Re: [lojban] Re: Marketing lojban

[Jay Kominek <jay.kominek@colorado.edu>]

On Sun, 25 Mar 2001 seidensticker@msn.com wrote:

> PDF is read only.  If the TeX or LaTeX approaches are easy (that is,
> in a WYSIWYG way) to modify, then perhaps the nuisance of learning a
> new editor won't be a big deal.  I'd vote for a format that's
> editable.  Or, make both .pdf and .doc (or whatever) forms available.

TeX (LaTeX is a fairly advanced set of macros and stuff written in TeX for
doing things like books), is a Turing-complete language meant for
type-setting.

LaTeX is not WYSIWYG, though there is a WYSIWYG editor for LaTeX which
defeats the point of it.

The reason I use LaTeX is because everytime there is a list, or the
exercises at the end of a lesson, I don't want to have to fiddle with
doing WYSIWYG stuff. That is a waste of life. Instead when I make a
list,

\begin{itemize}
\item Milk
\item Carrots
\item Veggies
\item Dog food
\item Cat litter
\begin{itemize}

and LaTeX ensures that every last list looks identical. If I want to
change the way they all look, I can dig into the TeX at the beginning of
the document and alter it. TeX is plain ASCII anyone can edit with
basically anything. If all one wants to do is add a paragraph, they don't
have to know anything. If they want to do something really fancy they can
learn TeX and then they could embed an AI into lesson 10 to autogenerate
all the examples and exercises.

> The reason I bring up editability is that I frequently find the
> formatting of some web-based document to be suboptimum.  Not a
> problem (to me) if it's in Word.  But it's basically unreadable if
> it's in PDF format.  For example, lojban.org has a short .pdf Lojban
> dictionary written with a microscopic font.  It looks like a nice
> piece of work, but I'd need to tweak it before printing it -- not an
> option with .pdf.

Does anybody edit the reference grammar? Did anyone (Besides John Cowan)
before it was published?

I figure the textbook is a text_book_. The ultimate goal is to have it
printed and distributed to students in classrooms. Therefore, it shouldn't
just look okay printed, it should look great printed, and printed quality
should be the first concern.

My plans are:
1 Take the textbook, convert it very structurally described LaTeX.
2 Fill out the sections missing material
3 Add examples
4 Accept corrections and new material
5 Repeat 2 through 4 until somebody clubs me over the head and takes it
  away, or somebody publishes it.

Unless anyone else was planning on doing roughly the above, then I believe
the best way to run things and make them look good is to use LaTeX.

- Jay Kominek <jay.kominek@colorado.edu>
  Waiting Is.