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[OM] Re: OT - search tips in the OM-list archives

Subject: [OM] Re: OT - search tips in the OM-list archives
From: Andrew Dacey <frugal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2004 11:53:19 -0300

On Aug 18, 2004, at 8:40 AM, Johan Malmstrom wrote:

>
> The search tips in the archive feels quite nerdy...
>
> Anybody but me still using laTeX or the, by me, preferd pdflatex?
>
> Had me a little laugh .
>
> / Johan

A few years back (1997) I was working at a local community network and 
we were developing some documentation. I was working quite a bit on 
getting our print documentation together. Someone had suggested looking 
into LaTeX (probably because we were working out of the Math, Stats, 
and Computer Science department). I was doing a lot of HTML work at the 
time and had really bought into the idea of generalised mark-up that 
only describes the structure of the document so I really liked working 
in LaTeX. I produced all of our print documentation in it. I even went 
as far as writing all of my university papers in it the following year 
(note, these were liberal arts classes, not mathematical papers which 
LaTeX is more known for). A big draw was because it has excellent tools 
for referencing other works and automatically creating bibliography 
entries. Not to mention that footnotes work really nicely as well. I 
found a bibliography style that put your references into a footnote 
(which was the style I liked to use) and particularly liked that if I 
referenced the same work twice (or more) in a row it would 
automatically put the subsequent references as "Ibid" but then I could 
go back and put a different reference in between those 2 and it would 
automatically fix this for me.

Also, since I touch type, I really like being able to just type in all 
of my formatting without having to highlight and select blocks of text. 
Particularly because I really like doing my formatting as I go rather 
than having to re-read through the paper to catch all the formatting 
that needs to be done.

I dropped out of using LaTeX once I graduated because I wasn't really 
producing many longer works. More recently though I've gotten back into 
it. At the moment I'm working on a novel which I'm writing in LaTeX and 
I'm also doing some more documentation which is being done in LaTeX. 
pdflatex has vastly improved since I had used it before (when it was 
based on ghostscript and produced very messy type) and is now my 
preferred output.

Andrew "Frugal" Dacey
frugal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.tildefrugal.net/


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