Packt is looking for someone to author a "Learning D"

[Craig Dillabaugh via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Sunday, 15 February 2015 at 11:36:22 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Sun, 2015-02-15 at 04:38 +0000, Craig Dillabaugh via 
> Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
>> […]
>> Well, if you do the document with Latex on git (or some 
>> similar version control), you get most of the same stuff.  
>> Latex has a comment tool where you can do margin comments if 
>> you wish, and of course you can also do comments in the 'code' 
>> if you want - they don't show up in the document at all.  
>> Heck, I am sure there is a package for everything in Latex if 
>> you look hard enough.
>
> (Xe|Lua)LaTeX or AsciiDoc
> Git or Mercurial or Bazaar
>
> Publishers have, however, seemed to have decided that 
> sub-editors must
> work on the original source document files directly. If this is 
> an
> integral part of the publisher workflow and the sub-editors 
> cannot
> deal with DVCS or the markup languages, then the publishers 
> refuse to
> use those tools.
>
> Still as long as some half-way decent authors are prepared to 
> use Word
> and abdicate their responsibility for the content once initially
> created, the publishers win.
>
>> A MS-word document with 'track changes' on, edited by multiple 
>> people, is the greatest eyesore known to humanity. I still 
>> don't understand why anyone who had a choice between Latex and 
>> MS-Word would pick MS-Word for anything longer than 25 pages...
>
> And who has the current master version, which  file is the 
> master,
> etc., etc.
>
>> Just my personal opinion as one who recently finished a 200 
>> page thesis in Latex, and is now working for a company where 
>> we do all our internal documents in Word. Latex certainly has 
>> its ugly
>> warts,
>> but it is so nice for lengthy document1.
>
> Luxury. I typed my thesis (including the maths equations) using 
> a
> broken portable manual typewriter. ;-)

And you tell new students these days, and they won't believe you 
:o)

One other nice thing about LateX is that since you prepare
your content in a text editor, it lets you focus on your content 
and
not be distracted by fiddling with formatting as you go!  In 
theory
you should do the same in MS-Word, but its sometimes hard to 
focus with
all the pretty buttons :o)

Of course, TeX is also a programming language, so for developer 
types
it does present its own distraction.  Luckly TeX coding is so 
obtuse
it is never a serious temptation.