Re: Documents

[Scott.Fahlman@SEF-PMAX.SLISP.CS.CMU.EDU]

    I propose we stop teasing ourselves with the notion of moving to LaTeX and
    we admit that we are going to write everything in Scribe until it is no
    longer available.  Then, when we have to do so, we can take the time to
    convert our manuals to LaTeX.
    
Sounds reasonable.  I'm not sure about the "no longer available" part, but
there's a big cost in moving, and more important things to do for the
forseeable future.

    Why are we in one of the nations most famous CS schools, but we are using
    text formatting technology from 10-15 years ago.  Why don't we have screen
    oriented text formatters like everyone in industry has, why do we have to
    be behind industry here at CMU?  Those I'm familiar with output TeX and
    LaTeX, so we could probably even use Guy's stuff to control the ultimate
    output.  Using one of these systems would also allow us to cook up editor
    macros to convert our documents into that system instead of having to enter
    them again, which would be out of the question.

Facilities is now pushing Framemaker as the standard way of producing
documents.  It has a nifty WYSIWYG interface running under motif,
facilities for producing and inserting figures, and a nifty WYSIWYG editor
built in.  Of course, if you like to edit in Hemlock, you're screwd.  You
can move plain ascii into Motif, but once you've done formatting stuff you
can't move back.  Framemaker was chosen as the best package which would run
on Mach and for which we could get a site license.  I don't know of any
really whizzy page-layout editor that emits LaTeX.
    
-- Scott