For anyone interested, here's the source - http://code.google.com/p/pytyp/source/browse/pytyp.rst#23 - for this paper - http://www.acooke.org/pytyp.pdf - and here's some notes on how it was generated - http://www.acooke.org/cute/HowToWrite1.html

Even though Latex itself is usually not that intrusive, I find this significantly easier to read and write (particularly lists!) - it also feels more natural to edit the source (with Latex I switch more to the formatted result).

I'm trying to envision a world where a boss forced his "secretary" to not only use LaTeX but compose it in emacs. It seems like cruel and unusual punishment. Even places I was at in the late 80's that were sun/vax/hp shops and everyone did composition in tex, the assistant pool etc. had dos pcs with wordperfect - that the engineers often wanted to borrow.

Heh I was in '96-'97 a lab supervisor at uni, helping people with Microsoft Word and other applications.

I remember at one of our meetings someone, not even a computer science student, suggested making everyone use LaTeX as a solution to all the problems people were having with word.

Half of me kind of wishes they did.

I find LaTex to be one of the easiest typesetting languages around. I got used to taking notes in it while sitting in class years ago, and prefer to use it for all my notes and paperwork for the most part.

My only gripe is working with someone that uses Scientific Word. Working with a SW tex file is like trying to look through an html file that was created by FrontPage in the late 90's.

Secretaries? Who has secretaries?