The reason I started a blog was to teach myself how to write — how to spell the words, how to construct proper sentances, and how to let my ideas into the readers (those unfortunate fellows who happen to stumple upon this blog). But eventually, my life with Linux has also taught me to appreciate the aesthetics in ‘written documents’ (all right, type-written documents).
My expose to Emacs as a writing tool, and LaTeX as a typesetting system had my imagination soaring heights. I mean, the typesetting quality of LaTeX are near-perfect. Emacs+AucTeX makes it more easier. I prefer the KOMA-Script classes to those of the default classes coming up with TeX distros (and moreover, I'm more into TeXLive distro, than sticking on to the obsolete teTeX distro). What attracted me most was the typographical quality, that I haven't seen duplicated with contemporary word-processing tools. After my playing around with TeX tools, I've always preferred to write “proper” stuff even for plain text files. I very often use the C-x 8 <char> key-chord is Emacs, for all those '©', '®', '¾' characters, and mostly type with latin-alt-postfix as the input language.
I now understand that these can be duplicated and typed-in using any of the present day word processors. What I don't get is how fewer people understand what should be put where. What quotes to be used, what hypen-seperators are to be used etc. (I personally did not have any clue about n-dash, m-dash, untill I used LaTeX and read up on that).
Now here's a site which gives out how to do it in your daily lives. I'd like to add-on sites that do policing on grammar too. :-)
But I prefer to write up stuff that's small with Emacs, in (X)HTML, and substitute all those symbols with “ (“), — (—), © (©), … (…). :-D
I don't know about you, but I'm anal like that guy — I prefer things the way they are and where they belong to. ;-)
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