On Sun, August 30, 2015 9:29 pm, David Wright wrote: > ... > but can hardly be considered adequate for a power-user of a > textual application where individual commands that have been used hundreds > of times will be typed without any conscious effort at all, rather like a > pianist plays ornaments.
In that epoch of my career I was running Window$ (95 or 98 or whatever) -- rodent and all -- on a second machine, for typesetting with Aldus (now Adobe) PageMaker. The work of composition, however, was done exclusively on a DO$ machine running Word 5.0. This all was in the day before the advent of low-cost Ethernet with multi-conductor cables terminated in RJ-45 connectors; back then, networking generally was done with coaxial cable. But nonetheless, I had a network connecting the two machines -- "sneaker net". So when an error by me or a blunder by PageMaker was discovered in the typeset output, I would go back to the "master" document in Word 5.0, make a change, and then copy the revised document file to floppy. (I think that, by that time, 3.5 inch floppies had become common, if not the standard.) Next, I would "network" the floppy to the drive of the Window$ machine, load the file into PageMaker, and typeset the document again. So even still today I am amazed by the ability in Debian to make a mouseless edit with EMacs, then, with a keystroke or two, switch to the terminal and typeset with a single command, and finally, with another keystroke, switch to the xdvi window and see the change -- all in a matter of seconds. Having learned PageMaker on the Macintosh and subsequently having migrated to PageMaker on the IBM-PC, I can say from experience that (at least, back then) PageMaker could not hold a candle to LaTeX. LaTeX was far more simple to use, and LaTeX produced far better quality of typesetting. So in the end, that Y2K bug in M$ Word 5.0 turned out to be a great blessing, and nothing less than Providential. RLH