YB>> as can be. The truth is, Office is very powerful, but very complex, YB>> very unintuitive, buggy, and mostly unused. We (at least in principle), YB>> the OS/FS people, prefer things that are either simple and do not shy YB>> being so, or powerful and also do not shy being so (and therefore are YB>> cleaner, since they do not try to hide the complexity).
Well, the whole history of software development is hiding the complexity. Can we provide an alternative to the user that wants to do his word-processing - with all basic needs that he has - easily? And then - can we supply not-so-basic needs also? YB>> things like LaTeX. Nobody has a pressing need to send LaTeX as the basic YB>> email format, even though we can (and it's probably even almost trivial YB>> to make your email client run latex and show you the dvi). The problem, however, is that to make some basic things in LaTeX takes considerable time, but to make them in Word takes much less time - and it so happens that the set of these tasks has considerable intersection with the set of tasks Joe User and Jane Secretary face daily. While I admire the power of LaTeX, I remember that trying to write my coursework once using only LaTeX turned out to be somewhat frustrating experience. Being a stubborn person, I invested about 3 days of time and learned what are packages, how to change fonts, even how to make it understand non-Latin things (not so trivial task back then, I guess much easier now), what to do when LaTeX reports cryptic errors and how to control various details I never knew about. After all, that is much easier and cleaner than programming for 8080 processor, so why couldn't I do that? But the big question is whether the proverbial Joe User would invest this time to grasp the power of LaTeX - or he will turn to less powerful, more bloated, costy - but easy to use - product. I think the history has given its verdict for this question. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] \/ There shall be counsels taken Stanislav Malyshev /\ Stronger than Morgul-spells phone +972-50-624945 /\ JRRT LotR. whois:!SM8333 ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
