Scott Lurndal <scott@slp53.sl.home> schrieb:
> Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:
>>Scott Lurndal <scott@slp53.sl.home> schrieb:
>>> Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:
>>>>MitchAlsup <MitchAlsup@aol.com> schrieb:
>>>
>>>>LaTeX has its quirks, of course (placement of figures is one
>>>>thing), but I still prefer it over Word, especially for formulas.
>>>>The hoops you have to jump through to number equations in Word are
>>>>hilarious.
>>>>
>>>>For slides, though. LaTeX is horrible, there WYSIWYG is better.
>>>>
>>>
>>> For slides I always preferred the troff mv macros.
>>>
>>> .VS 1 "Tunables Project" "October 31, 1995"
>>
>>How good are these if you want to have text on the left-hand side
>>and the pictures, or graphs, corresponding to the text on the
>>right-hand side?
>>
>>What about drawing a quick flow diagram with some annotations
>>on the boxes? How many iterations would you have to run through
>>to get it right?
>
> The pic(1), eqn(1), grap(1) and tbl(1) pre processors could be used with the mv
> macro set to include pictures, formulae and tables appropriately formatted.

Regarding pictures: Are these programs (specifically pic)
intelligent enough to set them without having to specify
the positions? In that case, you'd need to draw the picture
by hand or using WISYWIG an then calculate the positions.

Not really attractive :-)

The only automated layout program I know is dot (and friends)
for graphs. It produces so-and-so results.

> Various X11 drawing applications (e.g. xfig, dia) would produce
> pic(1) directives which could be integrated into design documents
> as well as the viewgraphs.

But then you're doing WYSIWG anayway, just in a different program.

> Powerpoint allows viewgraph abuse,

What is viewgraph abuse?

> so I'd not use that as an example
> of something to aspire to. Keep it simple.

> Yes, troff et alia has a learning curve and yes, it's cryptic.

I've written a few manpages, but apart from that, I never saw the
need to look at it, using LaTeX instead, which far more successfull
overall. Knuth beat Kernighan, there.

Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:
>Scott Lurndal <scott@slp53.sl.home> schrieb:
>> Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:
>>>Scott Lurndal <scott@slp53.sl.home> schrieb:
>>>> Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:
>>>>>MitchAlsup <MitchAlsup@aol.com> schrieb:
>>>>
>>>>>LaTeX has its quirks, of course (placement of figures is one
>>>>>thing), but I still prefer it over Word, especially for formulas.
>>>>>The hoops you have to jump through to number equations in Word are
>>>>>hilarious.
>>>>>
>>>>>For slides, though. LaTeX is horrible, there WYSIWYG is better.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> For slides I always preferred the troff mv macros.
>>>>
>>>> .VS 1 "Tunables Project" "October 31, 1995"
>>>
>>>How good are these if you want to have text on the left-hand side
>>>and the pictures, or graphs, corresponding to the text on the
>>>right-hand side?
>>>
>>>What about drawing a quick flow diagram with some annotations
>>>on the boxes? How many iterations would you have to run through
>>>to get it right?
>>
>> The pic(1), eqn(1), grap(1) and tbl(1) pre processors could be used with the mv
>> macro set to include pictures, formulae and tables appropriately formatted.
>
>Regarding pictures: Are these programs (specifically pic)
>intelligent enough to set them without having to specify
>the positions?

If I understand your question correctly, yes, the output from
'dia' or 'xfig' is a set of PIC directives (which pic(1) turns
into troff directives for drawing lines, arcs, text, etc) which
troff embeds into the output dynamically. Troff supports multicolumn
layouts, which the mv macros use to have e.g. a picture beside
the text.

Likewise for the output of other preprocessors like tbl, eqn or grap.

> In that case, you'd need to draw the picture
>by hand or using WISYWIG an then calculate the positions.

No, just use dia to create the picture, save as .pic and
the .pic file in the troff source using the '.so /path/to/dia.pic' that is run
through the preprocessor.

cat presentation.tr | pic | eqn | tbl | grap | groff -mv | ps2pdf > presentation.pdf

>
>But then you're doing WYSIWG anayway, just in a different program.

But only for the diagrams.

>
>> Powerpoint allows viewgraph abuse,
>
>What is viewgraph abuse?

Cluttered useless animated powerpoint slides :-)

Recall that when I started in the biz, we used
overhead projectors, blank transparancies and four
color pens. :-)