Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

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/