[tex-live] So far.....expensive failure

[Denis Bitouzé]

Le samedi 16/02/13 à 09h10,
Philip TAYLOR <P.Taylor at Rhul.Ac.Uk> a écrit :

> I don't follow this point, Denis.

I was pretty sure to not be followed by everyone :)

> Surely getting to learn and remember macro and environment names is
> absolutely essential if one is to hope to gain any proficiency at TeX
> at all; what benefit can possibly be served by attempting to hide
> these from the user ?

These are not hidden as they are visible in the editor panel after
clicking on the right button, choosing the right (sub)menu entry or
using the right keystrokes.

AFAICS, this is enough to make the students learn the macros but
easily, in a rather efficient (quick) and pleasant way, without troubles
due to misspelling, without interruptions in the writing flow needed if
they have to search in the documentation(s) the (exact) name of the
macro they want to use, etc. I'm pretty sure that, otherwise, a lot of
students who learned LaTeX with me would have given up after the course.

Recently, I gave a LaTeX course to PhD students, some of them being
completely novices, but one of them having a good background. This
student, for a reason I don't know of, was convinced that the better way
to use LaTeX was to write by hand all the code and it was the way he
used it, despite he was using Texmaker. I strongly advised to use
instead the IDE features (especially keystrokes) and, at the end of the
course, agreed he was much more efficient this way.
-- 
Denis