Msg: Re: Beginner's question + Euroscript.

Dear Martin,

I have no doubts that you are absolutely right: Latex produces the most professionally typesets and its possibilities in this respect appear to almost limitless. My primary task is not to publish a perfect layout in a magazine though, but to find an efficient and simple way to create academic papers that fulfill simple but stringent format demands.
Those don't necessarily have to look like professional prints but are merely manuscripts. Those sheets of paper an author would send to a publisher to be reviewed, corrected and - as the final step - put into typeset and print.

Now, to make things just slightly more complicated, I'm not saying that the look of the manuscripts, although merely an ephemeral production and intermediate step to the final print - does not matter at all. Manuscript printouts via Word which does not seem to know a lot e.g. about correct spaces between letters, somehow always just don't look right. And the 'Times New Roman' truetype-font (which is happens to be the standard) it uses does not nearly look as neat and professional as the postscipt font 'Times' used by xy.

I'm well aware that it could be just me and my incapibility to make proper use of the respective programs. But I can say that I have used Word (that I know quite well) on a daily basis for many years and that I have tried my hands on Latex for about 5 years (and I have probably read all the manuals..) and somehow have never been able to produce a simple, fast and straightforward, yet good looking raw manuscript as e.g. this one I found on the net:

http://www.joachim-linder.de/data/kohlhaas%20dv.pdf http://www.joachim-linder.de/data/kohlhaas%20dv.pdf

If I could produce something like that, only with mla-formating and the right German quotation marks, I would be glad. And if I could even make xy to work in combaination with an automatized citing-format-function (I mean something like mla-biblatex) my happiness would surely be bound boundless! :-)

In case you believe that I just haven't managed to make Latex work for me, I totally trust you. I imagine it to be the ultima ratio especially for scientific papers that use formulas and mathematical signs. But I also think there are reasons that it is not so widely-spread in the humanities. Perhaps it is just too complicated ;-)

Kind regards and thank you again! L

From: Martin J. Osborne
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx
Sent: Wed, November 3, 2010 1:24:53 AM
Subject: Re: Beginner's question + Euroscript.

>
> I would like to have one(!) simple, fast & efficient and basic editor
> like XY that lets me concentrate on pure simple text which, afterwards,
> by a keystroke and without much formating hasstle
> could be converted into the desired format.

I don't think that's feasible: if you want beautiful output, you need to pay close attention to the input!
>
> One other slightly offtopic remark. Please tell me - and I do consider
> this to be very likely - if I'm
> drawing wrong conclusions here: But after having tested Word against
> Latex against Xy4 and having
> compared the quality of the respective postscript printouts, the
> Xy4-Postscripts look without any doubt the best.
> I'm using the Times-postscript font in Xy4, Times New Roman in Word and
> Times (or alternatively
> twfonts which is supposed to be Times New Roman and looks very bad) in
> Latex. Could it be that
> the ASCII-Times font that Xy4 uses is typographically somehow superior?

I don't know anything about Word. But LaTeX can use any font. Its typesetting capabilities are far superior to those of XyWrite or any other "word processor". For example, it optimizes linebreaks over whole paragraphs. It also knows the "category" of every token, so that it can space them correctly. Thus, for example, when you type $x=1$, TeX knows that the equals sign is a binary operator, and thus leaves the right amount of space around it and allows linebreaks at the right points. XyWrite is a wonderful text editor, but it cannot produce high quality output.

-- Martin J. Osborne
http://www.economics.utoronto.ca/osborne http://www.economics.utoronto.ca/osborne

Theoretical Economics
http://econtheory.org

PoET
http://theory.economics.utoronto.ca/poet http://theory.economics.utoronto.ca/poet