Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!watdragon!rose!ccplumb
From: ccplumb@rose.waterloo.edu (Colin Plumb)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Where can I get AmigaTeX
Message-ID: <16790@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Date: 29 Sep 89 15:58:51 GMT
References: <221@digi.UUCP> <856@madnix.UUCP> <228@estinc.UUCP> <1855@cs-spool.calgary.UUCP>
Sender: daemon@watdragon.waterloo.edu
Reply-To: ccplumb@rose.waterloo.edu (Colin Plumb)
Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario
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In article <1855@cs-spool.calgary.UUCP> pepers@cs-sun-fa.UUCP (Bradley Pepers) writes:

>Would anyone recomend TeX for writing a book (NOT a manual)? Or would a WP
>like WordPerfect be better?

It does, as others have pointed out, depend on the book.  A novel isn't too
demanding of the typesetting software.  But, as Knuth says, TeX is designed
for books.  Its utility for smaller things is nice, but many people complain,
with some justification, that it's too much hassle to get TeX set up for
a page or two.  In a longer work, the setup cost is proportionally less,
and TeX makes it very easy to fine-tune the layout.  The more attention you
plan to pay to appearance, the better TeX is, since it gives more control
than a word processor.

I don't use LaTeX myself, mostly due to laziness: I never could be bothered
to figure it out.  If I need three-column output at some time, I'll probably
learn rather than write my own output routines, but I can't comment on the
relative ease of using the two.  Plain TeX works fine for me.

(Actually, I have this mad dream of rewriting TeX to give it a saner
programming language, but that'll happen when the rich uncle I didn't
know about becasue I was adopted and never told dies...:-})
-- 
	-Colin