[ale] LaTeX question?

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Sun, 2007-12-09 at 16:06 -0500, James Sumners wrote:
> A quick search returns this --
> http://www.tug.org/utilities/texconv/textopc.html

I had not seen that link yet.  Thank you, I will check that out a bit
more here, I think maybe one of those tools might just do what I am
looking for with a minimum of fixing up.
> 
> I would be loathe to do it, though. LaTeX and Word serve two entirely
> different purposes. Word is for those who don't know any better, and
> LaTeX is for when it needs to be done right. It seems to me that if
> you are working on a subject where LaTeX is the most appropriate tool,
> then your instructor would accept a PDF, or even the TeX file. But if
> the instructor is feeding the work through some sort of plagiarism
> checker, then it's likely that the subject is english or literature.
> For those, just stick with OpenOffice and hope that the Word exporter
> gets it right.

I like the idea of it much better than the idea of working with
OpenOffice.org.  The subject is anything---including math and computing,
but they require you to use Microsoft Word and Microsoft Equation
Editor.  I might just ask if they can take an RTF file that has the
content so that they can use whatever processing stuff on it that they
want, and submit the document intended for them to view as a PDF.

I don't quite understand how an online college that professes to teach
computing concepts /doesn't/ encourage the use of a typesetter, since
there are several TeX-based ones available that are free, and even the
groff system can typeset somewhat decently from what I hear.

Though I have to say, XeLaTeX takes the cake.  An easy way to use the
fonts that I have installed, meeting alongside the power of LaTeX...
very attractive, indeed.

My main motivation for trying to find something like this is because
using the APA package and BiBTeX for managing references, well, would
make my life a /lot/ easier than doing all that crud manually in
OpenOffice.  I wound up developing a template for OOo for the task, but
it falls short, because OOo falls short.

	--- Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch                                   mike at trausch.us
home: 404-592-5746, 1                                 www.trausch.us
cell: 678-522-7934                       im: mike at trausch.us, jabber
Ubuntu Unofficial Backports Project:    http://backports.trausch.us/
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