The author of a text should, at least in the first instance, concentrate entirely on the first of these sets of tasks. That is the author's business. Adam Smith famously pointed out the great benefits that flow from the division of labor. Composition and logical structuring of text is the author's specific contribution to the production of a printed text. Typesetting is the typesetter's business. This division of labour was of course fulfilled in the traditional production of books and articles in the pre-computer age. The author wrote, and indicated to the publisher the logical structure of the text by means of various annotations. The typesetter translated the author's text into a printed document, implementing the author's logical design in a concrete typographical design. One only has to imagine, say, Jane Austen wondering in what font to put the chapter headings of to see how ridiculous the notion is. Jane Austen was a great writer; she was not a typesetter. The first two points above should be self-explanatory. Let me expand on the third. (Its importance depends on the sort of document under consideration.)
I have attempted to make a strong pitch for the "ascii plus typesetter" alternative to word processors. I will admit, however, that there are sorts of documents for which a WYSIWYG word processor is indeed the natural tool. I'm thinking of short, ad hoc, documents which have a high ratio of formatting "business" to textual content: flyers, posters, party invitations and the like. You could do these in TeX, but it would not be efficient. The standard LaTeX document classes (report, article, etc.) would be of little use to you. And while LaTeX is very smart at handling automatically the range of fonts that you're likely to want in a formal text, it's not geared toward the sort of "mixing and matching" of jolly fonts that you might want in a casual production. Logical structure is not really an issue: you're interested in "raw formatting". You want to know, for instance, If I put that line into a 36-point font, will that push my last line onto the next page, which I don't want? WYSIWYG is your man.
If most of your word-processing work is of this kind, you probably stopped reading a long time ago. If most of your text preparation work involves the production of relatively formal documents, this qualification doesn't affect the essentials of my case.
It may not have escaped your notice that I'm a bit worked up about this theme. Yes, I am. The point is that it's not just a matter of an academic debate between alternative modes of text preparation. It's a set of scales in which the might and wealth of the major software vendors is all on one side. To be blunt, we're looking at a situation in which MS Word is poised to become, for much of the world, the standard for the preparation of documents using computers. But Word is a standard that has little to commend it other than the fact that it is (or aspires to be) a standard.
It's a bit like QWERTY. Do you know that story? Why the standard arrangement of keys on typewriter keyboards (and by extension computer keyboards) has QWERTYUIOP along the top line? That was not the original arrangement of typewriter keys. It was designed for a purpose, namely to slow typists down. The problem was that the expertise of the early typists quickly outran the capabilities of the early mechanical typewriters: a fast typist could jam the keys, hitting them faster than they could return after striking the ribbon. QWERTY distributed the keys so they couldn't go so fast. This is clearly a crazy arrangement for the keys on an electronic keyboard, but it's too late to change: QWERTY is standard, and all attempts to rationalize the keyboard have failed in the face of that reality.
Similarly, I'm arguing that MS Word has no right to be a standard for document preparation, since it's clearly less efficient (for most purposes) than readily available alternatives. I'm hoping that it's not too late in this case, that there's still the opportunity of saying No to Word. Actually, in a sense Word is worse than QWERTY: it's not a real standard, but rather an escalator. The Microsoft "standard" for the binary representation of document formatting is something that is variable at the whim of Microsoft Corporation. The MS Word quasi-monopoly piggybacks off the Microsoft Windows quasi-monopoly (an issue which I will not get into here). And so long as they are not hard-pressed by commercial rivals, Microsoft has no particular interest in establishing any sort of long-term standard for the binary representation of formatting. On the contrary, they have a strong interest in forcing you to "upgrade" Word at regular intervals. Oh dear, Word N.0 won't read the document your colleague just sent you, prepared using N+1? Well, you'd better update then, hadn't you? Even if there are no features in N+1, that were not present in N, that are of any real value to you.2
If you've come with me this far, you might be interested in more details about good text editors, the TeX typesetting system and so on.
The best place to start for info about TeX and friends is probably the TUG homepage (TUG is the TeX Users Group). This will provide all the links you might need; one of the main ones is to the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN) sites, from which you can download complete TeX systems for just about all computer platforms. Such systems include the actual typesetter, a large collection of macros, a previewer, and software for generating printable files.
TeX packages (free ones at any rate) do not generally include the text editor that you'll also need (unless you already have one that you like). There are many choices, but my personal favorite for working with TeX files is Emacs, along with the AUC TeX package. The latter makes Emacs very TeX-friendly: it will highlight TeX syntax so you can see any errors in your mark-up at a glance, and it also offers a wide range of TeX-related commands on convenient menus.
In case you're interested, here's a screen shot of an TeX editing session using Emacs (PNG, 40678 bytes).
1 The binary coding used by word processors is a quite different animal, so inter-conversion between TeX and word processor formats is not easy. In addition, since TeX is a superior typesetting engine, it is in principle impossible to convert a TeX document to, say, Word without loss of information.
2 For what it is worth, in my opinion as somebody who used Word for several years before switching to TeX, and who has a keen interest in typesetting, no worthwhile features have been introduced into MS Word for Windows since version 2.0 of circa 1990.
File translated from TEX by TTH, version 1.93. On 29 Jun 1999, 14:47.
