[Nfb-science] Formatting: An Inquiry of Resources

[John Miller]

Hello,
I dislike working in MS word for technical writing as a blind individual.
Latex or Chatty Infty provides a good authoring tool for technical ideas.  These can be the final end point in the academic setting.
In the professional non-academic setting, though, all input technical documents arrive to me in MS word or PDF and all output is expected in MS word.
Often MS word documents are presented with track changes on which, for me, just makes the problem worse.
I occasionally maintain 2 copies of documents, one in latex and one in MS word.
My best success with MS word is generating PDF and reading the PDF with Infty reader. When that fails, I laser print, scan, and read with Infty reader.
Working in the same media as co-workers is a huge plus.  Personally, I just have not mastered it yet.
Best wishes with your technical and mathematical writing!
John
 

-----Original Message-----
From: nfb-science-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nfb-science-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of aerospace1028 at hotmail.com
Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2010 4:33 AM
To: nfb-science at nfbnet.org; szostak.1 at osu.edu
Subject: Re: [Nfb-science] Formatting: An Inquiry of Resources


greetings,
I wish I had known about latex as an undergraduate: not just for the mathematics type-setting either.  I like the content-focused nature myself.  I also apreciate the internal cross-refferencing capabilities.

As Michael pointed out, a major disadvantage is not working in the same system as your coleagues.  There are programs to convert latex source into various outputs (the tex4ht package, I believe, produces open office word doccuments that can easily be converted to MS-doc format), This produces an extra step in compairing peer feedback on your .doc output to the corrisponding location(s) of your latex source.

In my opinion, a critical factor that would influence your decission is the amount of time/effort you have available to learning a different system.  (A) learning the basics of the latex language itself: (b) learning any additional tools (such as tex4ht) to generate .doc output: (c) working out a routine for handling feedback and revisions.

These trade-offs are a personal preference.  The more difficulty/dislike you have with/for office-style word processers, the more latex could be seen as useful.  Or, the more experience and comfort you have with Word, the less worth-while learning something new becomes.

--Paul 		 	   		  
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