[geeks] Apple software: the stuff you "gotta have"

[Mike Meredith]

On Thu, 11 Oct 2007 12:32:35 -0400, Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> On Oct 11, 2007, at 7:36 AM, ross-sunhelp at lonsteins.com wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, Oct 11, 2007 at 02:50:41AM -0400, Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> >     [snip]
> >> course, they had to, but what surprised me was a few history majors
> >     [snip]
> >
> > *cough* I'm not surprised ;)
> 
> Well, my assumption was that the history majors and professors were  
> driven by need just like the physics and math department.  Different  
> needs of course, but fairly serious stuff.  Large document handling,  
> excellent reference management, etc.

At work, the humanities faculty was/is involved in some pretty serious
number crunching ... historical census data and the like. For a few
years they were using more CPU power at Manchester than all the
scientists at work put together.

> It just surprised me I guess because it seemed that few of their  
> counterparts in biology, sociology, language, and other areas were  
> able to grok typesetting.  It always seemed to me that language  
> majors could really have used TeX, but I rarely saw them touch it.

I did once see a discussion on a mailing list (first serious mailing
list I ran) related to medieval slavonic manuscripts where the topic
under discussion was using TeX to make electronic versions of the
manuscripts. Several of those in the discussion were actively using it.
TeX is of course useful for typesetting languages which have no
font/character set seeing as you can create your own. The particular
language in question probably still only has a proposed Unicode 'page'.

-- 
Mike Meredith (http://zonky.org/)
 Power corrupts; Powerpoint corrupts absolutely.
 -- Vint Cerf