On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 11:59 AM, Ray Rashif <schivmeis...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11 December 2012 01:21, Jacob Bishop <bishop.ja...@gmail.com> wrote: > > have found very few people in the social sciences who are even aware of > > LaTeX. Not closed minded, just unaware. They use MS Word and Endnote > because > > they don't know that there are good/better (free) alternatives. > > And this stems from the fact that social science has negligible need > for (typesetting) equations, because that's what really sets LaTeX > apart. With MS Word you can configure references, cite them and > arrange your document based on styles. For qualitative/descriptive > papers, that is enough. As such, few people find any need to go out of > their way to look for something better. > > <rant> Not true. LyX/Latex's benefits are not limited to typesetting equations (although it does a much better job that its competition in that area). A Latex-typeset document looks better in many other respects---from paragraph-division and typesetting (in spite of recent improvements in Word's algorithms), to consistent application of style, down to small but crucial things such as determining font sizes/leading[1]. The reason why Social sciences/Humanities are happy with Word/Endnote is (historically speaking) different: authors used to submit Word files (or, earlier, Wordstar) and the publisher would import and typeset with real typesetting software. Such programs (and still are) were usually very bad at typesetting complex mathematical formulas unless each single formula was tweaked by hand, a very painful and expensive proposition. That was prompted D Knuth to invent TeX---the poor quality of professional typesetting software for math, not the similar but irrelevant problem in word processing program. The lack of equations in the Humanities/Social Sciences made the traditional process working smooth and insured that the typographical quality of publications in the fields was high, or at least acceptable. Authors used primitive (typographically speaking) software, publishers used real typesetters and everyone was happy. Except...that desktop publishing happened and publishers started to cut down on costs by using word as a typesetting program. Even worse, when they started asking for pdf, camera-ready they would provide typographical specs as series of Word instructions, since they do not know any better (all the typesetters having long gone). The result is that the vast majority of Humanities/Social Sciences journal and and increasing number of Humanities *books* are now typographically ugly and often barely readable The same radical cost-cutting measures took place in the Natural sciences/Engineering, of course. But since *they* were already using Latex/TeX, the quality of their journal and books was only minimally affected (although it was: it takes a truly capable typesetter to achieve high results in Latex--relying on standard classes is only the starting point. And most authors not named Knuth are not great typesetters). That's why we in the Humanities are stuck with Word as a publishing tool---because it used to work well as a drafting tool when the industry worked differently, not because we do not use equations. </rant> -- __________________________________________________ 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
