can TeX do That?

["Adam Lindsay" <atl@comp.lancs.ac.uk>]

As a follow-up to yesterday's question from an ex-FrameMaker user,
William Adams posted the following response to Hans's response:

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Subject: Re: [OS X TeX] Can Tex do That?
From: "William F. Adams" <wadams@atlis.com>
Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2004 11:15:07 -0500

I've been very busy at work lately (but finally finding (some) time to 
work on TUG2003 and my paper ;)

The answers received here and on TeXHaX are quite good though, so I 
didn't feel (too) guilty about not answering.

Did want to comment on this:

On Monday, February 9, 2004, at 10:41  AM, Adam Lindsay quoted Hans 
Hagen saying:

> - i still have to find something that cannot be done in tex (apart from
> page by page made up documents but that's a different game anyway)

Actually, when automated layout styles break down here or simply won't 
raise up to the customer's quality expectation here at work, doing such 
on a case-by-case, page-by-page basis is the raison-detre (sorry, not 
sure 'bout the funny French accents ;) for my employment here.

Doing such manually / by hand in TeX is the first line of defence and 
is usually where things are held at (picking spreads to run long / 
short is a good example as is forcing float placement), but at need 
we'll fall back on tweaking things w/ Enfocus PitStop or (re)creating a 
section in FreeHand or Illustrator. This is usually done in the final 
moments of a project when time is tight and there's no payoff for doing 
things programmatically (most of our books are one-offs and the 
designer was _not_ paid extra for series use)

A question I've not seen asked is, did you trouble to tag your 
documents w/ SGML? If so, you're a good ways toward re-use / switching 
to a formatting engine like TeX.

If not, what's your budget? My suggestion would be to set up LaTeX 
documentclass packages for all the documents which you create, then use 
LyX for editing all of your text source (and rtf2latex to pull in Word 
.docs from the un-washed masses), w/ a .layout file for LyX which calls 
your documentclasses, things should, ``just work'' at that point except 
for the odd special case which will require manual tweaking (can be 
done as ERT (evil red text --- raw LaTeX code) inserted into the text).

There was a very nice presentation at TUG2003 on doing this sort of 
switch, but the company bought the code and it wasn't released.

Can't resist pointing out though that John Warnock swore up and down 
that for so long as he was in charge at Adobe after their purchase of 
Frame Corp. Adobe would do FrameMaker (nominally he's not in charge of 
day-to-day operations these days).

William
-- 
William Adams, publishing specialist
voice - 717-731-6707 | Fax - 717-731-6708
www.atlis.com

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