Probably a couple years back, I think Tim might have mentioned a software program that was used by many people to write and edit books with. I think the perk was that it was easier to work with the font types than it was in Microsoft Word or Libre Office. Would anyone recall what software that was? Ron
Maybe you are thinking of LaTeX (pronounced La-Tech)? It is a "What You See Is What You Mean" (WYSIWYM) markup language, rather than "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) like most word processor software. You write your document using a text editor, mark it up using specific LaTeX language elements, then "compile" it into your final document (PDF, etc.) There is a GUI for LaTeX too, called LyX (and apparently some newer ones: https://beebom.com/best-latex-editors/) Or are you thinking of trofff/nroff which predates LaTeX? Speaking of which, would WLUG members be interested in Maddog giving a talk about the latter? I'm sure Maddog wouldn't mind me reposting his Facebook post about talks he gave on troff/nroff in 1984: "In 1984 I wrote some troff macros that would allow me to easily update and format my resume. I wrote these macros to help illustrate one of three talks I gave at DECUS. The three talks were: o "nroff(1) for beginners: All I want to do is write a simple letter" o "troff(1) for nroff(1)ers" All I want to do is write a simple resume" o "macro writing for nroff(1)ers and troff(1)ers: All I want to do is help someone else write a simple resume" The talks were very successful, with the first talk attracting 30 people, the second talk attracting 150 and the third talk had standing room only with people in the hallway trying to hear. Over the years I changed the engine from AT&T troff(1) which was really only good for a certain type of typesetter, to device independent troff (ditroff) to GNU troff (groff) which produced PostScript. In all that time I did not have to change my macros in the least, nor the input to the macros. Two days ago someone asked me for a copy of my resume, and I realized that I had not updated it since the year 2000, and that was also the last time I had used my macros or groff(1). I tried to take the PDF of my last resume and update it with Libre Office Writer, but that would take a VERY long time just to update it, and even longer to get the formatting right. Then I went into vim(1) and just added a page or two to the sources for my year 2000 resume, typed in the one command line I needed and created a pdf of my updated resume. Total time: two hours. Not bad for forty year old "code". " On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 01:44:56PM GMT, hammerron via WLUG wrote:
Probably a couple years back, I think Tim might have mentioned a software program that was used by many people to write and edit books with. I think the perk was that it was easier to work with the font types than it was in Microsoft Word or Libre Office.
Would anyone recall what software that was?
Ron
Ron, While I definitely have an interest in using something like LaTeX to format my books, I've been using a couple other pieces of software. 1. I've been writing in LibreOffice and then exporting as an epub / pdf / odf. 2. To so some specialized stuff I've been importing the epub into "Sigll" ( https://sigil-ebook.com/) to look at the indexes and create tables of contents. I've then been using github as an off machine backup solution so if this laptop was to cook off I wouldn't lose tons of work. It's also a pretty good medium to self publish stuff that you don't care if people see. Hope that helps! Tim. On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 2:31 PM Chuck Anderson via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> wrote:
Maybe you are thinking of LaTeX (pronounced La-Tech)? It is a "What You See Is What You Mean" (WYSIWYM) markup language, rather than "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG) like most word processor software. You write your document using a text editor, mark it up using specific LaTeX language elements, then "compile" it into your final document (PDF, etc.) There is a GUI for LaTeX too, called LyX (and apparently some newer ones: https://beebom.com/best-latex-editors/)
Or are you thinking of trofff/nroff which predates LaTeX? Speaking of which, would WLUG members be interested in Maddog giving a talk about the latter? I'm sure Maddog wouldn't mind me reposting his Facebook post about talks he gave on troff/nroff in 1984:
"In 1984 I wrote some troff macros that would allow me to easily update and format my resume. I wrote these macros to help illustrate one of three talks I gave at DECUS.
The three talks were:
o "nroff(1) for beginners: All I want to do is write a simple letter" o "troff(1) for nroff(1)ers" All I want to do is write a simple resume" o "macro writing for nroff(1)ers and troff(1)ers: All I want to do is help someone else write a simple resume"
The talks were very successful, with the first talk attracting 30 people, the second talk attracting 150 and the third talk had standing room only with people in the hallway trying to hear. Over the years I changed the engine from AT&T troff(1) which was really only good for a certain type of typesetter, to device independent troff (ditroff) to GNU troff (groff) which produced PostScript. In all that time I did not have to change my macros in the least, nor the input to the macros. Two days ago someone asked me for a copy of my resume, and I realized that I had not updated it since the year 2000, and that was also the last time I had used my macros or groff(1). I tried to take the PDF of my last resume and update it with Libre Office Writer, but that would take a VERY long time just to update it, and even longer to get the formatting right. Then I went into vim(1) and just added a page or two to the sources for my year 2000 resume, typed in the one command line I needed and created a pdf of my updated resume. Total time: two hours. Not bad for forty year old "code". " On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 01:44:56PM GMT, hammerron via WLUG wrote:
Probably a couple years back, I think Tim might have mentioned a software program that was used by many people to write and edit books with. I think the perk was that it was easier to work with the font types than it was in Microsoft Word or Libre Office.
Would anyone recall what software that was?
Ron
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-- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".
For writing I like plume creator. You can't do formatting in it but it has allows you to organize a lot of information like character bios, important locations, etc. You can break chapters into scenes. On Sun, 2024-10-20 at 13:44 -0400, hammerron via WLUG wrote:
Probably a couple years back, I think Tim might have mentioned a software program that was used by many people to write and edit books with. I think the perk was that it was easier to work with the font types than it was in Microsoft Word or Libre Office.
Would anyone recall what software that was?
Ron
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hammerron via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> writes:
Probably a couple years back, I think Tim might have mentioned a software program that was used by many people to write and edit books
It depends on what kind of "book". If you want to get it published or accepted as a dissertation, the deciding factor is what the publisher or school wants. If you just mean you want to write many pages and get them bound for personal use, I have gone to Park/Print in Worcester (very near my house) with a *.pdf file containing a math book, a Scheme report, or my own notes. They print it two sided 8.5x11 and bind it in a soft plastic cover and "comb" binding for short money. https://www.parkprintonline.com/ I have also gotten hard cover binding with title on the spine (back). I did this twice, once for my dissertation, once for some of my grandmother's writing. They cut it to the size you want. There was a place in Newton that did that, I don't know if they are still there. Chuck Anderson via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> writes:
Maybe you are thinking of LaTeX (pronounced La-Tech)?
In my bombastic opinion, if you need to write mathematics, you would be crazy to use anything else. I use emacs, LaTeX, and evince every day. Last meeting I tried the share-screen feature of jit.si and it worked. Tim asked "What's an idempotent monad?" or something like that. (It was in the title of the document on my screen.) I was not prepared to summarize a decade of grad school in a few seconds, and so did not answer. But if you promise not to ask too much about what it means, I could put together a few slides and demonstrations to show what it can do and how I use it. I would not want to take up the whole meeting, but maybe a few other people could do the same with their own favorite document production systems. -- Keith
Thank you all for the great responses. I'm pretty sure that LaTex was the software that I was trying to remember the name of. I have been currently using Libre Office. I think I will stay with it for now and will also keep notes on the others mentioned. The responses are so helpful, as it gives me new ideas, such as having some of my longer personal items printed by a print shop. I also find the idea of Sigil editing epubs as interesting. At the rate I'm going it could be a few years, I'll see what happens. It's on mineralogy. The writing is very slow moving with my time constraints. It's only at 34 pages currently. When it grows to sufficient content I was thinking of self-publishing with Lulu or something similar. I asked about the writing software in case moving away Libre Office was necessary. Ron On 10/20/24 13:44, hammerron via WLUG wrote:
Probably a couple years back, I think Tim might have mentioned a software program that was used by many people to write and edit books with. I think the perk was that it was easier to work with the font types than it was in Microsoft Word or Libre Office.
Would anyone recall what software that was?
Ron
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Guys, I'm posting this for Tim, who texted me this kickstarter link earlier today: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jetkvm/jetkvm Which looks interesting, and I'm certainly tempted to spend $70 bucks on a whim. I _am_ worried about how slick the presentation is, and the talk about the "Jetkvm Cloud" for remote access. No thank you. What do other people think? John
"hammerron" == hammerron via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> writes:
Thank you all for the great responses. I'm pretty sure that LaTex was the software that I was trying to remember the name of. I have been currently using Libre Office. I think I will stay with it for now and will also keep notes on the others mentioned. The responses are so helpful, as it gives me new ideas, such as having some of my longer personal items printed by a print shop. I also find the idea of Sigil editing epubs as interesting.
At the rate I'm going it could be a few years, I'll see what happens. It's on mineralogy. The writing is very slow moving with my time constraints. It's only at 34 pages currently. When it grows to sufficient content I was thinking of self-publishing with Lulu or something similar. I asked about the writing software in case moving away Libre Office was necessary.
So this type of document, where you have figures, equations, cross references, etc is where LaTeX shines. You can also use LyX which is the WYSIWYG version of TeX/LaTeX editor. The nice part is you can break things into chapters, and have a makefile assemble it all for you into a book and create an index automatically, along with Table of Contents, etc. And since you can just use plain text, it keeps you from agonizing over the look over the paper at first, letting you concentrate on the content. In any case, good luck! I know how terrible a writer I am, and how slow it would take me as well. John
participants (6)
-
Chuck Anderson -
Dennis Payne -
hammerron -
John Stoffel -
Keith Wright -
Tim Keller