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Re: [OCLUG-Tech] anyone out there using a production publishing toolchain?

I've been using Latex for a while now, and loving it, even if I'm not doing anything that involves mathematics. There is a learning curve, but I don't believe it's as steep as some make it sound to be. Docbook is nice, but I find typing (SG | X)ML slow and painful.

My recommendation would be Latex hands down.

J-F

On 2011-02-16, at 10:52 AM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:

> On Wed, 16 Feb 2011, Prof. John C Nash wrote:
> 
>> I recently completed a 313 page book using Latex. The learning cost
>> is heavy, but the rewards are too.
>> 
>> Latex is also used by a lot of technical / scientific publishers.
>> I've a paper in process at the moment. Style sheet supplied.
>> Bibliographic support is strong, but again needs learning.
>> 
>> There are also recent developments in what is termed "reproducible
>> research" to allow code to be embedded in Latex. We use this to
>> write articles where the statistics (procedures and data) may
>> change. Running special scripts in Sweave and ODFweave allow latex
>> and/or OpenOffice docs to be processed to finished pdf. There are
>> apparently other initiatives like this, but they suggest a useful
>> way to incorporate code and data into documents that avoid copy and
>> paste errors.
> 
> if what i was writing involved mathematics in any way, latex would
> be my first choice.  but there won't be so i'm not going down that
> road.  i'll stick with something based on docbook, i just want to know
> who is doing that sort of thing on a *production* basis, and how it's
> working out for them.
> 
> rday
> 
> -- 
> 
> ========================================================================
> Robert P. J. Day                               Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA
>                       http://crashcourse.ca
> 
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