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Using open-source tools for documenting research
Using open-source tools for documenting research
Posted Jan 24, 2006 5:16 UTC (Tue) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599)In reply to: Using open-source tools for documenting research by nix
Parent article: Using open-source tools for documenting research
And documents pretty much never break. I just re-LaTeXed a document I wrote in 1994. It worked, and it looked the same as it did back then.
That was not my experience. LaTeX changed rather massively between 2.09 and 2e; I found I had to make several changes to my dissertation (ca. 1995) to get it to "compile." And it sounds (or sounded, anyway) like 3.0 will/would be an even bigger break. Of course, these days my usage is limited to the occasional one-page letter, so I'm not terribly worried about future compatibility...
Greg
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Using open-source tools for documenting research
Posted Jan 25, 2006 16:09 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Yes; 2.09 -> 2e was a large jump, but *2.09 still works*, because it runs atop an unchanging core (TeX). So you can use both at once for different documents. :)
Using open-source tools for documenting research
Posted Jan 25, 2006 16:26 UTC (Wed) by roelofs (subscriber, #2599) [Link]
Ah, thanks for the clarification.Of course, from a practical standpoint, that means one needs to compile and install 2.09 first--and web2c before that, most likely--since no distribution of which I'm aware ships both. If you have lots of older documents and need only to do a one-time conversion to PDF (for example), that may be the simplest approach. But in general I'd expect most people would find it easier to modify the document(s). ;-)
Greg
Using open-source tools for documenting research
Posted Jan 26, 2006 14:45 UTC (Thu) by fgrosshans (guest, #35486) [Link]
I think not: Latex2e has a compatibility mode, pretending to be latex 2.09 when it processes documents starting with \documentstyle instead of \documentclass .
Disclaimer: I never tested this functionnality.
Fred
Using open-source tools for documenting research
Posted Jan 26, 2006 19:49 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
The compatibility mode isn't terribly capable. It can handle simple documents.