InDesign is not your typical GUI unlike moving stuff around on your desktop, you are supposed to create something as well. If you have no clue at all: the difference is between moving a mouse and typing commands - a GUI vs a command line tool. What is the difference between InDesign and LaTeX? Joel daintily side-stepped around the Most Important Question. Arabic) but your subject matter might require advanced techniques I know nothing about I don't do much typesetting for computer scientists. I'm pretty familiar with complex-script layout (e.g. If no one involved knows any LaTeX (if you are the only publications guy on board for this project), then I'd advise sticking with ID.īut I really hope for your sake that I'm not the only person to post in this thread. You will know a lot more about writing style sheets in raw text editors by the time you're done. If your collaborators are already intermediate-to-advanced users of LaTeX, then I'd say that it'd be worth it to try to scramble up that steep, steep learning curve.
My knowledge of computer languages is limited-I know how to use XMLmind well but I don't know how to write the style sheets that it uses. I know how to use XMLmind but I just really prefer to work with InDesign. But hey, maybe they're all top-notch developers in addition to being computational linguists. This phrase in particular: They're also figuring out how to merge XMLmind documents so that we can track version changes. Also, given that it sounds like you're doing some sort of structured authoring workflow, have you considered FrameMaker? That's another application that I don't really use anymore, but I do know that my DITA-usin' friends spend a great deal of time in Frame. Something about the generic text composition in LaTeX screams "I am a sophmore math major." If you are working on documents for print and expect them to look good to people who aren't tech wonks (and you have no background in layout or typography), go with ID. Brand-new users of ID are less obvious, typographically speaking, than brand-new users of LaTeX. Since you've never used either app, I'll contribute a few suggestions. It was indispensable a decade ago, and now the only people whom I advise to use it are math majors who can't afford commercial tools. We can't guess, so any advice you get is going to be necessarily limited.īut, in general: I've started up LaTeX maybe 5 times in the last 5 years. Perhaps your editors are technical writers with lots of experience with tagged text or structured authoring, or perhaps your editors are technophobes going to scream when they discover that you are going to ask them to use a tool that's not MS Word to contribute edits. You could be talking about a DITA workflow, or a TM/MT workflow, or a web/print publishing workflow, or a variety of other possibilities. You would need to go into a great detail concerning your plans here if you wanted reasonable & useful resposes. Also, these documents will undergo editing. Another note-I need to be able to export these documents back and forth between xml and non-xml documents.