On Wed, Mar 06, 2002 at 12:00:47PM -0400, Lex Spoon wrote:
> 
> > Over the past couple of days, I\'ve been doing some thinking...normally, I do 
> > most of my documentation work in LaTeX, and it does the job quite well.  It has 
> > it\'s obvious quirks, but I prefer it to, say, HTML or some closed-format word 
> > processor.
> 
> Yes, it strikes me as odd every time I switch from Squeak to LaTeX to
> edit a stupid text document.  The issue is, there are a *lot* of things
> in LaTeX that are nice.  Here are some of my top picks for anyone
> thinking of working on text processing is Squeak:
> 
> 	1. Sections and subsections, with automatic numbering.
> 
> 	2. Math formulas.
> 
> 
> Uh, okay, that's about it actually.  :)  A lot of LaTeX isn't useful if
> you are working in Squeak.  Insert today's date?  Put in an
> UpdatingStringMorph with "Date today"!  Outline something with a box? 
> Embed it in a Rectangle.

Well, personally I like the way I can programmatically design a document.
I like the fact that I can build a simple 'meta structure' and include
LaTeX files in that, in whatever ordering I like.  The fact that all
the sectional/chapter numbering and whatnot is automatically regenerated
is a real plus.  It makes a sort of fiendish sense that I can build
my documents with a simple Makefile. 

The ability to transform LaTeX into other "final" output formats is a
great boon, but it's also quite a pain...I like to have a neutral
document that can be PDF or HTML in it's final form, but pdflatex and
latex2html don't work together very well.

[snip]
> > in my brain, along with V. Bush\'s Memex.  The idea of a continuum of text that 
> > can be assembled objectively keeps coming back to haunt me. :)
> 
> You're not the only one!  It's so hard to figure out what to do next,
> however.  Fine-grained hyperlinked documents in Squeak, where even
> individual sub-sections are their own document and can be linked
> individually, would be fabulous.

Yes, I've been thinking a lot along these lines. :)  At the moment I'm
just dumping my brain out on paper...I need to organize the "what comes
next" part a bit better.

> 
> A not-insignificant problem is figuring out how to organize all this
> stuff.  It makes a traditional filesystem look pretty klunky!  I guess
> your "home directory" could be a master document with hyperlinks to all
> the documents you have made.  :)
> 
> 
> -Lex

I'm going to give this a lot more thought.  For some reason I've got this
document-composing itch that needs scratching. :)