Thursday; computer troubles...

[ozarque]

One of the things that happened when we moved was the discovery that there was no way my antique Macintosh could be made to work in our new apartment. Which means that I now have an iMac with many bells and whistles. That's good -- except when it gets in the way of getting my work done

Comments

[tkil]

LaTeX's learning curve is extreme enough that I wouldn't recommend it for anyone who *isn't* using it for serious formatting.

Oh, I never intended for ozarque to go the full TeX route. I was just responding to the flavor of her original post, where it seemed that "getting the nitty-gritty formatting details correct" was blocking her. Switching to semantic markup of some sort would mitigate that issue entirely.

As an author, it seems it'd be easier to type \thought{What was I thinking?} than to remember whether thoughts were italicized, surrounded by colons, or whatever. But then again, I've never written fiction (or even anything beyond medium-length papers), so my opinion is suspect.

Given the appropriate attention to stylesheets and software installations, it would be possible to set her up so that she just has to click an icon to have the full source-to-PDF (or whatever) executed.

Sadly, as you point out, there are not many accessible semantic-markup systems out there. I have a vague recollection that either Quark or FrameMaker (circa late 1990s) had some capability in this regard, but WYSIWYG pretty much took over.

(And, as autopope points out, it appears that many publishing houses are expecting MS Word files for interoperability anymore, so...)