Remember, boys and girls, the first rule of resource management is that every resource must have an owner responsible for releasing it when it's no longer needed.
Remember, boys and girls, begging the question only works when everyone else is too polite to point out how stupid you sound.
I wasn't begging the question at all. I would define a resource to be something that must be acquired before use and released afterwards. These are my axioms.
No problem! The resource is owned by the GC, which has the knowledge and ability to release it properly, so all is well.
Except that in practice, that's frequently not the case. GCs can involve very lengthy delays before releasing memory, and usually do not handle other resource types, as has been discussed elsewhere in this subthread.
Read my post and you'll see that it clearly states it wouldn't cure all of the problems but it would help and its better than nothing.
Sure. Now I'm challenging that assumption. As I'm arguing elsewhere in this subthread, in C++, it's far from clear that GC helps, and it can actually be counter-productive compared to the alternatives.
GC also protects against dangling references, which is a more serious problem than a pure memory leak.
Or, depending on your point of view, it hides the fact that your design is broken because you're trying to access data in one part of the code at a time when another part of the code thought that data wasn't useful any more.
My problem with GC isn't that it doesn't fix every problem, it's that it sometimes hides problems so nothing else will fix them either.
Wrong. Many (most?) GC implementations don't bother to run a collection cycle at shutdown - precisely because the OS will clean up anyway, so there's no point.
Some do, some don't. How does that make my actual claim (that GC is only really useful for addressing one class of programmer error) wrong?
Oh dear, the old "it's not absolutely perfect so I will reject it out of hand" line.
Not at all. But in C++, GC can actively get in the way, because (a) you then have (at least) two kinds of memory management going on, and (b) GC has natural conflicts with C++'s deterministic destruction approach that make it unsuitable for a lot of applications.
If doctors were C++ programmers, we'd still have kids dying of easily treated diseases daily - after all, antibiotics don't cure viruses, so there's no point using them, is there?
As opposed to applying a treatment that hides the symptoms but doesn't actually cure the illness six months late, I presume?
TV licensing people in the UK do not have a right of entry to your home without a search warrant.
They are often accused of being overly aggressive in their approach, because they will make unannounced visits and then ask for entry anyway, which has been viewed as intimidatory by many residents. See here for an entertaining grilling by the House Select Committee on Public Accounts of some senior BBC staff about their approach to checking on people who don't pay the licence fee. (Note that these proceedings were back in 2002.)
Thank you for posting that. I wish more people would understand that GC is not some sort of resource management panacea, and stop relying on it as a crutch to support bad designs.
Typically, GC prevents exactly one category of programmer error for exactly one type of resource: forgetting to release memory before your program ends. That category of error is one of the least dangerous anyway, since pretty much any modern OS will do it for you as a last resort.
GC provides no guarantees against a poor design hogging memory while the program is still running, and often doesn't work well with resources other than memory. What really matters in a typical application is the timely release of all resources, and usually GC won't help with that.
Remember, boys and girls, the first rule of resource management is that every resource must have an owner responsible for releasing it when it's no longer needed. If your ownership strategy isn't clear or the owner doesn't have the knowledge/ability to release its resource(s) promptly, then your design is beyond hope and no GC in the world will save you.
Web browsers are one of the pinacles of modern complex software. Think about it. A web browser is a document viewer, a network-aware program, an application platform with built-in scripting language runtime(s), a parser and renderer for dozens of varieties of HTML, XML, CSS and SVG, a secure e-commerce tool, a pluggin host, a media center and a personal communications tool.
Yes, yes, I've read all that before, and I'm even more convinced now that you've sworn at me.
The Zapfino/Omega thing is a hack using hundreds of megabytes of EPS files. It's impressive in that it shows how theoretically you can do anything with any font if you're devious enough, sure. But as a practical tool, it's got a long way to go to catch actual, y'know, real fonts that Just Work(TM).
Regarding hanging punctuation, the example from the TeXbook is also fundamentally limited. Sure, you can write a 18 lines of obscure TeX macros to get optically naive hanging punctuation in a single font if you're prepared to write all your dimensions afterwards in the form 6\pnt5in. Again, this is rather a long way from Just Working(TM).
As for your other comments, it's no doubt highly limiting that you can only kern to 1/1440th of an inch, that being finer resolution than even most good laser printers can work with, but I can't say my eyes are good enough to spot the imprecision at that level.
Finally, what is it that you think OpenType can't do but TeX's font system can? I'm quite intrigued, because as far as I can tell (having designed a whole font in it myself), METAFONT-style fonts basically provide glyph definitions, and some simple character mapping and combination primitives. OpenType, on the other hand, provides more power to describe and manipulate glyphs and character mapping than any script I've encountered would ever need, which by about page two of the manual includes everything METAFONT-style systems can do. What are the UI/feature-access limitations that are getting in your way so badly?
The basic design of the mail merge in OpenOffice is OK, but it has some slight drawbacks -- like the fact that once you've made a data source from a Calc spreadsheet, it doesn't update even if you update the spreadsheet, and you have to go through the whole process of creating a new data source again to change one character in your source data!
So go for neutral: it's the only alignment set that actually stands some chance of benefitting society rather than destroying the universe.
Yeah, but OTOH paladins can wield Carsomyr against the Lawful Evil Gelatinous Executives, and some of them come with an inherent 50% lawsuit resistance.
Revert to default formatting: select, Alt+O (Format) Alt+D (Default)
Is that default paragraph formatting? Charcter formatting? Frame formatting? There needs to be one option for each type of formatting data that can be styled.
Try doing a typical book thing of having an abbreviated table of contents with just the chapter titles, followed by a more detailed one with the sections as well. Writer can't, at least not without getting all the page numbering and title information seriously wrong.
I have to concur with a previous post - WTF are you talking about???
I can only assume that neither you nor the previous poster has actually tried producing a document a few hundred pages long with multiple tables of contents in Writer. Every time I have attempted to do this, the page numbering has been wrong in one or other table (though I think you only see this if the tables are long enough themselves to affect it), or the heading for each table doesn't appear in the other, for example.
Erm... you're missing the point here. It's NOT hierarchical.
Sure. That's why there's a hierarchical display of styles in the Stylist window, and an entry to specify the effective parent on the dialog when you define a style. You're right that it doesn't work properly as a hierarchy, but it seems pretty clear that it was meant to.
Huh??? you want me to post a picture of it? When the table does not reach the bottom of the frame you have an empty line; when it does, there's only the table. You must have left AutoSize on for the frame.
No. And there are similar bugs in the layout algorithms and cursor positioning if you do things like locking sections while creating a form, or a more complex page with multiple adjacent frames. You can work around some of the bugs if you're patient enough, but some are just broken and/or silly limitations.
Send me a picture if you like, but I work with a whole group of people who've been making printed materials with OpenOffice for a long time now, and we all seem to encounter pretty much the same bugs/limitations I've described from time to time. I'm betting that you were lucky, or looking at a very simple test case, rather than all of us and all the help sources we've consulted being wrong on all the documents we've had problems with over several years.
I wasn't thinking of how to install fonts and so (which truly is a mess, although I have managed to do so, and I'm just a regular geek with education in comletely different disciplines),
Installing fonts designed for TeX isn't too bad. Installing generic TrueType or OpenType fonts from professional sources is a living nightmare...
This is a complex issue, but you really only have to compare a document produced in Word to one produced with LaTeX to decide which you prefer. If they use the same font, you'll usually prefer LaTeX (there are add-ons for Word to make it support ligatures and stuff, though).
That's true today, but with the addition of decent OpenType support likely in the fairly near future, things like ligatures, expert set glyphs, and comprehensive support for foreign languages and specialist symbols will probably become routine in mainstream word processing and DTP applications fairly quickly. At that point, many of TeX's typesetting advantages will evaporate, but unfortunately the quirky limitations will remain.
Oh, and TeX does seem to (probably through pdftex) support OpenType.
It does, but alas only after a lot of work and with some inherent limitations that leave a lot of the OpenType features underpowered.
TeX has done very well for a long time, but a lot of its key strengths have always related to the quality of its text output. That's skating on thin ice today, and as mainstream WYSIWYG solutions or newer typesetting tools come along, I expect much more user-friendly tools to offer comparable or better quality output.
There are many legitimate gripes about Word compared to TeX, but in fairness, its font handling isn't one of them. TeX's font-handling is a poorly standardised mess. I can go and buy any number of professional quality OpenType fonts and download them in seconds, install them just as fast, and use them immediately in Word.
Sure, there are a few good fonts available for free on CTAN too, but for anything else, it requires a PhD and access to half a dozen HOWTOs just to get the thing installed and working. Even then, there are ludicrous (by today's standards) limitations on the number of glyphs, the kerning and ligature tools, etc. I managed to hit them with annoying frequency just designing a relatively simple font with METAFONT, so how someone's supposed to design a professional set with comprehensive ligature support, real small caps, numbering variations, etc. I have no idea. This isn't just the font format, either. TeX itself is poorly equipped to deal with some aspects of professional-standard typography these days. (Hanging punctuation springs to mind.) Meanwhile, the state of the WYSIWYG art is probably InDesign at present, which will do adaptive scripting using Zapfino and supports essentially the whole range of OpenType goodies.
Bottom line: Word on Windows blows any font technology in TeX away already, and when the more advanced OpenType stuff filters down, the gap will be even wider. Given that nearly all the serious professional font companies are now moving to OpenType, this is going to be a fatal flaw for TeX before too long. You can have the best paragraph justification algorithm in the world and allow the insertion of quarter-spaces, but if your fonts are ugly, no-one's going to notice.
I've been looking over your comments in this discussion, and also comparing this to what my girlfriend deals with (she's working on a linguistics PhD, and uses LaTeX for much of her work for similar reasons to you). I get the impression that you strongly prefer a "programmatic" approach to WYSIWYG, and ultimately you mostly produce plain-text-ish files with a wide range of characters, some limited formatting, and various custom diagrams. You also sound pretty technically competent generally. Is that about right?
If that's the case, then have you considered going the XML/XSLT route? I don't say this to be buzzwordy; I actually designed and maintain a fairly large web site that uses a custom XML schema to define the content (easily editable by our non-technical people so certainly possible for you) and then XSLT to do various clever tricks with it. We generate HTML output, but you could apply many of the same tools and techniques we use to generate a mostly-plain-text format that could be conveniently imported into any word processing package instead, Unicode glyphs and such included.
If you're willing to invest a few days of effort to develop the system, I can't see why you couldn't write a fairly simple customised mark-up language for yourself. You could use character entities or tags to access the Unicode glyphs for all your linguistic symbols, so instead of \phoneticsymbol, you now just need &phoneticsymbol; or <phoneticsymbol/>, depending on how clever/context-sensitive you need the interpretation to be. You can mark up document structure in much the same way as you would with TeX-based macros. Potentially, you could even define shorthand ways to represent common types of diagram as well: SVG plays nicely with XML, is rapidly becoming a viable graphics format in its own right, and might provide a convenient intermediate format to convert your diagrams into any common format required by the journal staff.
There are apparently some quite decent editing tools available to work with XML-based documents, but it sounds like you'd have about as much time for them as me and would probably prefer to work directly with the underlying mark-up. Converting your existing TeX-based documents could probably be mostly automated if you wanted, and using a structured, text-based format to represent your document has the advantage that you can support different output formats relatively easily in the future, so you wouldn't have to do all this again in five or ten years' time.
The only non-trivial work to be done in any specific word processor would then be applying the WP's heading styles, footnotes, etc. as required by the particular journal you're contributing to. You could deal with this by including a little processed mark-up in the output from your XSLT, and writing some trivial macros in any modern word processor to search for that, and apply whatever functions needed doing to that bit of text.
Without knowing more about the kind of documents you produce, it's hard to know whether this idea would be useful to you, but there it is for whatever it's worth. Good luck.
Pretty much all laws act against the force of nature. If it was natural for all individuals to follow a law, there would be no need for that law.
However, smart people realised a long time ago that what may be best for an individual, acting selfishly and in isolation at a particular time, is not always best for society as a whole (which may include that same individual at other times). Thus we develop the concept of a law, which is an agreement all are bound to follow for the greater good. Spare me the sideswipes at current abuses in certain jurisdictions, please; look at the big picture.
Copyright is no different in this respect to saying "Thou shalt not kill" to a guy with a gun in his hand, or "You may own this property" to a guy without a gun in his hand. As with all laws, it relies on the heavy majority of the population to accept it as reasonable and follow it, so that the minority who abuse the system may be caught and punished, to remove them from mainstream society and/or as an incentive to others not to do the same thing.
The approach you describe is perilously close to contradicting realistic economics and legislation. The difference between your position and mumblestheclown's is that history shows that the economic model he wants can support an industry of skilled workers producing useful products, while the economics of your approach remain very much in question at anything beyond a negligible level of adoption. Small companies like his, made up of skilled people doing work to produce software of value to others, drive the whole information economy.
The world may be changing, but if that change is in the direction you seem to favour, I'm not sure I want to be there when the results are in. Giving source code away as a business approach for a pure software development shop is nowhere near standing the test of time just yet, and the alternative revenue streams (as well described by Arandir) are far from proven on the sort of scale necessary to support the world's software industry.
I've no reason to doubt your opinions of Draw and Base, but I'll just note that my experience of Draw was quite different. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it was one of the worst computer graphics packages I've ever encountered.
The first time I used it, drawing a quick vector graphic (a simple map) and printing it resulted in the most pixellated garbage you've ever seen. I'm printing on a 600dpi laser, so why do my curves look like they were drawn with a dot matrix, and why is it apparently incapable of rotating a TrueType font by 30 degrees without making it look like a bad '80s computer game's graphics? I found similarly poor output in various other areas, before giving up on it after a few days.
I can't comment on Base, since such database stuff as I do is based on my own scripts/applications accessing a MySQL database directly, but my experience with Draw was obviously very different to yours.
Editing math equations in MS Office is quite painful. You have to click on things to get symbols, and it takes too long. With OO.o, you can just type and have the symbols appear, or optionally, you can click on symbols and have everything happen much slower.
You're seriously suggesting typing maths as a reason to use OpenOffice.org? <boggle>
Have you ever used a serious maths typing tool like TeX?
Microsoft improves things so slowly, that open source will be lightyears ahead of them in about 3 years.
Then wouldn't it be a good idea to wait most of those three years to be sure of that before committing to a change?
I can understand moving away from MS Office because of the closed, proprietary document formats. In fact, I think that's one of the two really good reasons to do so right now, the other being cost. But let's not kid ourselves that OpenOffice.org is a technically superior product, OK?
What specific gripes do you have with Open Office? What does MS Office do for you that Open Office doesn't?
I'm not the poster you're replying to, but I've also expressed the opinion that OpenOffice.org is (at least for now) inferior to MS Office in several ways. Here are a few, from direct personal experience, about Writer vs. Word in particular:
The usability is terrible.
Shortcut keys for selecting styles and inserting special characters, anyone? Writer is a goddamn word processor, and I shouldn't have to reach for my mouse every two or three characters in order to type common special symbols and do routine formatting.
I have similar gripes about direct formatting. Where are the shortcut keys (or even the menu commands, sometimes) to simply remove all character formatting or all paragraph formatting and return to the style's default settings?
Navigating the cursor around things like text boxes and tables is almost impossible to do reliably.
Want to update a table of contents that's marked non-editable? Try right-clicking on it to get the menu option and... oh, you can't.
Mail merge is terrible. It has basic limitations when it comes to the output produced (though in fairness some of these are expected to be fixed in the forthcoming OOo 2.0). The whole data sources architecture is broken horribly, particularly if you're using a Calc spreadsheet as a source. In MS Office, it just works. I have watched more than one person give OpenOffice.org a fair try, experience its mail merge, label it something we wouldn't repeat in polite company, and go back to Word, probably never to return.
Tables of contents don't work reliably. Try doing a typical book thing of having an abbreviated table of contents with just the chapter titles, followed by a more detailed one with the sections as well. Writer can't, at least not without getting all the page numbering and title information seriously wrong.
The styles system isn't just confusing, it's broken in several places. Try doing anything non-trivial with numbering, and it all goes to pieces. Try specifying useful things like relative sizes in a supposedly hierarchical system (as in, I'd like the test for a Heading 1 to be 120% of the size of the main body text) and you find that either you can't, or your relative information is just converted to absolute values immediately, missing the point completely.
The page layout tools have some frankly bizarre limitations. You don't seem to be able to place a text frame of an exact size, and then insert a table into it to fill the frame, for example. You have to have a blank line outside the table afterwards, whether you want it or not.
I could go on for a long time, but the upshot is that OpenOffice.org Writer is fine for routine word processing where all you need is typing a letter. Then again, so is any glorified text editor. When it comes to the extra stuff a WP is supposed to bring you -- better formatting/page layout, stylesheets/document templates, tables of contents, mail merge, etc. -- it just has too many elementary bugs and usability flaws for me to recommend it over MS Word any time soon. It's a good effort, and with time and some insight from the project leaders, it could easily overtake Word in these areas, but it's not there yet.
If it makes you feel any better, it was on BBC News here in the UK earlier, and it was the middle of the night here.
Re:Stop Wasting Our Time With Wannabe BSD Licences
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I take your point, but it seems to depend on context. The major Linux distros, for example, seem to be seeling pretty well from my local PC store at around 30-40 pounds (I'm in the UK), which is a pretty significant fraction of the asking price for Windows XP Home.
I guess it's all about convenience. Whereas things like Firefox or OpenOffice.org can usually just be downloaded from the project's web site, it's harder to find a "pre-fab" version of SUSE Linux for example. I guess the convenience is worth the asking price for enough people to pay up, even if theoretically they could find a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend who'd installed the same version they wanted and could legally lend them the CDs.
Re:Stop Wasting Our Time With Wannabe BSD Licences
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But they can do that with pretty much any open source licence, including the (L)GPL. They have to release the source if they sell the product, but nothing stops them doing so commercially, nor obliges them to give any of the money they receive back to the original programmer(s).
But even with copyrights, if a work is not published, but is something internal (say, the code to Google servers), then 50, 75, 100 years can pass, and even though it may (may!) end up technically in the public domain, it's still a trade secret, and if it never gets published externally, it's not public domain.
Yes, this is a serious problem. To avoid it, all human beings should be forcibly compelled to document every thought they ever have, and to publish them through a centralised public database that is open to all. Concepts like privacy and secrecy should be abolished, because the right of everyone to know everything about everyone and everything is much more important than respecting the right of an individual to think their own thoughts in their own head, and only to share those thoughts they wish to share.
By the way, how far does the judge have to go in saying that he's leaning towards a particular party before the evidence is even presented, before he starts risking invalidating the whole trial?
Since IANAL, I can't answer that, but let's look at the transcript. The judge tells the defendant to try to find a lawyer, and allows time for this, squashing the plaintiff's attempt to get material from the defendant under oath before the legal advice is available. Then she tells the defendant she wants her to fight the case, and tells the plaintiff's lawyer that he has to present his case in court now they've started a lawsuit. Throughout, the judge is fairly clearly in favour of the defendant getting a fair day in court.
The one thing she doesn't do is give any indication of whether she thinks the defendant should actually win the case, and to my legally untrained mind, that seems to be the only thing that would have been inappropriate. In fact, I find it rather reassuring and highly appropriate that a judge was heavily in favour of a defendant fighting against a fair case in court, and not being intimidated into doing things that aren't in their best interests without the benefit of counsel.
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I wasn't begging the question at all. I would define a resource to be something that must be acquired before use and released afterwards. These are my axioms.
Except that in practice, that's frequently not the case. GCs can involve very lengthy delays before releasing memory, and usually do not handle other resource types, as has been discussed elsewhere in this subthread.
Sure. Now I'm challenging that assumption. As I'm arguing elsewhere in this subthread, in C++, it's far from clear that GC helps, and it can actually be counter-productive compared to the alternatives.
Or, depending on your point of view, it hides the fact that your design is broken because you're trying to access data in one part of the code at a time when another part of the code thought that data wasn't useful any more.
My problem with GC isn't that it doesn't fix every problem, it's that it sometimes hides problems so nothing else will fix them either.
Some do, some don't. How does that make my actual claim (that GC is only really useful for addressing one class of programmer error) wrong?
Not at all. But in C++, GC can actively get in the way, because (a) you then have (at least) two kinds of memory management going on, and (b) GC has natural conflicts with C++'s deterministic destruction approach that make it unsuitable for a lot of applications.
As opposed to applying a treatment that hides the symptoms but doesn't actually cure the illness six months late, I presume?
TV licensing people in the UK do not have a right of entry to your home without a search warrant.
They are often accused of being overly aggressive in their approach, because they will make unannounced visits and then ask for entry anyway, which has been viewed as intimidatory by many residents. See here for an entertaining grilling by the House Select Committee on Public Accounts of some senior BBC staff about their approach to checking on people who don't pay the licence fee. (Note that these proceedings were back in 2002.)
Thank you for posting that. I wish more people would understand that GC is not some sort of resource management panacea, and stop relying on it as a crutch to support bad designs.
Typically, GC prevents exactly one category of programmer error for exactly one type of resource: forgetting to release memory before your program ends. That category of error is one of the least dangerous anyway, since pretty much any modern OS will do it for you as a last resort.
GC provides no guarantees against a poor design hogging memory while the program is still running, and often doesn't work well with resources other than memory. What really matters in a typical application is the timely release of all resources, and usually GC won't help with that.
Remember, boys and girls, the first rule of resource management is that every resource must have an owner responsible for releasing it when it's no longer needed. If your ownership strategy isn't clear or the owner doesn't have the knowledge/ability to release its resource(s) promptly, then your design is beyond hope and no GC in the world will save you.
Then maybe they're trying to do too much?
Yes, yes, I've read all that before, and I'm even more convinced now that you've sworn at me.
The Zapfino/Omega thing is a hack using hundreds of megabytes of EPS files. It's impressive in that it shows how theoretically you can do anything with any font if you're devious enough, sure. But as a practical tool, it's got a long way to go to catch actual, y'know, real fonts that Just Work(TM).
Regarding hanging punctuation, the example from the TeXbook is also fundamentally limited. Sure, you can write a 18 lines of obscure TeX macros to get optically naive hanging punctuation in a single font if you're prepared to write all your dimensions afterwards in the form 6\pnt5in. Again, this is rather a long way from Just Working(TM).
As for your other comments, it's no doubt highly limiting that you can only kern to 1/1440th of an inch, that being finer resolution than even most good laser printers can work with, but I can't say my eyes are good enough to spot the imprecision at that level.
Finally, what is it that you think OpenType can't do but TeX's font system can? I'm quite intrigued, because as far as I can tell (having designed a whole font in it myself), METAFONT-style fonts basically provide glyph definitions, and some simple character mapping and combination primitives. OpenType, on the other hand, provides more power to describe and manipulate glyphs and character mapping than any script I've encountered would ever need, which by about page two of the manual includes everything METAFONT-style systems can do. What are the UI/feature-access limitations that are getting in your way so badly?
The basic design of the mail merge in OpenOffice is OK, but it has some slight drawbacks -- like the fact that once you've made a data source from a Calc spreadsheet, it doesn't update even if you update the spreadsheet, and you have to go through the whole process of creating a new data source again to change one character in your source data!
Yeah, but OTOH paladins can wield Carsomyr against the Lawful Evil Gelatinous Executives, and some of them come with an inherent 50% lawsuit resistance.
Is that default paragraph formatting? Charcter formatting? Frame formatting? There needs to be one option for each type of formatting data that can be styled.
I can only assume that neither you nor the previous poster has actually tried producing a document a few hundred pages long with multiple tables of contents in Writer. Every time I have attempted to do this, the page numbering has been wrong in one or other table (though I think you only see this if the tables are long enough themselves to affect it), or the heading for each table doesn't appear in the other, for example.
Sure. That's why there's a hierarchical display of styles in the Stylist window, and an entry to specify the effective parent on the dialog when you define a style. You're right that it doesn't work properly as a hierarchy, but it seems pretty clear that it was meant to.
No. And there are similar bugs in the layout algorithms and cursor positioning if you do things like locking sections while creating a form, or a more complex page with multiple adjacent frames. You can work around some of the bugs if you're patient enough, but some are just broken and/or silly limitations.
Send me a picture if you like, but I work with a whole group of people who've been making printed materials with OpenOffice for a long time now, and we all seem to encounter pretty much the same bugs/limitations I've described from time to time. I'm betting that you were lucky, or looking at a very simple test case, rather than all of us and all the help sources we've consulted being wrong on all the documents we've had problems with over several years.
Installing fonts designed for TeX isn't too bad. Installing generic TrueType or OpenType fonts from professional sources is a living nightmare...
That's true today, but with the addition of decent OpenType support likely in the fairly near future, things like ligatures, expert set glyphs, and comprehensive support for foreign languages and specialist symbols will probably become routine in mainstream word processing and DTP applications fairly quickly. At that point, many of TeX's typesetting advantages will evaporate, but unfortunately the quirky limitations will remain.
It does, but alas only after a lot of work and with some inherent limitations that leave a lot of the OpenType features underpowered.
TeX has done very well for a long time, but a lot of its key strengths have always related to the quality of its text output. That's skating on thin ice today, and as mainstream WYSIWYG solutions or newer typesetting tools come along, I expect much more user-friendly tools to offer comparable or better quality output.
There are many legitimate gripes about Word compared to TeX, but in fairness, its font handling isn't one of them. TeX's font-handling is a poorly standardised mess. I can go and buy any number of professional quality OpenType fonts and download them in seconds, install them just as fast, and use them immediately in Word.
Sure, there are a few good fonts available for free on CTAN too, but for anything else, it requires a PhD and access to half a dozen HOWTOs just to get the thing installed and working. Even then, there are ludicrous (by today's standards) limitations on the number of glyphs, the kerning and ligature tools, etc. I managed to hit them with annoying frequency just designing a relatively simple font with METAFONT, so how someone's supposed to design a professional set with comprehensive ligature support, real small caps, numbering variations, etc. I have no idea. This isn't just the font format, either. TeX itself is poorly equipped to deal with some aspects of professional-standard typography these days. (Hanging punctuation springs to mind.) Meanwhile, the state of the WYSIWYG art is probably InDesign at present, which will do adaptive scripting using Zapfino and supports essentially the whole range of OpenType goodies.
Bottom line: Word on Windows blows any font technology in TeX away already, and when the more advanced OpenType stuff filters down, the gap will be even wider. Given that nearly all the serious professional font companies are now moving to OpenType, this is going to be a fatal flaw for TeX before too long. You can have the best paragraph justification algorithm in the world and allow the insertion of quarter-spaces, but if your fonts are ugly, no-one's going to notice.
I've been looking over your comments in this discussion, and also comparing this to what my girlfriend deals with (she's working on a linguistics PhD, and uses LaTeX for much of her work for similar reasons to you). I get the impression that you strongly prefer a "programmatic" approach to WYSIWYG, and ultimately you mostly produce plain-text-ish files with a wide range of characters, some limited formatting, and various custom diagrams. You also sound pretty technically competent generally. Is that about right?
If that's the case, then have you considered going the XML/XSLT route? I don't say this to be buzzwordy; I actually designed and maintain a fairly large web site that uses a custom XML schema to define the content (easily editable by our non-technical people so certainly possible for you) and then XSLT to do various clever tricks with it. We generate HTML output, but you could apply many of the same tools and techniques we use to generate a mostly-plain-text format that could be conveniently imported into any word processing package instead, Unicode glyphs and such included.
If you're willing to invest a few days of effort to develop the system, I can't see why you couldn't write a fairly simple customised mark-up language for yourself. You could use character entities or tags to access the Unicode glyphs for all your linguistic symbols, so instead of \phoneticsymbol, you now just need &phoneticsymbol; or <phoneticsymbol/>, depending on how clever/context-sensitive you need the interpretation to be. You can mark up document structure in much the same way as you would with TeX-based macros. Potentially, you could even define shorthand ways to represent common types of diagram as well: SVG plays nicely with XML, is rapidly becoming a viable graphics format in its own right, and might provide a convenient intermediate format to convert your diagrams into any common format required by the journal staff.
There are apparently some quite decent editing tools available to work with XML-based documents, but it sounds like you'd have about as much time for them as me and would probably prefer to work directly with the underlying mark-up. Converting your existing TeX-based documents could probably be mostly automated if you wanted, and using a structured, text-based format to represent your document has the advantage that you can support different output formats relatively easily in the future, so you wouldn't have to do all this again in five or ten years' time.
The only non-trivial work to be done in any specific word processor would then be applying the WP's heading styles, footnotes, etc. as required by the particular journal you're contributing to. You could deal with this by including a little processed mark-up in the output from your XSLT, and writing some trivial macros in any modern word processor to search for that, and apply whatever functions needed doing to that bit of text.
Without knowing more about the kind of documents you produce, it's hard to know whether this idea would be useful to you, but there it is for whatever it's worth. Good luck.
I have with a taskbar two rows high. Guess which row the Start button gets put on. :-(
Pretty much all laws act against the force of nature. If it was natural for all individuals to follow a law, there would be no need for that law.
However, smart people realised a long time ago that what may be best for an individual, acting selfishly and in isolation at a particular time, is not always best for society as a whole (which may include that same individual at other times). Thus we develop the concept of a law, which is an agreement all are bound to follow for the greater good. Spare me the sideswipes at current abuses in certain jurisdictions, please; look at the big picture.
Copyright is no different in this respect to saying "Thou shalt not kill" to a guy with a gun in his hand, or "You may own this property" to a guy without a gun in his hand. As with all laws, it relies on the heavy majority of the population to accept it as reasonable and follow it, so that the minority who abuse the system may be caught and punished, to remove them from mainstream society and/or as an incentive to others not to do the same thing.
The approach you describe is perilously close to contradicting realistic economics and legislation. The difference between your position and mumblestheclown's is that history shows that the economic model he wants can support an industry of skilled workers producing useful products, while the economics of your approach remain very much in question at anything beyond a negligible level of adoption. Small companies like his, made up of skilled people doing work to produce software of value to others, drive the whole information economy.
The world may be changing, but if that change is in the direction you seem to favour, I'm not sure I want to be there when the results are in. Giving source code away as a business approach for a pure software development shop is nowhere near standing the test of time just yet, and the alternative revenue streams (as well described by Arandir) are far from proven on the sort of scale necessary to support the world's software industry.
I've no reason to doubt your opinions of Draw and Base, but I'll just note that my experience of Draw was quite different. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it was one of the worst computer graphics packages I've ever encountered.
The first time I used it, drawing a quick vector graphic (a simple map) and printing it resulted in the most pixellated garbage you've ever seen. I'm printing on a 600dpi laser, so why do my curves look like they were drawn with a dot matrix, and why is it apparently incapable of rotating a TrueType font by 30 degrees without making it look like a bad '80s computer game's graphics? I found similarly poor output in various other areas, before giving up on it after a few days.
I can't comment on Base, since such database stuff as I do is based on my own scripts/applications accessing a MySQL database directly, but my experience with Draw was obviously very different to yours.
You're seriously suggesting typing maths as a reason to use OpenOffice.org? <boggle>
Have you ever used a serious maths typing tool like TeX?
Then wouldn't it be a good idea to wait most of those three years to be sure of that before committing to a change?
I can understand moving away from MS Office because of the closed, proprietary document formats. In fact, I think that's one of the two really good reasons to do so right now, the other being cost. But let's not kid ourselves that OpenOffice.org is a technically superior product, OK?
I'm not the poster you're replying to, but I've also expressed the opinion that OpenOffice.org is (at least for now) inferior to MS Office in several ways. Here are a few, from direct personal experience, about Writer vs. Word in particular:
I could go on for a long time, but the upshot is that OpenOffice.org Writer is fine for routine word processing where all you need is typing a letter. Then again, so is any glorified text editor. When it comes to the extra stuff a WP is supposed to bring you -- better formatting/page layout, stylesheets/document templates, tables of contents, mail merge, etc. -- it just has too many elementary bugs and usability flaws for me to recommend it over MS Word any time soon. It's a good effort, and with time and some insight from the project leaders, it could easily overtake Word in these areas, but it's not there yet.
If it makes you feel any better, it was on BBC News here in the UK earlier, and it was the middle of the night here.
I take your point, but it seems to depend on context. The major Linux distros, for example, seem to be seeling pretty well from my local PC store at around 30-40 pounds (I'm in the UK), which is a pretty significant fraction of the asking price for Windows XP Home.
I guess it's all about convenience. Whereas things like Firefox or OpenOffice.org can usually just be downloaded from the project's web site, it's harder to find a "pre-fab" version of SUSE Linux for example. I guess the convenience is worth the asking price for enough people to pay up, even if theoretically they could find a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend who'd installed the same version they wanted and could legally lend them the CDs.
But they can do that with pretty much any open source licence, including the (L)GPL. They have to release the source if they sell the product, but nothing stops them doing so commercially, nor obliges them to give any of the money they receive back to the original programmer(s).
The difference between you and me is that I understand the word "sarcasm".
Yes, this is a serious problem. To avoid it, all human beings should be forcibly compelled to document every thought they ever have, and to publish them through a centralised public database that is open to all. Concepts like privacy and secrecy should be abolished, because the right of everyone to know everything about everyone and everything is much more important than respecting the right of an individual to think their own thoughts in their own head, and only to share those thoughts they wish to share.
Since IANAL, I can't answer that, but let's look at the transcript. The judge tells the defendant to try to find a lawyer, and allows time for this, squashing the plaintiff's attempt to get material from the defendant under oath before the legal advice is available. Then she tells the defendant she wants her to fight the case, and tells the plaintiff's lawyer that he has to present his case in court now they've started a lawsuit. Throughout, the judge is fairly clearly in favour of the defendant getting a fair day in court.
The one thing she doesn't do is give any indication of whether she thinks the defendant should actually win the case, and to my legally untrained mind, that seems to be the only thing that would have been inappropriate. In fact, I find it rather reassuring and highly appropriate that a judge was heavily in favour of a defendant fighting against a fair case in court, and not being intimidated into doing things that aren't in their best interests without the benefit of counsel.