On Thursday 25 May 2006 07:43 pm, Stephen Harris wrote: [clip] > Designing such a menu seems quite ambitious, even for a > subset of possibilities. I would have thought it impossible > if Steve Litt, who wrote the layout tutorial, hadn't said > he thought it was a good idea. It just seems so dynamic!
I envision a small subset of the totality of possible environment and command tweaks. Certainly fonts are fairly easy, at least I think so. Margins might be pretty easy. Once somebody (like me with some help) has delivered margins and fonts, others will add other functionality as it gains popularity. > What we need here is a breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence, > so I'm having trouble fathoming building a menu-driven new .cls > or .layout file creator as even a debatable possibility that > doesn't need expert human supervision and knowledge feedback. > I am really interested to see how this (can possibly) works. Hi Stephen, I'm not necessarily saying it wouldn't need some human intervention, nor am I saying it would always produce exactly the right results, especially at first. However, without the menu driven interface, most people would just give up. Only a huge need kept me from giving up. Probably the layout tweaking program would need to be accompanied by LaTeX documentation, and by that I mean how to modify LaTeX, not just a listing of all the commands. > > The proof of the pudding is in the eating not the view, That's true. Half the projects I bragged that I'd create never saw the light of day. SteveT Steve Litt Author: * Universal Troubleshooting Process courseware * Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful Technologist * Manager's Guide to Technical Troubleshooting * Twenty Eight Tales of Troubleshooting * Rapid Learning: Secret Weapon of the Successful Technologist http://www.troubleshooters.com/bookstore http://www.troubleshooters.com/utp/tcourses.htm
