Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
Miles Fidelman wrote:
Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
Outside of high academia & the publishing industry, most people don't
care how ugly their printed documents look.
I think there are an awful lot of us in business, non-profits, and
government who'd contest this.
Not to mention those in the advertising and marketing arena.
To take this further, one would have to argue about what is ugly. There
is a continuous scale from very ugly to very beautiful. Products like M$
Word cover the range from very ugly to somewhere in between. The very
beautiful end is accessible to professional typesetting systems only,
ie. TeX based systems like LaTeX or Adobe's InDesign.
Point taken.
I think what typically happens is that individuals who care about really
beautiful design will migrate to
either a commercial product or a Tex based system, depending on what
they're more comfortable
with. Corporate design departments (or university, or other large
organization) are likely to
pick a tool for reasons having to do support, or what their vendors
(printers, ad agencies, etc.)
use.
These remarks are not intended to start a flame
Likewise. Just commenting on personal experience in various work
environments.
I'm personally in the camp of time and data exchange being more
important than beauty - Word is
good enough, it's what most of the people I exchange documents use, and
we have internal
templates to start from. (And I'm not sure my eye or taste are good
enough to do much better).
When I need really fancy design work, I hand a Word document to someone
else (like my wife, a former mechanical
artist from the old pre-computer days, who went on to work at Bitstream
for a while) and let them use their prefered tools.
FYI: Just for perspective, I'm also old enough to remember designing
control logic for film processors used for in preparing print the
old-fashioned way (you know, half-tone separations, prepared with
screens and cameras) - and, for that matter, laying out the PC boards
with black tape on acetate. Never used TeX or LaTeX, but used enough
runoff and troff (remember those :-) to prefer WYSIWIG editors for short
documents.
Cheers,
Miles
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