[ale] I'm going to hate myself

[Michael Trausch]

On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 9:11 AM, Craig Button <craigb.rn at gmail.com> wrote:
> I’m going to hate myself for this but I’m actually likening Windows 7 and MS
> Office 2010.
>
> I’m currently working on a book collaboration with people from all around
> the country and even one from Australia.  We’re all academics so we didn’t
> have to spend and arm and a leg for Win 7 and we all participated in the
> Office 2010 Beta.  It’s got some really good collaboration tools built in.
> Last night I had 20 people around the county watching my PowerPoint
> presentation streaming to their computers.  Now I admit I’m running it on a
> computer with more horsepower than the average desktop, but it works well
> and the only hiccup with my ATT DSL that decided to stop in the middle of
> it.
>
> This is really going to hurt since my dissertation is on utilizing open
> source software to support free community health clinics and critical access
> hospitals.

Still, nothing can beat a good cross-platform DVCS and LaTeX (or, my
personal favorite, XeLaTeX).  At least then, you work with plain text
files (the ultimate in cross-platform compatibility!) and have
collaboration features that are built-in to the tools.  And XeLaTeX
lets you get some wonderfully polished and professional-looking output
that you can send to Lulu or another publisher as a camera-ready PDF
file.

You should check out the XeLaTeX toolset sometime, though; it is
particularly shiny on OS X, where the full power of OpenType can be
used with the fonts that come with the system and other feature-rich
OpenType fonts, such as those from Adobe.  (That said, there are a
handful of very pretty and free OpenType fonts out there that can be
used to create pretty documents with XeLaTeX, as well.)

It will be nice when all of OpenType's features can be easily used on
all platforms; I think that XeLaTeX only needs FreeType to support all
of them to do that.  I'm not 100% sure about that, though.

   --- Mike