On Tue, 11 Sep 2007 10:19:12 +0530, jtd jtd@mtnl.net.in said:
On Tuesday 11 September 2007 09:14, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
For what it is worth, in 20 years of usage, with two masters theses and a Ph.D. thesis, I've never had TeX crash on me -- not even once. And it understands kerning too.
And it's the right tool for laying out a document and producing output in multiple formats.
I think you mean docbook here. TeX is designed for printing, though people have tried to hack dvi-to-html conversion with varying success. I tend to ship PDF, usually.
Unfortunately my half hearted attemtps to use tex and Latex have been just that.
Like a lot of capable tools, it does have a learning curve.
Also afaik there is the problem of importing spreadsheets and documents from OO into tex. I did attend a workshop by Dr.Nag many yrs ago and the o/p generated by tex in particular maths formula is years ahead of other layout tools.
TeX is not a layout tool, or a word processor. It is a Typesetting tool.
And yes, trying to import a word processor document into TeX would be ... difficult, and, in my opinion, pointless. The preferred method, I someone put a gun to my head, would be to export to plain text, and than add TeX or LaTeX markup.
I use TeX for print, and Docbook for online presentation; and usually the destination for the document is well enough established for me to chose one or the other a priori.
manoj