Round-trip revisions via MS Word. Alternate methods?

[Syed Zaeem Hosain (Syed.Hosain@aeris.net)]

Agreed that LaTeX has a steep learning curve and, in this WYSIWYG world, it may seem like a step backward to some people. However, the power and flexibility (with highly consistent formatted output) is very appealing in some cases.

With regard to hyphenation, it sounds like the person writing the thesis was not providing hyphenation hints. You can use the \hyphenation command to identify the break points in a set of unusual words, and LaTeX will do the right thing after that whenever it sees those words.

Or you can also use hyphenation marks in the wording of the text as needed. So that if the text flow changes later, the hyphens are _not_ shown when the word is not at the end of the line. This is best used for the occasional word, rather than using hyphenation hints for all occurrences of an unusual word.

Z

-----Original Message-----
From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Steve Rickaby
Sent: Monday, March 03, 2014 9:46 AM
To: Harding, Dan; rebecca officer; framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: RE: Round-trip revisions via MS Word. Alternate methods?

At 16:36 +0000 3/3/14, Harding, Dan wrote:

>Anything proprietary, that requires a major learning curve, or an additional software purchase/install would not work well at all.

With all respect to Rebecca, in that case I would be very cautious about LaTeX. Yes, it's free, and yes, it works, but if you want to deviate from the designs dictated by existing packages (correct term?), you are then into a very big learning issue, requiring deep knowledge of TeX itself. LaTeX can be made to do amazing things in the hands of an expert, but I've yet to see a predefined package produce acceptable results: there's always some wrinkle the package developer hasn't thought of, and which you can't fix.

As a small example, I recently copy-edited a thesis done in LaTeX. The package designer had never considered that an author might want to embed non-proportional character markup, which is very common in software documentation, where camel-case is a convention, i.e. 'ThisIsaThing'. Such words are almost always non-dictionary words. In this case, if such a word fell at the right-hand margin of the text page, LaTeX simply didn't bother to try to hyphenate it, resulting in gross margin violation and the author having to manually break such words *in the LaTeX source*. Of course, any editing that resulted in text flow destroyed this, with the manually hyphenated word now appearing hyphenated within a line. Yech.

-- 
Steve
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