On Wed, 23 Oct 2002 01:58:03 -0700 (PDT) Satya satyap@satya.virtualave.net wrote:
Text editors are not word processors. Also, it won't be a good idea to try and make a text-editor some kind of a de-facto standard (not to mean that Satya implied this :-)
Good point. But given the way most non-computer-savvy users seem to (ab)use word processors, pico/nano seem to be the simplest thing around. Philip's suggestion of jstar is also very sound.
I couldn't find jstar on the web. I presume that many of the judges won't be already computer-savvy (aka "Windows Users"), so it'll be relatively easier to get them on to text editing than trying to convert people grown used to WPs ;-) Pico (or nano, haven't tried it but I take your word) seems to be a good choice to start with as long as the audience is told that more powerful but slightly difficult to learn alternatives exist, so that the brave and the curious might try them out.
Another thing to look for is spell-checking. I found that pico takes you around the file finding erroneous words in alphabetical order, rather than scanning the file from top to bottom like ispell and it doesn't seem to have an option for adding words to the dictionary.
but we may alias lpr to something like "text2latex | lpr" so that the pretty printing is taken care of transparently.
No need to alias it, just tell them that the print command is print foo and have print be a tiny script or alias that Does The Right Thing to foo.
Spot on! BTW, there are a lot many interesting things on http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/packages/TeX/support/ and I found another script, txt2tex, doing a better job. It's good enough to convert raw plain text into something close to expectations, yet has enough under-the-hood stuff to enable tweaking (I'm thinking on the lines of a flatter learning curve than that of LaTeX itself).