More TeX advocacy

More TeX advocacy

Just to make up for the brevity of my initial post...

Firstly, I'm sure that Scribus is a great program. I wish it and its authors the greatest success. My only gripe was with the advertising copy and the implied dismissal of the TeX universe.

There seem to be various respects in which Scribus wins over the TeX family. For example pdfTeX does not generate fully PDF/X-3 compliant output the last time I looked (but someone is working on it, so that info may be out of date). Also, although it is pretty easy in LaTeX to have funny-shaped paragraphs dotted over the page, flowing a paragraph through various disjointed boxes is notoriously difficult to do in LaTeX, making it not really a suitable tool for say magazine layout. Scribus' integration of color management also looks promising. On the other hand, many of the comments in response to my initial post betray a lack of appreciation of what TeX in the broadest sense is capable of. There is a showcase of documents prepared with TeX, many of which are far from the kinds of scientific/mathematical works that TeX is famous for (and many of which are not so far....)

(dr_lha) What TeX is good at is producing textbook style typesetting with excellent support for equations, mostly in black and white

Yes, this is what TeX is famous for but that doesn't mean it can't do the other stuff. All manner of color separation, trapping, etc. can be handled easily.

(jmalcolm) I would expect that most Tex output that becomes books in a store would go through a program like this at some point even if the author did not know it.

This may well be the case but I think that just reflects the mindset of a typical print shop, rather than any intrinsic limitations of TeX-based solutions. Remember, most Windows users are incapable of sending a PS file to a laser printer without first loading it into some &#!?% program or other (although I'm sure that no LWN-reading Windows users fall into that category).

(dr_lha) LaTeX (therefore TeX) are typesetting languages, not DTP. DTP software is all about laying out things on a page how you would like to see them, with great control over the position of objects

(utidjian) Well yes, as a GUI DTP app it is the first that I have seen. LaTeX et al, are hardly DTP apps.

I suppose that for some suitable definition of DTP app, then you are right that LaTeX is not one :)  Seriously though, I think that if `DTP' is supposed to signify more than just a sociological group or a market segment for software vendors then it would have to include LaTeX. Is it a requirement that a DTP app have a GUI? LaTeX has many, including LyX as you mention, but in my opinion the best is emacs :). I would venture that TeX-the-program is `just' a typesetting language, LaTeX-the-program is `just' a TeX-based document-design/markup language, but that TeX/LaTeX/etc-the-system most definitively is functionally equivalent to a DTP app. It sure don't look like Quark or InDesign but I'd say that the output is generally just as "professional" and "press-ready" (in the right hands, of course). Interestingly, the Wikipedia entry for LaTeX gives equal billing to `typesetting' and `DTP' in the first paragraph, so at least one other person in the world agrees with me.

(dr_lha) with TeX the software makes the decisions for you in terms of layout, using complex typesetting rules (which can often mean if you have a specific layout in mind that breaks these rules you have to battle TeX to get it to do what you want).

It is true that LaTeX philosophy is generally to discourage user-intervention in the physical layout on the page. This has obvious advantages when you are writing, say, a novel or a scientific paper. However, if you want "great control over the position of objects" then all the facilities are there. Check out, for example, the pstricks package.

For those who are interested, ConTeXt is a newer TeX-based typesetting system, aimed specifically at high-end publishing and with an even stronger claim than LaTeX to DTP-hood. I haven't used it for any serious work but it seems to be very well integrated (not really an accusation that can be leveled at LaTeX) and, if the docs are anything to go by, is well-suited to producing the flashier stuff that LaTeX has traditionally abjured (for instance, you can easily embed MathML, MetaPost, and JavaScript in your documents).

Best Wishes,

Will Henney