Which Editor to choose?in the Unix/Linux Survival Guide based on discussions, flamewars and the rest of the whole shebang. But I recently discovered, that this type of discussion seems to spread out of the realm of computers. Sure, everybody thinks that the e.g. car that one owns is the best, or the computer, the T.V., you get the picture. But this is not what I'm talking about at the moment. I'm talking about an unsuspecting customer confronted with
We are using [insert your favorite operating system/software-package here] and therefore the end product is far superior to what you can expect from [insert the operating system/software-package you really hate for whatever reason here].
Reality-Check: A customer does not, I repeat, does not care about how something is created, most of the time, that is. The German version of the aforementioned book was written in XML using Emacs (no, I won't tell you which flavor [if you really don't know why I won't tell, look here and here]) and the American version in MS Word. The publishers couldn't care less about the program used to create the manuscript, all they were interested in was to get it in the right format, period. The editor used was a tool, the result was a manuscript.
On a side-note: Try writing a text about *NIX commands like
date, apropos, etc. and run Word's grammar-checker on it ;-)Back on topic, as long as your customer wants an end-product, means no further processing on the customer's side, do not bother, or worse, annoy, him/her how you will create said product. It really does not matter if we are talking graphics, layouts, photos, manuscripts, movie-scripts, buildings, cars, airplanes, or cookies (the baked variety). (Try to avoid the
if all you got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nailtrap, though.) The worst thing that could happen is an—for whatever reason—annoyed customer.
Quick example: I don't feel that good going to the ATM since I learned that most ATMs are running some kind of MS Windows ™ these days.
:-)
