• [^] # Re: Erreur mon cher Watson!

    Posté par (site web personnel, Mastodon) . En réponse au lien Using LaTeX for writing research papers. Évalué à 3. Dernière modification le 14 juin 2024 à 22:19.

    Enfin, il y a le fait qu'un système comme LaTeX correspond beaucoup mieux à ma manière de travailler, où tout est visible en mode texte et codé, qu'un éditeur WYSIWYG.

    Voilà, et Frank dit bien que le même outil/système ne peut pas correspondre à toutes les populations (mode de fonctionnement visuel contre structuré purement textuel) ou milieux de travail.

    Most graphic designers and professional typesetters are used to working visually with immediate feedback and control. So, for them, systems like LaTeX appear difficult to handle and they don’t see any benefit in this unfamiliar working model.
    Whether or not the use of LaTeX would be advisable really depends on the job at hand, and cannot be answered without context. In a nutshell, I would suggest using LaTeX or a similar system whenever one or more of the following factors play an important role in the job:

    • user’s preference is to think in logical structures
    • designs that require consistency
    • documents whose designs are not yet fully defined or that need to be presented in several layouts in parallel
    • documents that require high-quality paragraph breaking
    • documents that contain heavy mathematics
    • automatically produced content (e.g., from databases)
    • long material

    On the other hand, the following factors move the balance towards using a (good quality!) visually oriented system:

    • user’s preference is to think in visual structures
    • user not at all comfortable working with programming languages (a high-level front end for TeX, e.g., LaTeX or ConTeXt, helps here but...)
    • designs that require a lot of visual flexibility rather than consistency (e.g., headings are designed one-off according to nearby objects)
    • designs that require text to flow around arbitrary shapes (TeX is simply not designed for this)
    • designs that change the horizontal measure from column to column
    • short material

    What actually tips the balance may differ in different circumstances

    "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." ― David Hume