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I'm no Apple user so I don't know about Keynote. But for ensuring compatibility, I make sure that my wife's PowerPoint presentations are all converted to PDF.

Anyway, in Linux you could use Impress, which is more than enough for most people in need of a graphical slide editor.

As for me, in my lectures I use Beamer in LaTeX, which is more than enough for my needs. And its output is, again, PDF.

I can project anything of these with Okular in presentation mode, easily. So I think Linux is more than capable in the area.

For my embarassing notes I use the fixmetodonotes package that puts all my notes in bright yellow boxes with huge red FIXMEs warnings on the border. Hard to miss.

Technology is here to prevent us from embarassing ourselves.

``Pascal as defined was not suitable for large projects...''

Unless of course, one is Dr. Donald Knuth, then one creates a brand new programming paradigm: http://www.literateprogramming...

and writes programs such as TeX: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archiv...

Somewhere, I have a copy of the Oberon language manual printed out --- it's quite cool, and very concise.

Well, you are focusing on TeX, but LaTeX is a different issue. TeX is "just" its implementation language. Now I'll grant you that TeX as a programming language sucks: programming in TeX is about as much fun, probably less, as writing autoconf macros in m4.

Yet something like the "Kritische Gesamtausgabe Ernst Troeltsch" is written using LaTeX, employing the bigfoot package for multiple-layered footnotes.

This spells out an original text with footnotes, uses footnotes inside of either to point out different variants in different original publications (the currently edited volume contains some "variant" running through more than 20 pages), and the current publisher also has his own footnotes anchored in all of the above.

The customary process (explaining the price tag) is to print out each apparatus on paper, send all that stuff to home workers who do the page breaks and page arrangement using scissors and glue, they send the results back and they are scanned in as a template for the actual typesetting.

Fascinating. Turnaround time probably a month, and a renowned volume has 6 iterations in its budget. Explains the price tag. Using the LaTeX-based process (yes, the editors use some TeXshell, don't ask me which one, for entering all that stuff), an iteration takes something like 20 minutes. Which is startingly long (something like the source code of TeX typeset using Weave+TeX, takes a similar amount of pages and probably 5 seconds), but that's because a lot of page and line break combinations are scored and the best variant is chosen.

It's astonishing how much work is between "this meets the formal specifications as best as they could be specified" and "this no longer looks gratuitously crappy to the casual observer". Took several volumes to get all of that honed (work started with the simpler ones). But the point is that the comparatively open bowels of TeX facilitated combining its own scoring methods with external scoring and picking overall solutions based on that. The code is awful. It is structured and modular, but if you dig in, you get a headache.

You can't do that using Word. Not manually, and most certainly not automatically. Word does not expose the required information or hooks. Heck, Word can't even do a paragraph-long linebreak optimization (like even plain TeX does), so it does not actually have the kind of information you need for scoring well.

There's also camel: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/camel/

I'd love to see someone manage this using biblatex --- I wonder though if the solution isn't to turn the problem around --- type the citation, then after the fact, run a tool which finds all the cites, displays them in an interactive tool and allows one to match things up and extend them w/ links as you described.

Ever try PSTricks http://www.ctan.org/topic/pstricks? And yes, one can get them in 3D.

The digital version is too spindly since it preserves the original digitization's having been a stroke font rather than outline and is drawn w/ too narrow a pen.

It's also too clean and lacks the charm of the original (when it was typewritten using an IBM typewriter).

I actually rather like Computer/Latin Modern Mono:

http://mirrors.ctan.org/fonts/lm/fonts/opentype/public/lm/lmmonoltcond10-regular.otf

William

You can actually do most of this in LaTeX too. My latest book is about Go and was written while the final spec was still in flux, so it got a lot of iterations through copyediting before the final version. I used latexdiff to produce PDFs indicating all of the changes since the previous version, including insertions and deletions. I have it integrated into my build system, so I can just specify a subversion revision number and have it give me a diff against that one. You can also use standard tools for revision control and for small changes just look at the raw diff without typesetting it.

OpenOffice does have change tracking, but somehow the performance is terrible. On a large document, with changes visible, on a 2.2GHz quad core i7, it took several seconds for each character I typed to show up.

If you're in the position of having to typeset a book or give an opinion on the typesetting of one, you should read the documentation for the `memoir' package for LaTeX. (WARNING: It is huge)

pdfLaTeX!

Here's a tutorial: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/pdf-forms-tutorial
or
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/14842/creating-fillable-pdfs

htm5 schmaTML5. I wrote a fractal viewer in TeX, in 1995. How's that for useless? http://tug.ctan.org/cgi-bin/ctanPackageInformation.py?id=mandel

Use the Fourier fonts.

Because HTML continues to evolve LaTex does not.

Really? How long is it taking the W3C to release HTML 5?

It may be powerful at layout (but not as powerful as something like InDesign or Quark) but what I'm talking about it something that encompasses page layout, web design, and semantic markup.

LaTeX is working on semantic markup
http://tug.ctan.org/cgi-bin/ctanPackageInformation.py?id=stex

and

http://tug.ctan.org/cgi-bin/ctanPackageInformation.py?id=cool

As for web design, people are working on converting LaTeX to MathML.

it's also to be able to use that file to create decent web pages without any modification, that works with content management systems and the like.

And how do you presume to get all the browser vendors on board?

Because HTML continues to evolve LaTex does not.

Really? How long is it taking the W3C to release HTML 5?

It may be powerful at layout (but not as powerful as something like InDesign or Quark) but what I'm talking about it something that encompasses page layout, web design, and semantic markup.

LaTeX is working on semantic markup
http://tug.ctan.org/cgi-bin/ctanPackageInformation.py?id=stex

and

http://tug.ctan.org/cgi-bin/ctanPackageInformation.py?id=cool

As for web design, people are working on converting LaTeX to MathML.

it's also to be able to use that file to create decent web pages without any modification, that works with content management systems and the like.

And how do you presume to get all the browser vendors on board?

How many of these require javascript or some other non-FOSS implemented feature? The fact of the matter is that interactive PDFs are useful. You can essentially use them as a webpage, but everything is in one file and you don't have to worry about the other side, say, missing an obscure font. For example, I'm working on writing a math textbook and being able to include self-marking javascript tests for people to test themselves with would be very cool.

Calc also rocks, and is better then Excel for my usage pattern anyway.

To be honest, I don't use either Calc or Excel very much. The version of Excel I was using for a while started to piss me off for a couple dumb reasons (the main one was that it was sort of halfway between a SDI and MDI program, which meant that I was constantly doing the wrong thing) so I briefly switched to Calc, but it had some issues too (don't remember what they were) so I switched back. This was a while ago though.

So I probably shouldn't have been quite as categorical in my dismissal of OO outside of Writer, because Writer and Impress are the only ones I feel that I can speak to their quality.

I use Impressive now for all my presentations, no matter what program produced them...

Just looking at the front page, that looks pretty slick; I'll have to check it out. Thanks for the link. ...but most of my new presentations are being made with LaTeX Beamer.

[Not sure why I wrote all of this... whatever.]

Beamer is also pretty slick; I've used it a number of times. Both Beamer and PPT have a bunch of deficiencies relative to each other though, so which one I prefer varies. PPT, especially 2007:

• Can easily create some pretty darn nice graphics, while about the nicest graphics I've seen produced in Latex are in the manual for the PGF package, and they aren't quite as nice.
• Has presenter view. I keep going back to this, but it's a very important feature to me most of the time. The alternative is to deal with paper printouts of presenter notes (or memorize, which is often a non-option), which just isn't anywhere close to as nice, even if they are ultimately generated from the same Beamer document. (A feature for Impressive that would get me to switch with almost no reservation would be to allow you to build two PDFs -- just the slides, and the notes -- and display them side by side, with a timer and such on the notes page. Or just a text document for the notes or something.) (Ironically, I'll be using PPT and/or Beamer slides more this semester than I ever have before, but since the A/V setup I'll be using sucks, I won't be able to use presenter mode anyway, which is the only reason that I may switch to Beamer and PGF pretty soon.)
• Lets you embed things like movies, and lets you animate the objects in a slide. The latter especially is often used just for flash, but there are plenty of times that animation adds clarity. It's just too bad that it's a major PITA to do that sort of thing in PPT. The most animation that you can do in a Beamer document, at least to my knowledge, are slide transitions.
• The sorts of presentations I'm doing this semester are often going to be very image/diagram heavy, and placement of those is much easier in PPT than Beamer.

By contrast, Beamer gives you:

• In many ways, nicer presentations, but this is pretty dependent on the type of presentation too. If you don't have occasion to use things like their blocks, aren't doing a math-heavy presentation, and don't want the automatic navigation features like the bars at top and/or bottom, the differences are pretty minor. And if you start doing graphics not built with an external tool (and doing this has a lot of advantages), PPT's advantage starts to show up.
• Makes math way better. (But I'm not doing much math stuff.)
• Is programmable, which gives you things like PGF's tree library (which I probably will be using a lot).
• Works way better with version control

So basically, if I'm doing a math-heavy presentation, Beamer is the only reasonable choice (maybe unless you get something like Aurora which lets you put Latex in Office documents); if you're doing text-heavy presentation, which is a better choice depends on whether you want presenter mode; if you're doing a graphics-heavy presentation, I think a lot of the time PPT is the better choice.

Seconded. Even better would be XeTeX (or XeLaTeX) because the font handling is so much better.

Oh, and learn the Memoir class. It will change your life.

The GP question is spot on: there is a lot of interesting content on the web that I would like to read comfortably in my Hanlin.

• However, if you can only get said content as PDF you really need something like pdfcrop.pl.
• If you can recreate the PDF, use bitstream-charter fonts as these were made to be used in low resolution devices.

Regarding the awkward font mechanism, have a look at Xe(La)TeX: http://scripts.sil.org/xetex (or the upcoming luaTeX, http://www.luatex.org/).

For an experimental from-scratch replacement, look at Ant, http://ant.berlios.de/

Concerning bibliographies, the biblatex package is moving things forward (together with the many bibtex-aware bibliography managers). Graphics have gotten a big helper since the inception of the pgf/TikZ packages (for info about packages, see http://www.ctan.org/)

A lot of good editors are around to lighten the (not-so-heavy) code burden: emacs, kile, winedt, texshop, ...

If you want things to be simpler, but still get acceptably typeset (math/science) stuff, you're currently out of luck.

The language for creating new BibTex styles is so retarded it's not even funny. Basically, you can't do it.

Check out the biblatex package (http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/biblatex.html). It is far easier to create and modify bibliography styles. Although still rather new, it is rapidly gaining users and hence robustness. I work in the humanities and bibliography citation has never been handled adequately by any BibTeX style. I stumbled across biblatex a year ago and never looked back.

First of all, you have zero chance of finding anything better than LaTeX for mathematical/scientific typesetting. However, there are ways of solving lots of the problems you mention without chucking LaTeX out the window.

1. Frustrated that you're constantly having to download and install new packages, fonts, etc.? Try the everything-including-the-kitchen-sink distribution, TeX Live. If you're running Mac OS X, there's a great Mac-specific version of TeX Live called MacTeX, which also includes a number of front-end apps for editing, managing bibliographies, spell-checking, etc.
2. Hate the standard (La)TeX font, Computer Modern? You're not alone. For free, math-capable fonts (most of which are included in TeX Live/MacTeX), check out this illustrated survey. If you want the ability to use OpenType and other installed fonts on your system, as well as foreign language scripts, unicode, and other modern font features, check out the wonderful Xe(La)TeX and its fontspec package, both included in TeX Live/MacTeX (of course)
3. Want the ability to do real programming in (La)TeX, with a full scripting language? Check out LuaTeX (although it's still very much a work in progress).
4. Want a good LaTeX front-end/editor? IMHO, Scientific Word and Lyx try to hide the complexity behind a WYSIWYG interface -- but this makes things even more confusing, because the complexity is still there, but now it's invisible, so it's impossible to diagnose why your document doesn't look the way you want. What you really want is a text-editor with built-in templates, push-button PDF compiling, and other TeX-specific features. One of the most popular editors (justly so) is TeXShop, for Mac OS X. A cross-platform program called TeXWorks is in development (led by Jonathan Kew, who developed XeTeX), and promises to bring TeXShop's advantages to all platforms. If (like me) you're wedded to Emacs, there's the fantastic AUCTeX editing mode for all things TeX-related.
5. Read LaTeX books designed for users, not developers or those interested in the "theory" of typesetting. This means, in my opinion, to stay away from anything with "Knuth" in the byline. I really like Leslie Lamport's introductory book on LaTeX, which you should be able to track down at almost any university library if you don't want to buy it.

Above all, be patient, and be open to learning. It's understandable that you want to do powerful and flexible document processing, without having to learn a whole bunch of commands. Unfortunately, this has a lot of similarity with people who want to program computers without learning a programming language. ("Why can't the computer just understand what I want it to do, in plain English?") Any program powerful enough to do everything you want is also powerful enough to do lots of things you don't want -- and because the computer can't read your mind, you have to learn how to tell it exactly what you want.

Cheers,
IT

While the Memoir class manual is mainly of interest to LaTeX users, its opening chapters have an enlightening introduction to the history of book publishing, including the long use of the golden section. The concept is certainly relevant to DTP.

It took THREE VERSIONS to come up with a layout idea that's been used in newspapers for books for literally centuries?!

Web pages have infinite vertical space. Newspapers and books don't. Horizontal space is at a premium for web pages. It's not as important for newspapers and books. Unsurprisingly, a layout strategy that trades horizontal space for vertical space isn't a high priority for a technology primarily aimed at web pages. I wouldn't say that web standards that actually prioritise the web are nothing but "idiocy", I'd say that's entirely sensible.

Use LaTeX instead of plain TeX, it allows you to concentrate on content without the distraction of presentation.

\section{Sure}
% TODO: rewrite this paragraph
LaTeX allows you to concentrate on content\footnote{If you are able to ignore all the clutter in your text that makes it illegible.}. There is \emph{no distraction} whatsoever.

Don't blame the tool if you're using the wrong one instead of the one true Editor

P.S.: Don't use TODO comments in LaTeX. The FixMe package is much better.

Even better, check out the The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List (PDF file). For a quick and dirty overview of what kinds of symbols aren't in Times New Roman, a large scientific/mathematical subset of these have been converted to screen bitmaps: GIF and PNG Images for Math Symbols.

I'd thoroughly recommend the Not So ShortIntroduction to LaTeX. That's the only thing I read about LaTeX before writing my undergraduate dissertation with it. If you've got a problem it doesn't explain, then google ctan.org, and there's probably a package that solves it already (which may well be in your TeX distribution already).

Don't forget that TeX is a full programming language, and LaTeX is a set of macros built on top of this for semantic markup. The important thing while writing is to keep the semantics clear. Do this by defining marcos for new semantics you wish to capture, rather than falling back to syntactic markup. For example, I use a \keyword macro that makes the arguments italic and adds them to the index and a \code macro that syntax highlights short code snippets inline.

Since learning LaTeX, I've written an undergraduate dissertation, a PhD thesis, and a book using it, and I can't imagine going back to something like OpenOffice for any nontrivial documents.

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contr ib/mla-paper/

For a good LaTeX tutorial, I highly recommend A Beginner's Guide to LaTeX. It's a tremendous guide which is very useful both for learning LaTeX and as a reference. It's what I used to learn LaTeX, and I continued to use the guide as a reference throughout university in everything I wrote from essays to lab reports to research papers. Once you've got LaTeX and an IDE installed, hop into Chapter 2 and start reading.

If you want to stay in Latex use the memoir document class.

Personally I don't use OO because I can't swap files with people with whom I co-author scientific articles. MS Office and Open Office equations STILL don't work right (and before you LaTeX fanatics step in, neither of us speak that language).

Myself (and a number of my fellow students) love the 'track changes' features in Word.

When writing academic papers in LaTeX, I had a tough time understanding how the edits my advisors made improved the paper.

The visual nature of track changes

Dude I downloaded LaTeX for Windows last Wednesday and I'm hooked. It used to take me 30 minutes to do a single equation in Word's shitty editor; now I spew them out from my keyboard in seconds. LaTeX is absolutely fantastic - God's gift to anyone who needs to write documents with mathematics in them. And it just comes out looking like every textbook and paper that you've ever read - which actually adds a sheen of authenticity to your mistake-ridden work ;)

I love LaTeX. I just wanted to say that.

BTW if you can write HTML, you can write in LaTeX. It's not hard to learn at all.

Here is where I started: http://www.math.vanderbilt.edu/~schectex/wincd/int ro_to_tex.htm

Honestly I was writing complex vector equations down within a few hours, and most of that was download time.

Get the PDF "The Not So Short Guide to LaTex 2e" from here (linked on the above page):

ftp://cam.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/lshort/english /lshort.pdf

Skim through that while the packages download and you're golden.

There's plenty of WYSIWYG tools for Latex.

I'm always happy to see fellow TeX evangelists here. If you don't know about LaTeX yet, check out the TeX Frequently Asked Questions and discover the joys of a typesetting system that is not only high-quality, but free as in freedom and immensely extendable.

LaTeX's markup makes so much sense that a WYSIWYG tool isn't necessary, for even the man on the street can be just a productive with doing it up in a text editor. A good and free as in beer guide to the system is The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e , though if you are going to be markup up lots of math (LaTeX's specialty) you'll probably want Graetzer's Math Into LaTeX since LShort doesn't cover it so much.

TeX is, IMO, a little overkill for your CV

When I was at university doing my engineering degrees, I was able to type equations in to LaTeX on my Psion 5 faster than most were able to write. And I could then read and index my notes afterwards.

Learn LaTeX. It's the fastest way to record notes, be they mathematical or just text.

For diagrams it gets more complicated, but the Psion comes with some good drawing tools and you can just draw on the screen. Very easy.

scrlttr2 would be easy enough for the average office worker. Especially if you give them some examples.

I am convinced that every secretary who can cope with the quirks and annoyances of Word could work with LaTeX. It's not rocket science, you know?

Maybe they are afraid of the looks of a LaTeX file, but honestly, the looks of Microsoft Word scares the shit out of me, too!

Then I went back and read it and found that document does reference pen and paper and it also says "All these thoughts and ideas have one common goal: Reduce the users effort while creating a document. The user should only enter the data e.g. the text and define a layout and a structure. He should concentrate on the things that matter."

Perhaps someone should implement this. Someone might even write a GUI frontend to it!

Where do I find these "twins in latex" of which you speak? :)

pretty much anything in latex can be downloaded from www.ctan.org

Parent should be "insightful" not "funny"!
I pity the tired, poor, huddled masses brought up on things called "word processors" who may not even know that to breathe free today no voyage over the ocean is needed but a simple mouse-click is enough... Thanks to Don Knuth and the folks from the LaTeX3-project for this awesome gift.

Parent should be "insightful" not "funny"!
I pity the tired, poor, huddled masses brought up on things called "word processors" who may not even know that to breathe free today no voyage over the ocean is needed but a simple mouse-click is enough... Thanks to Don Knuth and the folks from the LaTeX3-project for this awesome gift.

My apologies for the swear word. Rough weekend.

pdftex's character protrusion feature is a lot more robust and flexible than using active characters, have you read Thanh's thesis? Also, if you spec dimens in sps you never have to use \pnt

I'm never satisfied about my work until bluelines or some other film-based proof shows up. proofing on a laser is neat, but only an approximation of the final product.

XeTeX is an excellent example of what TeX can do. Will Robertson's fontspec package (http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/xetex/late x/fontspec/) provides a nice interface to both OpenType and Apple Advanced Typography font capabilities --- it's the latter which I'm taking advantage of in my design, a font with an optical axis and two design axes. Darned shame Adobe let Multiple Master font whither. After that I do have plans for a METAFONT which I'm hoping will push the envelope on what can be done with MF.

MF vs. OT? Garamond Premier Pro has four sizes: Caption, Normal, Subhead and Display (and this seems to be all Adobe plans to do these days, see http://store.adobe.com/type/topics/opticalsize.htm l); Computer Modern has eight sizes (5,6,7,8,9,10,12,17). The typeface revival I'm working on had 15 sizes in hot metal, plus a lithographed poster (which has provided interesting insights into the design).

Sure, I could have 15 different named fonts, but even when setting style sheets it's tedious to change the size twice, and it makes for ungainly font menus. That also fails to address the two style axes (and if things continue to go well I'll probably do a weight axis --- the foundry did a demi-bold)

William

\NeedsTeXFormat{LaTeX2e}
\ProvidesPackage{newslet ter}
\LoadClass[a4paper,12pt]{article}[2000/01/01 ]
 
%Load Required Packages
\RequirePackage{multicol}
\RequirePacka ge{graphicx}
\RequirePackage{fancyhdr}
\RequireP ackage{lastpage}
 
\renewcommand\maketitle{\par
      \begingroup
    \renewcommand\thefootnote{\@fnsymbol\c@footnote}%
      \def\@makefnmark{\rlap{\@textsuperscript{\normalfo nt\@thefnmark}}}%
    \long\def\@makefntext##1{\parindent 1em\noindent
            \hb@xt@1.8em{%
                \hss\@textsuperscript{\normalfont\@thefnmark}}##1} %
    \newpage
    \global\@topnum\z@ % Prevents figures from going at top of page.
    \@maketitle
  \endgroup
  \setcounter{footnote}{0}%
  \global\let\maketitle\relax
  \global\let\@maketitle\relax
  \global\let\@date\@empty
  \global\let\@title\@empty
  \global\let\@issue\@empty
  \global\let\title\relax
  \global\let\date\relax
  \global\let\issue\relax
}
\def\@maketitle{%
  \newpage
  \null
  \begin{flushright}
    {\Huge Name of Newsletter}\includegraphics{your_logo_here.eps}
    \end{flushright}
  \begin{center}%
    \par\rule{360pt}{0.4pt}\par\vskip 0.4em%
    \begin{tabular}{ccc}
    \@title & \@issue & \@date\\
    \end{tabular}
    \rule{360pt}{0.4pt}\vskip 1em%
  \end{center}%
  \par\vskip 1.5em}
 
\pagestyle{fancy}
\rhead{Page \thepage/\pageref{LastPage}}
\cfoot{}
\renewcomm and{\headrulewidth}{0pt}
\renewcommand{\footrulew idth}{0pt}
 
\newcommand{\issue}[1]{\def\@issue{# 1}}
 
\addtolength{\voffset}{-48pt}
\addtolength {\textheight}{48pt}
\setlength{\headheight}{15pt}
 
\AtBeginDocument{%
\maketitle
\begin{multico ls}{3}
}
 
\AtEndDocument{\end{multicols}}

Currently I use LaTeX for documents and Lilypond for music.

For those who prefer paper flashcards and know LaTeX, I would recommend the flashcards package. It will generate high-quality flashcards and is highly configurable, plus LaTeX usually has fonts installed to handle all kinds of languages. Typesetting foreign languages become even easier with the latex-unicode package. If you are in a university setting, you can make good money by drawing up flashcards for yourself and selling copies to your classmates.

Try here.

Well, here's another reason he'd appear on Slashdot: he wrote TeX, which is even today the best free typesetting system. And it beats every commercial typesetting system for typesetting mathematics, which Microsoft, Adobe and others don't have a clue about after 20 years of research (indeed, most scientific publishers use TeX/LaTeX). You'll find it on your linux box: among other things, GNU TeXinfo uses it for printable manuals.

And yes, that's still the same Knuth -- he wrote TeX because he was unhappy with the publishers' typesetting of TAOCP.

The problem with LaTeX is that it's impossible to Google for document classes or other documents about it, because of the porn that comes up. Vanilla TeX has the same problem, except that you get derogatory pages about the President, instead.

You could start by actually looking in the obvious places first, and save yourself the trouble. There are a suprising amount of prepared packages and documentation for LaTeX available, you just actually have to look for it.

Jedidiah.

A good resource is the Not So Short LaTeX Tutorial. Additional packages are available from ctan.org. If you are writing anything that requires code listings, take a look at the listings package - among other things, it lets you add an entire source file complete with syntax highlighting and line numbering (completely configurable) with a single command.

If you've got a Mac, you should take a look at the Equation Service, which lets you type in LaTeX formulae and have them typeset to PDFs that you can then drag into other documents.

I found the layout of the recipe very nice, but it just doesn't scale if the steps are particularly complex -- look at how creme brulee was described if you don't believe me. However, something very similar that does scale is the latex style cooking by Axel Reichert (CTAN link: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contr ib/cooking/)

The essential difference is that instead of nesting columns, Axel's style uses only two columns which enables the second column to be very large if necessary. Though I've got to admit that for simple recipies, the cooking for engineer's site looks very good.

PS: Cooking is a great way to unwind after spending all day coding, especially if you don't mind the meal taking a few hours (and glasses of wine) to prepare...