roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) (10/10/85)
I run an 11/750 (4.2bsd) system which supports about 100 users, most of whom are not computer people. One of the (major) things we do with the system is prepare scientific manuscripts. The users are a mix of Ph.D. biologists, graduate students, and secretarial/clerical people. We've recently gotten a major grant to expand our facility, and will probably be getting some Suns, a laser printer, and an array processor. Enough background. Slowly, we're getting fed up with the whole nroff scene. What are our alternatives? Are there "what you see is what you get" type systems available that will run under 4.2 on a regular ascii terminal? What better tools of this type are there available on the Sun? How well can they integrate text and graphics? Now we just do a ".sp 6i" (or whatever) in the nroff source, and paste the figures in later. It would be real nice to be able to insert graphics right in the manuscript. We're not committed to WYSIWYG; if there are imbedded-instruction systems which are easier to deal with than nroff available, we might be interested in them. I know about Scribe and TeX only from causal reading about them; comments on these would be appreciated. What we don't want to loose are the nice features available under nroff. We make heavy use of neqn, tbl, and bib; to have to live without the functionality provided by these tools would be unthinkable. The current implementation of that functionality, however, leaves a lot to be desired. There are all sorts of strange interactions between the various preprocessors, error reporting is all but non-existent, and the whole thing is generally difficult to master, especially for people with no background in computers. So, does anybody out there have magic answer? -- Roy Smith <allegra!phri!roy> System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
jjhnsn@ut-ngp.UTEXAS (J. Lee Johnson) (10/10/85)
> the system is prepare scientific manuscripts. The users are a mix of Ph.D. > biologists, graduate students, and secretarial/clerical people. ... > Slowly, we're getting fed up with the whole nroff scene. What are > our alternatives? Are there "what you see is what you get" type systems > available that will run under 4.2 on a regular ascii terminal? How can a WYSIWYG system on a regular ascii terminal display scientific manuscripts? > What we don't want to loose are the nice features available under > nroff. We make heavy use of neqn, tbl, and bib; to have to live without > the functionality provided by these tools would be unthinkable. It seems to me your choice is between TeX and Documenter's WorkBench (device independent troff). Cost may be the deciding factor. TeX is usually cheaper, especially compared to a commercial license for DWB. TeX has eqn functionality built in to it. TeX has no equivalent to tbl. I'm not sure about bib. Troff has the advantage that it is compatible with nroff and a wider "class" of devices than TeX. The TeX language is "nicer", but basically both TeX and troff are embedded instruction text formatting systems. The pic preprocessor from the DWB package does simple graphics by invoking the line drawing functions in troff. There is supposedly a similar program for TeX. -- James Lee Johnson, U.T. Computation Center, Austin, Texas 78712 ARPA: jjhnsn@ut-ngp.UTEXAS.EDU UUCP: ihnp4!ut-ngp!jjhnsn allegra!ut-ngp!jjhnsn gatech!ut-ngp!jjhnsn seismo!ut-sally!jjhnsn harvard!ut-sally!jjhnsn
snoopy@ecrcvax.UUCP (Sebastian Schmitz) (10/16/85)
Summary: Expires: References: <garfield.3821> Sender: Reply-To: snoopy@ecrcvax.UUCP (Sebastian Schmitz) Followup-To: Distribution: net Organization: European Computer-Industry Research Centre, Munchen, W. Germany Keywords: Well, we also got fed up. So we forked out plenty of cash and bought scribe with a Talaris laser printer. Works very well, and we are happy, also with all the mathematical stuff. Contact me personally about more information. -- Love, Sebastian (Snoopy) "You haven't done it, till you've done it with pointers" \!mcvax\!unido\!ecrcvax\!snoopy /* N.B. valid csh address */