Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> Why not run LyX or Kile? The best of both worlds. Works fine as long as
> templates are not strictly imposed and you needn't collaborate with Windopes
> (who unfairly enough swap Office files, but refuse to handle LaTeX or
> install a front-end).
Yeah. I hate it when people in the academic world insist on doing
things with word processors. In reality, people are backed into a
corner to an extent when it comes to software. For example, when I
taught EE T circuits courses, I decided to incorporate OrCAD 10.5 into
the course. It just seemed like the logical choice, not one I was
willing to make. But they had a free version, and most students would
be using word processors to do their reports. So it made a lot of sense
to have them use OrCAD and be done with it. It does look like pretty
good cad software, but I don't think there's a Linux version of it. I
could be wrong. I did introduce Linux quite a bit, as well as show the
students a little bit about gnuplot, LaTeX, and regular spice. There
wasn't enough time to spend talking about why they should use Linux. I
also stressed the importance of knowing how to do a netlist by hand in
spice. Most students weren't willing to learn. Well, they were all
pretty much comfortable with big, expensive, proprietary OrCAD. Plus,
everybody pretty knows Office. It's just that as an instructor, one has
to learn how to work in the "other" means of getting work done whenever
possible.
Also, I get these "standard course outlines", from which I pretty much
cut-n-paste everything to make my syllabi, in Office format. Most are
littered with crap like boxes and tables. While they translate well
into Open Office format, I run into problems when I try to convert them
back to MS Office format from within OO. The department chair bitched
because my syllabi made his MS Office crash. So, I wound up installing
the trial version of MS Office, and redoing everything so the dept.
chair's MS Word wouldn't crash when he tried to open it. It's little
things like this that have me back to MS Office.
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