On Thu, Dec 22, 2022 at 09:51:58AM -0500, Matt Hogstrom wrote: > Fair comments. In my travels I’ve not seen anyone use Libre Office > or LaTeX; I’m not knocking them but if they are not widely used who > will maintain the doc later when we all retire? When considering > authoring docs like programs we need to consider the downstream > consumers / maintainers so I’d go with the popular tools of today.
...like Word Perfect and AmiPro... It does not matter what is popular today when one is calculating with decades in mind. LaTeX is pure 7-bit ASCII (or maybe Unicode in more modern incarnation). I might bet my money that of all formats used today, 7-bit ASCII will disappear the last, if ever. LaTeX is (I believe) a set of macros for TeX, itself written in C (at least one of the mostly compatible with each other few TeXs I have heard about). Again, I might bet my money that C compiler will be among the last one going out of use, given that people are able to write themselves toy compiler for toy virtual machine or use old real one inside of not-so-toy VM. Maybe it will be slow to run, but what is going to be slow twenty years from now? Something akin to our supercomputers, I guess. Of all things mentioned in this thread so far (I am about 1/3 in it) I would use LaTeX for book/manual and org-mode for ad-hoc memory aid. Both are text (ASCII/Unicode) based and if there is no tool for processing them (i.e. one doing what I want), I think I can help myself with good keyboard and some coffee. HTH -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_r...@bigfoot.com ** ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
