On Wed, 2006-10-18 at 12:06 +0200, Per Jessen wrote:
this in SuSE is to use LaTeX with the hyperref package. This is a little harder than using (say) OpenOffice but is more flexible and produces much higher quality output than you can get from any word processor.
Initially I looked at using LaTeX for generating PDFs, but found the learning curve much too steep when compared to openoffice. Also, IMHO the PDFs produced by OpenOffice can easily match the quality of those produced by e.g. LaTeX.
In fairness, comparing LaTeX with OpenOffice is like comparing a pipe organ with a saxophone. LaTeX is a professional typesetting system, probably the most powerful there is. It has better wordspacing and hyphenation. It types maths better and it gives access to a larger range of pdf features. It can also use any PostScript (and with some effort) any TrueType font and handle multiple-character ligatures while openoffice has difficulty with simple ligatures and em dashes. It also hnadles expert fonts much better. The price of this flexibility is a steeper learning curve, though it's not very hard to create a simple document. And most people prefer the output, especially if you use some of the PostScript fonts that most people prefer to computer modern roman. Sometimes OpenOffice is what you want, especially if you just want simple office documents or pdfs with limited features. A saxophone is probably easier to play well than a pipe organ, many people prefer the sound, and certainly it's a lot easier to carry around with you. -- JDL