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The social construction of DTPThe social construction of DTPPosted Jul 17, 2003 15:43 UTC (Thu) by wjhenney (guest, #11768)In reply to: More TeX advocacy by dr_lha Parent article: Scribus 1.0 released
At the risk of turning into a bore, I'll rise to the bait here... nobody in the publishing world considered LaTeX to be a DTP program and until very recently nobody considered Linux to be a desktop operating system, despite the fact that it has been on my desktop for a decade :) Of course you are right that the concept `DTP', as commonly used, is a social construct that is "intrinsically linked to programs like Quark Xpress." I was just hoping that people in the free-software world could see through all that marketing BS, and would adopt a more `empirical' (or at the very least `instrumental') definition. Your analogy with Emacs vs Word Processors is interesting, but IMO flawed. Emacs is not a Word Processor because it is not designed to fulfil (many) of the functions of a Word Processor (typesetting simple letters, reports, etc.) and AFAIK nobody uses it for such tasks. On the other hand, TeX-based systems are designed to fulfill the same functions as `DTP apps' (among many others) and are used by at least some people to do so. I think a more apt analogy would be with Emacs vs IDEs. Is Emacs an IDE? A typical MS Visual Studio user might not think so but I certainly do. It integrates any compiler/debugger you care to mention, has syntax highlighting and class browsing for all languages under the sun, etc. Go by the smell, not by the looks :) Cheers Will
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