On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 5:11 PM, Jens Nöckel <noec...@uoregon.edu> wrote: > > On Feb 13, 2012, at 2:58 PM, stefano franchi wrote: > >> On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 4:44 PM, Uwe Stöhr <uwesto...@web.de> wrote: >>> Am 13.02.2012 23:35, schrieb stefano franchi: >>> >>> >>>> Well, that's exactly the issue. IF your publisher does the >>>> typesetting, THEN you can forget about LaTeX. >>> >>> >>> I don't know any scientific publisher who is not using TeX. Also most of the >>> humanity-linked publishers are using it in the background. They sometimes >>> even require MS Word format but transform the word file to TeX to be able to >>> layout the text properly. So just ask you publisher. >> >> Sorry Uwe, but this is not true---at least not in the US. Most >> publishers in my field (Humanities) do not use latex at all. When >> they ask for Word is because they use inDesign or Quark Xpress (this >> one less and less true). And smaller presses--or not so small >> presses, like Rodopi---just go for PDF+print-on demand. I hear from >> colleagues that the social sciences are the same. Latex dominates in >> CS and Math only. Even some (and, I hear, more and more) hard >> scientists (i.e. physicists) now use word. >> > Sorry, Stefano - but LaTeX is undoubtedly the main physics publication > vehicle. >
Glad to hear it! The day MS Word goes out of existence I will be a happy camper. > And LyX has gotten orders of magnitude better at decoupling the user > experience from the LaTeX source in the past decade, so I would agree that > you no longer need to know LaTeX to use it in a standard way. There are still > the occasional LaTeX errors, but I can't recall any specific recent example, > and that just proves that things have improved a lot… Here we disagree. I have been helping another user with a conversion issue just today---and I would not have gone anywhere without knowing (a bit of) LaTex. Lyx may well have reach the poitn where 80% or 90% of what you need to do is Latex-free. Even 95%. Still, it is not 100% (and, in my opinion, it never will. Latex certainly isn't). This is not meant to be a criticism of the great job of the Lyx developers. I think Lyx is a great program that would deserves a much greater user base than it has. I am certainly glad I use it---and I don't use it anything else. I'll shut up now---we are veering dangerously close to pure philosophy---and that's work ;-) Cheers, Stefano -- __________________________________________________ Stefano Franchi Associate Research Professor Department of Hispanic Studies Ph: +1 (979) 845-2125 Texas A&M University Fax: +1 (979) 845-6421 College Station, Texas, USA stef...@tamu.edu http://stefano.cleinias.org
