On Thursday 29 May 2003 12:01, Herouth Maoz wrote: > It's more than that. Most people, unlike programmers, don't think in a > symbolic+logic way. Most don't try to find the most efficient way to > perform a task, but just *some* way to perform it, preferably a familiar > one. Our training has made us think in a different way than the majority of > people.
It's true that I expect people to be able to generalize and think in abstractions, at least on some basic level. Maybe I need to mix with less computer/math=oriented people to realize most people actually can't really do that :-( > > Thus, when writing a document, people don't think in the terms of a "level > 3 heading", but rather in a more intuitive way of "now I want a smaller > header so that people see it's not a new section but part of the old". If > you told them their document was hierarchical they would ask you why you > are cursing them. To them it's just big header - text - smaller header - > text - another big header - text. OK, so put hierarchical structures aside. If someone has two kinds of headers in his document, big and small ones, surely they can generalize to the point of telling the editor "this is a big header" instead of telling it "this is a 16pt. bold font"? They'd just see it as another miracle tool... Or have I lost touch with reality? > On another issue that was mentioned in this thread: So what if LaTeX > formats things like a book should look? Not everybody writes books, and > even books differ - a novel doesn't have the same format as a technical > book. A book is different than an article, a news article is different than > an academic article, and all of them are different than a fax or a recipe > or an exam form or a text page a teacher gives to the pupils. Those four > last things are what my mother uses her Word for - and they certainly > shouldn't be arranged like a book. Well, so tell latex about the styles and arrangement of a fax or recipe or whatever. There must be latex document classes for many things out there... -- Dan Armak Matan, Israel Public GPG key: http://cvs.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key
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