6/28 is it useful/essential to learn Latex? I'm pretty happy with MS Word
and Powerpoint but occassionally people make fun of me and I kind of
feel left out and wanna learn Latex, but I'm not sure if it's
worthwhile to spend the time learning it. thx.
\_ I don't think I've ever found it useful, and I know very very few
people in industry that have any use for it. Perhaps it's different
in academia if you're serious about publishing something (lecture
notes, text books, etc). It's a tool, man. If a tool serves a
need you have, then learn it. It sounds like the people you hang
with are kind of silly.
\_ If people are making fun of you for not knowing LaTeX, those
people really need to get a life. Meet girls, pick up a language,
explore the world, learn about other cultures, see live theater,
read a book. There's so much more to life than learning LaTeX.
If you have nothing better to do then knock yourself out.
\_ Shut up Paolo.
\_ Uhm, even if it is Paolo, his comment seems pretty sensible.
Dumbass.
\- you should learn troff -me macros.
\_ my first resume was ms macros with tbl. those were good times.
\_ I use LaTeX as my main way of composing a document of which
appearance is important. The only time I run word is when
I have to deal with a word.doc someone else sent me. Although
I hope the world does not revolve around MS Word and its
proprietary file format, I don't think the reasons your offered
justify learning latex. (It sounds like a troll actually.)
BTW, I never learned latex in the sense of taking a course or
sitting down and read a few chapters of a book. Nobody does.
You just look at an existing document or draft and emulate. That's
the advantage of LaTeX. I knew all about Word 10 years ago but
since I stopped using it, now I forgot how to do many things in it.
\_ I need to learn it for my work. (LLNL) Really, for large
documents where layout is important and there are a lot of
graphs and pictures, Word becomes unuasable. It got so bad
that my version of Word XP would crash whenever I tried to
insert a text box. It's just the wrong tool for the job.
-jrleek
\_ well, yes; Word is not a layout tool, it's a word processor.
If you need layout, use InDesign or Quark. Or better, do it in
XHTML. -tom
\_ vi and troff. real men settle for nothing less. |
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