is likely a limitation of the use of FrameMaker to compose the document and an unwillingness to set up new styles to put them together (unfortunately O'Reilly hasn't use TeX for a title since _Making TeX Work_) and was probably let stand since they needed a particular page count to come out to even signatures anyway.
Speedracer: The Videogame --- there's a notice for Lua scripting on the copyright screen, so Nintendo can't be said to be forbidding opensource solely for being opensource, so there seems to be some sort of misunderstanding or miscommunication here.
Traditionally the US Marine Corp has defended embassies --- the problem of course is that they have to be in uniform to comply w/ treaty requirements &c. (as would the Army) Hence the perceived need for a civilian group to do this.
I believe though, that rather than contract this out to the lowest (or only) bidder that they should create a division of the state department to provide such services --- much more accountability and controllability. Okay, so one loses the easy ability to cancel the contract, but aren't long-term commitments for this sort of thing better?
The wire hanger antenna is supposed to be better than most of the commercial versions --- it's basically free so I'd suggest making one and trying it before dismissing it.
Similar difficulties here in the past --- when the local PBS affiliate was broadcasting in digital while everyone else was analog, I could receive them just fine w/ the rabbit ear antenna in the basement as a digital signal despite that being a non-optimal antenna configuration / location.
Since the digital switch over they've dropped their signal strength and in order to even begin to receive a signal I had to make an antenna out of wire hangers and move it up to the living room:
Agree completely that ebooks (and readers) need to move beyond a static representation / recreation of a printed text (though in doing this they need to preserve niceties of fine book typography such as avoiding orphans and widows, preventing stacks, have decent justification algorithms (why isn't there an ebook reader program which uses TeX's algorithm) and use nice typefaces which are legible and readable).
Rather a shame Tim Berners Lee didn't use TeXview.app as inspiration for worldwideweb.app rather than TextEdit.app.
It doesn't feel natural to me to use a mouse to control and fire a firearm, or a sword and besides, I sit at a chair and push a mouse around all day at work (and sometimes longer) --- it's not something I want to do for leisure.
The Wii allows for interesting, natural interfaces which minimize button mashing and allow for more immersion, which for me equates to fun.
Better still, one can use various gun shells to improve the verisimilitude --- I've even been making Wii Zapper-like pistols in my wood shop and handing them out to co-workers along w/ used copies of Link's Crossbow Training so that we can all compete for high scores.
Do yourself a favour, open your mind, get your keister out of your chair, grab a Wii Zapper or other gun shell (the Nyko Perfect Shot Pistol is excellent if you have large hands) and try an FPS on a WII, e.g.:
- ranger levels in _Link's Crossbow Training_
- Quantum of Solace --- this game is quite a bit of fun, almost as good as Goldeneye
- Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
- Medal of Honor
- Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles
- House of the Dead: Overkill
Unfortunately Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition doesn't work well w/ a standard gun shell, though GameStop makes a 2-button one which does work w/ it.
A game which almost makes it is the prosaically named Ski and Shoot (a biathlon game) which also supports the Wii Balance Board --- I'd really like to see an FPS which did this well.
When will there be a way to check a person's marijuana intoxication level quickly and easily at a traffic stop?
Until there is such a check, legalizing marijuana would make the current drunk driving problem many times more difficult in terms of detection and enforcement.
My wife's Mac SE is still running System 6.0.8 just fine too.
And my mother-in-law gave me her Esterbrook fountain pen which she received as a graduation present in 1950 which works wonderfully, though I mostly use a Sheaffer Agio w/ custom ground 0.8mm italic nib (the 9312 medium italic for the Esterbrook is a bit wide for day-to-day use).
And there's the Remington No. 4.32 rimfire rolling block rifle which my father received in lieu of money from someone on his newspaper route when he was a boy during World War II --- made in 1898 or so.
And your algorithm for handling multiple floats in a document so that all are placed optimally and every chapter last page has at least 6 lines of text is available in an implementation where?
Look at the Dummies books --- the people doing them don't care much about typography and layout.
However, while I was told it's Word beginning to end, that doesn't seem to be the case for _Podcasting for Dummies_ --- if one opens up the sample.pdfs they have Quark Xpress cropmarks on them, so I'll have to retract my incorrect blanket statement.
You may also want to look into tools like pstricks and eukleides.
William
Re:Much more than you think leaves Word & Co.
on
MS Word 2010 Takes On TeX
·
· Score: 3, Informative
you said: >There aren't entire books that are PUBLISHED using Word and other, non-professional typesetting tools
Sadly, that's not the case.
The `` for Dummies'' imprint for example is done entirely in Word using a publisher-provided stylesheet --- there are others, but I can't recall the title of the one which my previous employer did for a client.
There's even a New York phone directory (a smallish one, marketed to a specific ethnic group) which my employer prints which is formatted using Word --- I know 'cause they haven't worked out a way to do the bleed tabs, so I wrote a LaTeX file which assembles their pages and stamps them w/ the bleed tab (and if need be has options to adjust the page placement 'cause it's often inconsistent from one section to the next).
- it's not What You See Is What You Get, but intent rather on defining the appropriate structure of a document --- the one book I got for production which was authored in LyX (back when I was doing LaTeX composition) was well-formed LaTeX and the basic formatting was accomplished ``merely'' by redefining some LaTeX commands and environments
- unlike all-too many opensource applications it's not trying to slavishly duplicate an existing application, but rather creatively solve a problem considering fully what's gone before.
- all the positive attributes of LaTeX, none of the binary / proprietary negatives of Word
There aren't that many other tools which have attempted to handle the scientific authoring / publishing challenge --- FrameMaker is moribund (and its typographic features were always lacking --- no baseline shift beyond super / subscript?!?), Publicon doesn't seem to be getting much traction --- TeXmacs as you asked after is the only other tool coming to mind at the moment. My problem w/ it is that it seduces authors into making adjustments to layout too early, just as Word does.
Ligatures are mostly decorative these days --- the original reason for them was to handle kerns which intruded into other characters, hence the existence of fi and fl --- also Gutenberg used optional / alternate ligatures to facilitate evening out the spacing of his lines, but that fell by the wayside, and has yet to be reasonably automated (though that was one of the intents of the HZ algorithm which URW developed and Aldus licensed to use in what became Adobe InDesign).
I make extensive use of Zapfino's ligatures in a small ``Peace on Earth'' card which the TeX User's Group mailed out one year:
But you're not using a better front-end for LaTeX --- you're directly editing ``raw latex in a text editor''.
I didn't say LyX was more user-friendly than Word, merely that it's the most user-friendly interface for LaTeX which has yet been achieved.
The only thing comparable is using word2tex or wordml2latex w/ matched up Word styles and latex macros --- and I guarantee that if you set up such a system some na\"ve user will use local formatting which breaks it --- by contrast LyX w/ a custom layout format can be locked down using file permissions so that the user can't do anything but what's correct.
- paragraph hyphenation is brain-dead one-line at a time
- one must invoke commands to generate the ToC and Index and remember to re-invoke them if pagination changes
- documents are non-portable / formatting is dependent on currently installed printer
- graphics can be embedded and can be nightmarish to get out in a press-ready form
- citations require third-party extensions which can interfere w/ importing / processing documents (hit Command shift F9 to convert all selected form fields to text)
- There is no easy way to assign paragraph styles --- one has to build a custom toolbar to have them all available w/ a click, the arrangement of said toolbar is dependent on the _length_ of the stylenames --- why the outline view can't have some sort of pop-up menu or ability to assign more than Heading 1--n and Normal is beyond me
- local formatting is insidious --- create an InDesign document, assign styles to everything, formatting everything w/ styles, take it into Word, then bring it back into InDesign and one will still have to clear over-rides to keep the text from being formatted as Times New Roman
and all of that doesn't consider stupid / ignorant users and the visually formatted, but not structured documents which they always create. Best indictment of that here:
If typography were easy, Word wouldn't be the foetid mess which it is.
One will also never use Word as the basis for back-end typesetting systems --- I've done them for customized children's stories and telephone directory line ads --- a co-worker (Jeff McArthur) at my previous workplace developed one which would do customized versions of the CIA World Factbook as a demo --- the original version did the typesetting for a 2,200 page register and the technology was customized and sold to several customers.
William (who wrote a several thousand line WordBASIC macro to handle the formatting for a review journal for a major sci-med publisher so that the text could be pulled into Quark XPress 6, then 7, then finally InDesign CS3 --- I also wrote a xelatex package for typesetting the journal, but that was nixed by my boss 'cause if the journal had been done in TeX it would've been outsourced to India)
Slashdot Mirror
For that kind of money they could put a copy of the ``Death and Taxes'' poster:
http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/
in almost every schoolroom and courtroom and courthouse in the country.
William
Just after I posted I wondered if O'Reilly was still so wedded to FM and wished I could've taken the time to research the matter.
Thanks for correcting my wrong assumption and setting the record straight.
William
is likely a limitation of the use of FrameMaker to compose the document and an unwillingness to set up new styles to put them together (unfortunately O'Reilly hasn't use TeX for a title since _Making TeX Work_) and was probably let stand since they needed a particular page count to come out to even signatures anyway.
William
Apparently you never played Barbarian or Obliterator (classic games for the Commodore Amiga and certain other 8-bit systems).
They used a joystick for movement, the mouse for targeting long distance weapons and the keyboard for all other functions.
Very well done and most importantly a lot of fun and incredibly immersive.
William
Speedracer: The Videogame --- there's a notice for Lua scripting on the copyright screen, so Nintendo can't be said to be forbidding opensource solely for being opensource, so there seems to be some sort of misunderstanding or miscommunication here.
William
Traditionally the US Marine Corp has defended embassies --- the problem of course is that they have to be in uniform to comply w/ treaty requirements &c. (as would the Army) Hence the perceived need for a civilian group to do this.
I believe though, that rather than contract this out to the lowest (or only) bidder that they should create a division of the state department to provide such services --- much more accountability and controllability. Okay, so one loses the easy ability to cancel the contract, but aren't long-term commitments for this sort of thing better?
William
After the local PBS affiliate reduced their signal strength I had to make an antenna to get a signal:
http://current.org/ptv/ptv0821make.pdf
Anyone who is having reception difficulties who hasn't tried an antenna specifically designed for digital reception might want to consider it.
William
The wire hanger antenna is supposed to be better than most of the commercial versions --- it's basically free so I'd suggest making one and trying it before dismissing it.
William
Similar difficulties here in the past --- when the local PBS affiliate was broadcasting in digital while everyone else was analog, I could receive them just fine w/ the rabbit ear antenna in the basement as a digital signal despite that being a non-optimal antenna configuration / location.
Since the digital switch over they've dropped their signal strength and in order to even begin to receive a signal I had to make an antenna out of wire hangers and move it up to the living room:
http://current.org/ptv/ptv0821make.pdf
If you're using rabbit ears, try the weird looking antenna --- it's ugly, but it works.
William
You mean like this?
http://www.mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.html
Agree completely that ebooks (and readers) need to move beyond a static representation / recreation of a printed text (though in doing this they need to preserve niceties of fine book typography such as avoiding orphans and widows, preventing stacks, have decent justification algorithms (why isn't there an ebook reader program which uses TeX's algorithm) and use nice typefaces which are legible and readable).
Rather a shame Tim Berners Lee didn't use TeXview.app as inspiration for worldwideweb.app rather than TextEdit.app.
William
It doesn't feel natural to me to use a mouse to control and fire a firearm, or a sword and besides, I sit at a chair and push a mouse around all day at work (and sometimes longer) --- it's not something I want to do for leisure.
The Wii allows for interesting, natural interfaces which minimize button mashing and allow for more immersion, which for me equates to fun.
Better still, one can use various gun shells to improve the verisimilitude --- I've even been making Wii Zapper-like pistols in my wood shop and handing them out to co-workers along w/ used copies of Link's Crossbow Training so that we can all compete for high scores.
Do yourself a favour, open your mind, get your keister out of your chair, grab a Wii Zapper or other gun shell (the Nyko Perfect Shot Pistol is excellent if you have large hands) and try an FPS on a WII, e.g.:
- ranger levels in _Link's Crossbow Training_
- Quantum of Solace --- this game is quite a bit of fun, almost as good as Goldeneye
- Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
- Medal of Honor
- Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles
- House of the Dead: Overkill
Unfortunately Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition doesn't work well w/ a standard gun shell, though GameStop makes a 2-button one which does work w/ it.
A game which almost makes it is the prosaically named Ski and Shoot (a biathlon game) which also supports the Wii Balance Board --- I'd really like to see an FPS which did this well.
William
When will there be a way to check a person's marijuana intoxication level quickly and easily at a traffic stop?
Until there is such a check, legalizing marijuana would make the current drunk driving problem many times more difficult in terms of detection and enforcement.
William
My wife's Mac SE is still running System 6.0.8 just fine too.
And my mother-in-law gave me her Esterbrook fountain pen which she received as a graduation present in 1950 which works wonderfully, though I mostly use a Sheaffer Agio w/ custom ground 0.8mm italic nib (the 9312 medium italic for the Esterbrook is a bit wide for day-to-day use).
And there's the Remington No. 4 .32 rimfire rolling block rifle which my father received in lieu of money from someone on his newspaper route when he was a boy during World War II --- made in 1898 or so.
William
poster guy:
http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/
Or at least learn from it and similar presentations.
William
And your algorithm for handling multiple floats in a document so that all are placed optimally and every chapter last page has at least 6 lines of text is available in an implementation where?
William
Look at the Dummies books --- the people doing them don't care much about typography and layout.
However, while I was told it's Word beginning to end, that doesn't seem to be the case for _Podcasting for Dummies_ --- if one opens up the sample .pdfs they have Quark Xpress cropmarks on them, so I'll have to retract my incorrect blanket statement.
William
If I had to use a cross-platform, Linux and Mac OS X drawing application I'd use Cenon:
http://www.cenon.info/
Doesn't LyX have good xfig integration though?
You may also want to look into tools like pstricks and eukleides.
William
you said:
>There aren't entire books that are PUBLISHED using Word and other, non-professional typesetting tools
Sadly, that's not the case.
The `` for Dummies'' imprint for example is done entirely in Word using a publisher-provided stylesheet --- there are others, but I can't recall the title of the one which my previous employer did for a client.
There's even a New York phone directory (a smallish one, marketed to a specific ethnic group) which my employer prints which is formatted using Word --- I know 'cause they haven't worked out a way to do the bleed tabs, so I wrote a LaTeX file which assembles their pages and stamps them w/ the bleed tab (and if need be has options to adjust the page placement 'cause it's often inconsistent from one section to the next).
William
Things which I like about LyX:
- it's not What You See Is What You Get, but intent rather on defining the appropriate structure of a document --- the one book I got for production which was authored in LyX (back when I was doing LaTeX composition) was well-formed LaTeX and the basic formatting was accomplished ``merely'' by redefining some LaTeX commands and environments
- unlike all-too many opensource applications it's not trying to slavishly duplicate an existing application, but rather creatively solve a problem considering fully what's gone before.
- all the positive attributes of LaTeX, none of the binary / proprietary negatives of Word
There aren't that many other tools which have attempted to handle the scientific authoring / publishing challenge --- FrameMaker is moribund (and its typographic features were always lacking --- no baseline shift beyond super / subscript?!?), Publicon doesn't seem to be getting much traction --- TeXmacs as you asked after is the only other tool coming to mind at the moment. My problem w/ it is that it seduces authors into making adjustments to layout too early, just as Word does.
William
Ligatures are mostly decorative these days --- the original reason for them was to handle kerns which intruded into other characters, hence the existence of fi and fl --- also Gutenberg used optional / alternate ligatures to facilitate evening out the spacing of his lines, but that fell by the wayside, and has yet to be reasonably automated (though that was one of the intents of the HZ algorithm which URW developed and Aldus licensed to use in what became Adobe InDesign).
I make extensive use of Zapfino's ligatures in a small ``Peace on Earth'' card which the TeX User's Group mailed out one year:
http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/peace_on_earth.pdf
More discussion of them in:
http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/onetype.pdf
which is a companion piece to the broadside:
http://mysite.verizon.net/william_franklin_adams/portfolio/typography/typefaceterminology.pdf
William
But you're not using a better front-end for LaTeX --- you're directly editing ``raw latex in a text editor''.
I didn't say LyX was more user-friendly than Word, merely that it's the most user-friendly interface for LaTeX which has yet been achieved.
The only thing comparable is using word2tex or wordml2latex w/ matched up Word styles and latex macros --- and I guarantee that if you set up such a system some na\"ve user will use local formatting which breaks it --- by contrast LyX w/ a custom layout format can be locked down using file permissions so that the user can't do anything but what's correct.
William
- paragraph hyphenation is brain-dead one-line at a time
- one must invoke commands to generate the ToC and Index and remember to re-invoke them if pagination changes
- documents are non-portable / formatting is dependent on currently installed printer
- graphics can be embedded and can be nightmarish to get out in a press-ready form
- citations require third-party extensions which can interfere w/ importing / processing documents (hit Command shift F9 to convert all selected form fields to text)
- There is no easy way to assign paragraph styles --- one has to build a custom toolbar to have them all available w/ a click, the arrangement of said toolbar is dependent on the _length_ of the stylenames --- why the outline view can't have some sort of pop-up menu or ability to assign more than Heading 1--n and Normal is beyond me
- local formatting is insidious --- create an InDesign document, assign styles to everything, formatting everything w/ styles, take it into Word, then bring it back into InDesign and one will still have to clear over-rides to keep the text from being formatted as Times New Roman
and all of that doesn't consider stupid / ignorant users and the visually formatted, but not structured documents which they always create. Best indictment of that here:
Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient by Allin Cottrell
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html
If typography were easy, Word wouldn't be the foetid mess which it is.
One will also never use Word as the basis for back-end typesetting systems --- I've done them for customized children's stories and telephone directory line ads --- a co-worker (Jeff McArthur) at my previous workplace developed one which would do customized versions of the CIA World Factbook as a demo --- the original version did the typesetting for a 2,200 page register and the technology was customized and sold to several customers.
Also, to be fair and accurate, Quark XPress and several other DTP programs handle OpenType features in addition to InDesign and XeTeX/XeLaTeX http://www.tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex and the nascent luatex, http://www.luatex.org/ (as well as ant http://ant.berlios.de/).
William
(who wrote a several thousand line WordBASIC macro to handle the formatting for a review journal for a major sci-med publisher so that the text could be pulled into Quark XPress 6, then 7, then finally InDesign CS3 --- I also wrote a xelatex package for typesetting the journal, but that was nixed by my boss 'cause if the journal had been done in TeX it would've been outsourced to India)
For easy-to-use, LyX is the best front-end for LaTeX:
http://www.lyx.org/
IMO it's one of the most innovative of software projects, commercial or otherwise.
William
Interesting.
Only five books from that site are listed as free at the Online Books Page though:
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=National%20Academy%20of%20Sciences
Do you have a list of free books there beyond that? If so, you should send it to John Mark Ockerbloom so that he can add them.
William
Acknowledged. For my part, I've quit putting my homepage URL in papers and instead will just upload stuff to CTAN and point to that.
I looked into registering a domain name, but coudn't find one I liked (not that I like william_franklin_adams) --- ::grrr:: squatters.
William