emacs, vi, LaTeX, CVS, Ghostview, xdvi, ps2pdf, xpdf, and dvipdf

I decided to start reading Open Source Web Development with LAMP over on Safari to broden my horizons.  Everything is going fine until I get to this paragraph in the intro:

"This book was written entirely with Open Source software: emacs, vi, LaTeX, CVS, Ghostview, xdvi, ps2pdf, xpdf, and dvipdf on Linux and OS X. Frankly we couldn't imagine writing something of this length and complexity in Word. Shudder!"

I don't know what to do.  The authors lost me.  So all I need is  emacs, vi, LaTeX, CVS, Ghostview, xdvi, ps2pdf, xpdf, and dvipdf to replace Word?  Sign me up!  And I'm not totally sure what they are talking about with Word not being able to handle a document of their complexity.  We are talking about a 500pg document, that seems to be almost completely text.  Now perhaps they only have 8mb of ram or something on their machine, then I can see Word choking.  But I'll assume when you load up , vi, LaTeX, CVS, Ghostview, xdvi, ps2pdf, xpdf, and dvipdf they take up a bit of resources themselves. 

If I didn't have to wait 30 days to dump this book, I'd do so immediately.  While I wait, I might venture back into the book and hope that the authors just had a brief lasp in judgement, or just gave up on Word too soon.  Heck, I know it took me something like 3 or 4 minutes to figure out how to do a table of contents in Word.  And don't get me started on figuring out how to create a style in Word XP.  Let's just say that's three minutes of my life I'm not getting back!

Humph.  Family Guy is on soon.  That should put me in a better mood. 

1 Comment

  • I'm not quite sure why they need TWO text editors (emacs and vi, for sirshannon's benefit!), but then maybe if there were two authors doing it?



    As for all the others: LaTeX is a bunch of extra formatting commands for Donald Knuth's TeX language (the 'e' should actually be a subscripted E); GhostView is a PostScript viewer using the GhostScript not-actually-PostScript interpreter; CVS is the Concurrent Versions System, a source control tool; xdvi is an X Windows viewer for TeX's DVI output format; ps2pdf is part of the GhostScript suite for converting PostScript files to Adobe PDF; xpdf is a GUI PDF viewer; and dvipdf generates PDFs from DVI.



    Word can't quite hack a full non-fiction book with decent sidebars, illustrations and surrounding text flow. I believe MS Press still uses FrameMaker for publishing their books. Fiction rarely uses such devices, so Word is perfectly acceptable.



    Yes, you get lots of control over your text with LaTeX, but you have to type all the control codes yourself. Into a text editor. Generally with no preview. It's a little like, well, writing a program in emacs then running it to see if it works.



    If you know how to use styles in Word, and you can put up with later versions thinking they know more about what you want to do than you do, it's very easy to prepare copy for import into a serious DTP package.

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