SCO director defends fight-back stance (ComputerWorld)

SCO director defends fight-back stance (ComputerWorld)

I agree with gilb's response. If you're starting from scratch and are a gooey kind of guy, then FrameMaker has the advantage of a shorter learning curve. Relative to LaTeX, Frame has the disadvantage of inferior typesetting , restricted foramatting, and cumbersome mathematical expression handling.

LaTeX has a longer, steeper learning curve -- but if you are a programmer it is not hard to relate to. Also depends on one's motivation. Twenty years ago I was a grad student in mathematical physics at University of Utah. TeX had just become available on the Math Department's Vaxen. The departmental secretaries were tripping over themselves in their rush and desire to learn this typesetting language. These were secretaries, not programmers. And this was TeX, not LaTeX. And these were multiplexed character terminals, not video monitors. But these gals had spend their careers hoarding alternate golf-balls for their IBM Selectrics upon which they painstakingly prepared journal manuscripts for their math professorial clients. You bet they were motivated. A year later LaTeX was out and Nelson Beebe had written a nifty set of LaTeX mode macro's for Alice's Emacs. That was like heaven.

That was also twenty years ago, and people's standards and tolerance for pain have diminished. I learned LaTeX on that system, and prepared two dissertations and three articles for some fairly prestigious journals. The subsequent advent of dedicated individual workstations, video monitors, and Xdvi has made LaTeX just a joy to use -- for me. But I already have gone through the process of learning it. But by comparison FrameMaker just seems clumsy and slow.

Again, that is to my own perception. By "slow" I mean by how fast it takes *me* to input and format documents containing even a minimal amount of mathematical expression. Keep in mind that typesetting mathematical books, and typesetting beautiful mathematical books, was Knuth's motivation for developing TeX and its associated fonts in the first place. The result is unsurpassed. All the journals of the American Mathematical Society and American Physical Society except manuscripts as LaTeX files using journal-specific style sheets. If you mant to see the end result, browse the mathematics sections of your local technical bookstore and note how many authors have set their products using LaTeX, and the unsurpassed quality of their results.

Their are also good packages for incorporating figures and drawings into LaTeX markup files, but I haven't used them much myself.

But any of these systems takes time and research to learn to use well. Which to choose will also depend on your targeted applications and environment. I've spoken from the mathematics and physics perspective, at which LaTeX has no peer. But if you are looking for a skill applicable to a particular company or industry that has standardized on FrameMaker, well, LaTeX might not be such a good choice. As FrameMaker might not be so good if your targeted environment has already standardized on DocBook or SGML.

Plan ahead. One size does not fit all.