Steve Izma > James Lowden sent me, off list, this link to an > article he wrote about the relevance of groff to > fundamental concepts of programming and computer > use. I assume he's too modest to broadcast it, > but I think it's excellent: > [...]
My thanks to James and to you, Steve. Back in the University, everybody I knew used exclu- sively MS Word, and doing a couple of term papers in it got me tired and annoyed to a headache, although I think I used its basic functionality like styles appropriately. So when the time for the diploma came, I said to myself I would do it LaTeX, which at that time I didn't know at all. I encountered the same problems as James's daughter, because the default LaTeX output was very far from the handicapped version of the Russian standard we had to adhere to, so I registered with FIDO7 (the Russian FIDO branch) and subscribed to a Tex-related group, whose members helped me customize LaTeX as was required. It was very difficult for a beginner, but I didn't give up. Next was the problem of text exchange, but that only enhanced my discipline. In the end, it all payed off. While others had to painfully go through the whole document to fix it after incorporating even small changes, in LaTeX it was easy. The bigger the document, the more evident was its superiority over Word. Anton
