[OLUG] Misbehaving Microsoft products: what to do?

[Dave Burchell]

Christopher Garrity says:
> 
> 	LaTeX and Vim, only one person needs to learn LaTeX, the rest write ASCII.

Right you are.  And in fact, they could use VIM, Notepad, or even Word 
to edit the ASCII text.

Would you ask the users to edit ASCII text including XML tags, or just 
edit the text and you would put in the tags (or LaTeX markup, or whatever)
for them?

> I
> think you can convert LaTeX source to XML, but I doubt very much you could go
> from XML to LaTeX. 

You can go from XML to LaTeX (or HTML, or whatever) but you will loose 
something in the translation.  For example, you may have some tags for
the date:

<date>
  <year>2000</year>
  <month>06</month>
  <day>06</day>
</date>

You might want to make this look in LaTeX like

\textbf{2000--06--06}

or like

\textit{06/06/2000}

Either way, you've gone from structured document to layout.  (A fine
thing -- just don't try to go back.)

(Of course, you could use LaTeX to create a structured document; you
could write your own LaTeX style file if you want.  You could make LaTeX
do many of the same structured things as XML, but that's not going to
give you XML's interoperability.)

> You can go from LaTeX to HTML as well (I hear them now, "yes
> but we can do that under MS Word too")...

Yes, but (as we all understand) it is Word's features that don't work
that brought up this problem in the first place!  So I guess when you ask
Microsoft about a product, there are two questions:  "Will Microsoft Foo
support feature bar?" and "Will support for bar _work_ in this version
of Foo?"


> 	I'm just AHI (Another Humble Idiot)
> 
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-- 
Dave Burchell                                          40.49'N, 96.41'W
Free your mind and your software will follow.              402-467-1619
http://incolor.inetnebr.com/burchell/                  burchell at acm.org     

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