[Pipet Devel] LaTeX etc. WAS executing a network script

[Brad Chapman]

Sorry to be so slow in responding... dumb finals...

> What is the difference between LaTeX and TeX?

TeX is actually what does all of the beautiful typesetting. This was 
developed by Donald E. Knuth, and only contained some pretty basic 
macros to work with it. These macros are pretty hard core and 
difficult to learn, so eventually Leslie Lamport developed LaTeX, 
which in a more accessable set of macros to work with the underlying 
typesetting engine. You lose some power and flexibility using LaTeX, 
but it is definately made up for by being a lot easier to learn and 
use. I am not nearly experienced enough with it to even touch TeX yet. 
All I know if that the day I discovered LaTeX was the day I said 
goodbye to horrible horrible Microsoft Word

> Gary and David were starting (very preliminary) to document Loci with
> DocBook.  Can someone explain why DocBook might or might not be 
better than
> LyX/LaTeX?

    In my mind, LaTeX is a better choice. I think the most difficult 
thing about LaTeX is learning it, and getting all of the tools working 
on your system to generate the right kind of documentation. However, 
it seems like LyX helps a lot in this regard.
    The advantage of DocBook is that the tools are more easily 
installed and "standard" so it is probably easier to set up, and is 
also easier for other users to generate all kinds of different 
documentation from the raw SGML. With LaTeX you have to have all of 
the right packages and other stuff installed to generate ps/pdf 
documentation right from the original .tex source, so this is more 
likely to be difficult (I know that it is a problem mentioned on some 
of the python lists--since python uses LaTeX for documentation). 
However, I think we could get around this by having a non-bulky 
readible format (like html) included along with the .tex files, so 
then users who don't care about producing documentation from the 
source and just want something to read have the html to look at.
    Just my thoughts on this...

Brad