days muzings

oy it’s been a hazardous day :

Sick of laying around, sick of jumping around!

Finally finished my effort to convert the new RoE SOP to LaTeX. The main reason is that I can generate us a crap load of formats out of it and keep the source easy enough for most people to update even without my skillset. I packed it up in a ZIP and sent it to En4cer. I think after adding my sig to the SOP it is supposed to be official going by the finalized En4cer sent but until I hear about it. I’m keeping the files under my hat as far as those outside the SNCO project are concerned.

I must admit I am some what disappointed with the SOP Rewrites, don’t get me wrong its great material. It’s just the issue of workload balancing and time, sheesh man this stuff should’ve been done before I was even a Cpl… Let along sitting on my desk when I was made RSM.

LaTeX is a really good format, it’s pretty easy for every one to edit with a minimal understanding of it. And for some one like me it can become a very valuable tool. I’ve long since gave up on word processors, it’s like the worst idea in typesetting history if you ask me. I think half the bloody books I’ve read were probably passed through TeX / PostScript sooner or later in printing any way.

With my great dissatisfaction with word processing at the WYSIWYG level because it is such false advertising when you share files ^_^ and the crappy selection of portable formats. I eventually took to using XHTML/CSS for documents to be printed.. I’m fluent in XHTML but still it adds overhead to editing. LaTeX on the other hand, the learning curve is there for the sake of learning how to do XYZ when it pops up but it makes editing documents much easier.

Using Microsoft Word was harder then LaTeX haha and tables in LaTeX feel a little less pesky then they have always felt to me in XHTML. I think though one of my fundamental problems is that I’m linguistically diverse by nature.

I’m also some one that likes to work with data in comfort without having to worry about layout on other peoples system. That is one reason I tend to include a PDF version of all of my documents, at least that one will look proper lol.