At the May 14th 2004 meeting John Moore presented another in his "Lessons in Linux" series: Desktop Publishing, Linux style - The Linux system supports a number of tools to allow you to publish your own work professionally or just for fun. This is an overview of the types of word processing and publishing tools available as well as a comparison of their strengths and weaknesses.

If you missed the meeting, don't make the mistake of thinking you would have heard nothing new! John took us through the history of text handling in general, moved on to the remarkable TeX and LaTeX which were designed to support elaborate formatting of mathematical work, and explained how Linux's Man pages work as well as how to create our own. They needn't be manuals, but any document we would like to be able to pop up with a "man [filename]" command. He explained how XML grew out of HTML, which in turn derived from much older SGML and why. He got rather deeply into word processing and astonished some of us by pointing out that the OpenOffice wordProcessing document format is actually a zipped file containing several files with content as an XML file accompanied by files for layout, styles, settings, etc.!

As usual, his notes are in Lessons in Linux: Desktop Publishing which is studded with links to web sites taking you into far more detail than even John provided. Check it out!!