Kieran Healy

Three Quarks

Dean Allen, of the incomparable Textism, has an entertaining rant up about the evils of Quark Express and its 90% market share. I hesitate to ask what he thinks of LaTeX, the typesetting system I use to produce everything I write and one of the three applications I can’t live without. (The other two are Emacs and R.) LaTeX is very powerful, quite old, rather unfriendly and completely free. That about sums it up.

In another post, Dean notes that someone seems to have stolen his phrase `Intellectual Property is Theft’, thereby confirming the truth of the aphorism.

“LaTeX is very powerful, quite old, rather unfriendly and completely free.”

Any opinion on LyX?

I tried LyX ages ago. It was already pretty good, and I’m sure it’s improved a great deal. My problem is one of path-dependence. All my stuff is in latex files, and it’s not trivial to port them to lyx. And any statistical analysis I do uses R, which integrates very well with Emacs and Latex. So I’m kind of stuck.

I hate to break this to you, but publishers are increasingly moving towards actually laying out entire books using… MS Word and PDF. It’s some kind of cost saving move that seeks to cut out the production department entirely. So say what you will about Quark, I miss it already.

Do you identify with LaTeX, seeing as how it is old, unfriendly, etc., etc.? :-)

Do you identify with LaTeX, seeing as how it is old, unfriendly, etc., etc.? :-)

Hmph. No. Mainly because, unlike LaTeX, I am not very powerful.

LaTeX is bad at typesetting magazines, newsletters, and the like: any type of document where there are multiple streams of running text that interact in unpredictable ways (think multiple articles which jump pages) and graphics and pictures that need to be placed on the page in individually variable ways. This is the sort of thing Quark is very good at. But LaTeX doesn’t even claim that sort of document as one of its applications, and its developer community doesn’t try to make it better for that sort of thing. (In comp.text.tex, posters are regularly advised to use some other program.) This is just to say that TeX and LaTeX aren’t layout programs, which is what Quark is. You can manhandle it into doing layout, but that’s pretty painful.

On the other hand, Quark’s typesetting engine is pitiful compared to TeX. The line- and paragraph-breaking routines aren’t anywhere near as good.

The two systems only go head-to-head when the product invovles continuous streams of mostly text. I think here TeX might be the better program, but I can also see a book designer not liking it because I suspect that, at the highest level of book production, techinque becomes of matter of art: small, unpredictable adjustments made to the layout of individual pages. That’s not something that TeX makes it easy to do.

But people producing books using Word is shocking, no question.