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b-hebrew - Re: [b-hebrew] Re: b-hebrew Digest, Vol 13, Issue 12

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Subject: Biblical Hebrew Forum

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  • From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
  • To: bill.rea AT canterbury.ac.nz
  • Cc: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Re: b-hebrew Digest, Vol 13, Issue 12
  • Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 15:29:12 -0800

On 19/01/2004 14:39, Bill Rea wrote:

Peter wrote:-


But, though you may not realise it in
beautiful but far-away Christchurch (I was there last January), the
world is multilingual and we simply can't all communicate with
ISO-8859-1.


Sheesh, I asked you to hold the gratuitous insults and you throw me
another one!


Well, sorry, but I was complimenting your home city at the same time.

Peter also wrote:-


I guess you will say Latex, which is also free. Well, 20+ years
ago I too used this kind of batch processing (remember nroff?) to
produce formatted English text. Then I discovered WYSIWYG word
processing, and have never looked back since. I can do WYSIWYG Hebrew
word processing with OpenOffice and MS Office, and typesetting with MS
Publisher. Why should I go back to the dark ages of batch processing?


I suggest you really do read the arguments regarding systems like TeX or
LaTeX as opposed to any WYSIWYG word processor you care to name. All your
comment above shows is that you don't know what you're talking about.


I'll ignore the gratuitous insult :-) and ask you to send me some such arguments. I honestly don't know any which hold a drop of water. I did the Google search which Trevor suggested, and the only relevant article on the first page was the one I named, which quoted a few arguments against WYSIWYG and comprehensively demolished them.

But maybe the point is that I am doing something a bit different. I don't care too much about high quality typesetting, PDFs generated by Word or OpenOffice are good enough for me. I am looking for easily usable tools for working with Hebrew and other text. I don't want gobbledegook codes in my face, I want to see what my output is going to look like. And so does most of the world - look at why Windows and Mac together conquered the world, and Linux could only begin to fight back when it got a decent GUI.

Maybe it's difficult for you Unix geeks (I don't mean that as an insult, honest!) to understand, but not everyone's ideal user interface is a command line prompt.

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/






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