Re: Boldface typing

[Marcin Borkowski <mbork@wmi.amu.edu.pl>]

On 2014-12-31, at 14:55, Rusi <rustompmody@gmail.com> wrote:

> Good to remember that the DTP revolution centered around things like pagemaker
> doing images and text together.
> Does latex do a half decent job of images?? Dunno... I find it implausible

Well.

It depends on what you mean by "doing job of images".

LaTeX is not a DTP system, it's a typesetting system aimed primarily at
scientific publications.  It can (of course) reserve some space on the
page for an image - even include an image into a PDF, and do some basic
transformations (like scaling, rotating or cropping).  That is no
problem.  It can wrap an image with text, though this is much less
reliable and has severe limitations.  (I hope that the new LaTeX3 output
routine will change it for the better, but we'll have to wait for that.
In the meantime, if yoy want to produce graphics-heavy documents,
ConTeXt might be the way to go.

  ConTeXt is also TeX-based, but it's completely independent of LaTeX2
(either the "old" 2.09, or the "new" 2e), and is designed much, much
better than LaTeX 2.09 and much better than LaTeX2e (which is
constrained by at least partial backwards compatibility).  ConTeXt
shines especially in a few areas LaTeX is lacking: images, grid
typesetting, columns.  Also, while LaTeX is very
scientific-stuff-centric, ConTeXt is much more general (though it was
historically aimed primarily at educational materials).

OTOH, if by "doing job of images", you mean /producing/ images (like
diagrams, graphs etc.), you almost couldn't have a tool better than
LaTeX.  Check out the manual for TikZ (oddly, the file is named
pgfmanual.pdf); it is a huge engine for programmatically generating very
sophisticated graphics.

All in all, I think that comparing LaTeX with DTP stuff is a bit unfair:
they are a bit different animals.  Not as different as in "Word vs
LaTeX", but still.  There are things (especially graphics-related) where
LaTeX clearly falls behind, and there are things (especially
mathematics-related, both in the sense of math formulae and in the sense
of e.g. producing diagrams posessing certain mathematical properties;
also, bibliographies, though to be honest I don't know how InDesign et
al. perform in this department) that it's hard to beat.

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Adam Mickiewicz University