[Tfug] Followup [Re: Desktop Publishing Software]

[Claude Rubinson]

On Thu, Nov 08, 2007 at 05:42:43PM -0700, Predrag Punosevac wrote:
> On 11/8/07, Claude Rubinson <rubinson at u.arizona.edu> wrote:
> > Andy's correct.  Moreover, I work in LaTeX every single day.  Of
> > course I thought about using it.  But it's not the correct tool for
> > all tasks--despite what some people think (see, e.g., Beamer).  In
> > particular, it's not ideal for tasks such as this which are primarily
> > about presentation and layout, rather than structured content.

> I do not know what you mean by Beamer.  Do you need to do
> presentations?

No. I was using Beamer as an example of something for which LaTeX is
inappropriate: presentations.

> I honestly didn't try to use TeX to write a news-letter/newspaper so
> I might be very wrong about suitability of the TeX for such things.

TeX is a typesetting language.  Certainly it can be used directly but
there are more efficient/less tedious ways to accomplish such tasks.
Hence, LaTeX, which, in contrast, is a basically a content markup
language.  I love LaTeX; as I said, I use it all the time.  But LaTeX
is almost always the wrong choice when you have a low content:form
ratio, that is to say, when the form of the presentation is more
important than its content or, as Marshall McLuhan said, "the medium
is the message" (such as is the case for PowerPoint-type presentations
and many newsletters).

Indeed, for precisely this reason, it has occurred to me that I might
try using Scribus for the next presentation I need to create.

Claude