> Xetex + \usepackage{fontspec} No fiddling required!
I'm not in an ASCII-english speaking country, and it's not like that at all. And all projects that started to rectify TeX with regards to unicode text, have fallen behind or are totally abandoned (I speak of stuff like LaTeX3e, Omega et al).
> Isn't this sort of the problem with WYSIWYG in general, though?
For some it's the problem, for others it's the allure. I like Framemaker style tools myself --but Adobe it has had it stagnate, and it's also not on the Mac.
> Can Word give me a nice, hierarchical view of all the paragraph and character styles and margin settings that have been applied to my article?
It has styles, and can present a list of them et al. Not many people use it that way, but it's quite powerful. Not as powerful as Framemaker though.
> My text editor does that for me, and I'm not distracted by presentation issues while I type my document.
No, but you are distracted of keeping a syntax NOT RELATED to the document content in your head.
> How so? Text flow around images is an issue in TeX - have Quark or InDesign really improved much otherwise?
There have been improved hyphenation/justification algorithms during the 90's that InDesign et al utilize, that provide better visual output even for simple paragraph text compared to plain ole TeX. Mainly utilizing the hz algorithm.
I'm not in an ASCII-english speaking country, and it's not like that at all. And all projects that started to rectify TeX with regards to unicode text, have fallen behind or are totally abandoned (I speak of stuff like LaTeX3e, Omega et al).
Xetex is still actively maintained, and at the very least it's utf-8 aware. Googling around, I found that non-ASCII users report that Xetex doesn't really do a very good job of handling language-specific spacing, but at the same time there are an abundance of packages and extensions to Xetex that address a lot of these issues. I'm curious though - where are you from? Would Xetex really be unworkable where you come from?
For some it's the problem, for others it's the allure. I like Framemaker style tools myself --but Adobe it has had it stagnate, and it's also not on the Mac.
Yes - I too was disappointed when they killed the Mac version.
It has styles, and can present a list of them et al. Not many people use it that way, but it's quite powerful. Not as powerful as Framemaker though.
If Word had a mode where it could enforce styles - prevent me from accidentally dragging a paragraph margin around with the flick of the mouse or something - if Word insisted that every bit of formatting in the document came from one of the named styles, that alone would be progress.
No, but you are distracted of keeping a syntax NOT RELATED to the document content in your head.
Well, I've been able to learn TeX/LaTeX syntax - so for me it's a sunken cost. And for me at least, it's a lot less distracting than the tools and accoutrements of WYSIWYG text editing. YMMV.
There have been improved hyphenation/justification algorithms during the 90's that InDesign et al utilize, that provide better visual output even for simple paragraph text compared to plain ole TeX. Mainly utilizing the hz algorithm.
Interesting - I've never heard of the hz algorithm - although Wikipedia has this to say about it:
According to Zapf,[3] Hàn Thế Thành made a detailed analysis of the Hz-program for micro-typography extensions to the TeX typesetting system and implemented them in pdfTeX. These are available as part of the LaTeX and ConTeXt typesetting packages.
So it might be as straightforward as \usepackage{microtype}? I've looked at the pdfTeX document on the microtype package and it does indeed seem to improve the text layout quite a bit, at least with the font expansion feature.
I'm not in an ASCII-english speaking country, and it's not like that at all. And all projects that started to rectify TeX with regards to unicode text, have fallen behind or are totally abandoned (I speak of stuff like LaTeX3e, Omega et al).
> Isn't this sort of the problem with WYSIWYG in general, though?
For some it's the problem, for others it's the allure. I like Framemaker style tools myself --but Adobe it has had it stagnate, and it's also not on the Mac.
> Can Word give me a nice, hierarchical view of all the paragraph and character styles and margin settings that have been applied to my article?
It has styles, and can present a list of them et al. Not many people use it that way, but it's quite powerful. Not as powerful as Framemaker though.
> My text editor does that for me, and I'm not distracted by presentation issues while I type my document.
No, but you are distracted of keeping a syntax NOT RELATED to the document content in your head.
> How so? Text flow around images is an issue in TeX - have Quark or InDesign really improved much otherwise?
There have been improved hyphenation/justification algorithms during the 90's that InDesign et al utilize, that provide better visual output even for simple paragraph text compared to plain ole TeX. Mainly utilizing the hz algorithm.