I run Linux and OpenBSD at home, have some years experience in software development and electrical engineering and I have a cat.
I am currently looking at Elisp, the emacs version of the programming language Lisp, mostly use LaTeX for document processing. I have Debian 3.1r1, OpenBSD v3.8, SuSE Linux and a homebrew of OpenBSD 3.6 on four different boxes.
I haven't used Windows in years.
Do I think Linux and OpenBSD is better than Windows? From a personal level I prefer Linux and OpenBSD. I get all sorts of software available to me and the hard part, the really hard part, is deciding what to use.
Decisions, decisions: like when writing letters do I use the standard letter class in LaTeX or do I use the Koma-script scrlttr2 class. I've been using the standard letter class until recently but then came upon the issue of writing out an invoice.
Initially I used the longtable package, then tried the invoice package which produced better results but I couldn't get the top of the page to have the recipient and sender's address quite where I want them. I tried using article class to no avail.
While using the invoice package I found mention of the Koma-script set of classes so I took a look at those. It produces a better output; looking at it this morning it definitely produces a better output than I had previously but I want more.
The book I use to help with LaTeX is A Guide to LaTeX by Helmut Kopka and Patrick W. Daly. I am thinking of buying another book which might help me understand classes and packages and how to write my own because I nearly always find limitations with the packages and classes I have at my disposal. Again, there may be something out there on CTAN which will do what I want it to do but my present issues are :
- Envelopes - there's a package that will print envelopes and I have had success with A5 and D1 size envelopes but these are designed toward the American postal system so use a sans serif font. A barcode of the address can be printed, which apperently the American system requires and these two factors hlep the machines in American read where the mail destination. But, for the time being, in England, we don't have such restrictions. I want the envelope to use the same font as I use in my letter and it would be fantastic to be able to create the .dvi output
- Invoices - there's a package that does invoices and does them quite well, but I want to be able to have recipient and sender address on there, and maybe the opportunity to do have a fancy header of some sort in there.
- While using the invoice package I had a really neat invoice table and the recipient's address on the right lined up with the start of the table on the left but no matter how I tried I couldn't get the sender's address to line up with the right hand edge of the table. I wasn't happy with that at all.
To be honest I haven't a clue why. I like the output from LaTeX. Once something is set up I don't have to worry about what it looks like, I can just worry about the content. Yes there are templates in Microsoft Word and in OpenOffice but they don't quite do it for me.
When you consider longer documents which might need cross references and mathematical typesetting, LaTeX produces really good output. I have set a thesis in electromagnetic field theory and finite elements using Microsoft Word, and it was hell to do. Move any figures, tables or equations around and it was a hunt through the whole set of documents comprising that thesis to find all the cross references and check they were ok. Sometimes things didn't line up quite right and getting that alignment correct was really really time consuming. And then Word would sometimes realign on various metrics that I had no control over so I'd be sitting there doing all that work again and working out how to get around that newly discovered metric.
With LaTeX, this typesetting is separated from the activity of looking at and considering the content. The way the two tasks are broken down, it's easier.
