[ale] Publisher for Linux

[Sean Kilpatrick]

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On Friday 28 November 2003 11:37 pm, hbbs at comcast.net wrote:
| The learning curve thing is a problem for working with Lyx, TeTeX, etc.
| Barring the use of canned styles, the notion of designing a document
| before typing word one is off-putting to many, I'm sure.


I would gently suggest that such folk get over it.  I have spent decades
working in the publishing industry. It is far easier to type all but
the shortest bits of text in a word processing program or text editor
and then import the text into a DeskTop Publishing (DTP) program.
DTP programs make lousy text editors.  Headlines, chapter headings
and the like can be created while running a DTP program but anything
longer is best written in a program that is designed for editing text.

Writing text and designing page layouts are very different tasks,
requiring different skills and different mind-sets. It is difficult to
do both at the same time except for the simplest of documents. Programs
like Word, or Word Perfect, or the WP module of OO, are Word Processing
programs with extra bits thrown on top for minimal layout tasks. They are
not, nor were they intended to be, true DTP programs. Programs such as
Quark, or Pagemaker or Scribus take time to learn and are difficult to
master but they contain the tools needed to create complex, multi-page
documents.

Sean

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