laser-lovers@uw-beaver (laser-lovers) (09/14/84)
From: Creon Levit <creon@AMES-NAS-GW.ARPA> Pic, which runs under unix with ditroff, is used for typesetting drawings. It can be used with tbl (i.e. you can put little drawings inside of table entries). Also, equations can be put inside of tables using eqn and tbl. In fact, equations can be put inside of drawings inside of tables. ----------
laser-lovers@uw-beaver (laser-lovers) (09/18/84)
From: Brian Reid <reid@Glacier> The best I've ever seen was done by some guy named Victor at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, DC. I'll try to hunt down the reference. It's all written in Cobol, but wow, can it format tables!
laser-lovers@uw-beaver (laser-lovers) (09/20/84)
From: Beach.pa@XEROX.ARPA My current research focus is on the problems with table formatting. In the hope of discovering some interesting tools I thought I should ask this august group. I know about tbl for troff and LaTeX for TEX. What other table formatters exist? Are there interactive front ends to these packages? Is there a table preprocessor for Scribe somewhere? Do the tools handle math or graphics or tables within tables? I'd appreciate references to published papers, pointers to implementors or user documentation, and SAMPLES! Its always interesting to see how tough table formatting problems are handled by various tools. Cheers Rick Beach Xerox PARC
laser-lovers@uw-beaver (laser-lovers) (09/26/84)
From: Beach.pa@XEROX.ARPA In my previous message, I requested information about table formatters, interactive front ends for table formatters, a Scribe table preprocessor, and tables with math or equations included. Unfortunately the answers were not encouraging. Sonnenschein.es@Xerox.ARPA pointed out that the Xerox Star 8010 workstation has interactive table formatting. [Shame on me for not mentioning it before! RJB] Mark D Senn <senn@PURDUE.ARPA> pointed out that 'naked' TeX works fine for tables using the templates designed by Donald Knuth in "The TeXbook". Creon Levit <creon@AMES-NAS-GW.ARPA> suggested pic, the picture language preprocessor for device independent troff under Unix. eqn, pic, and tbl can be used in succession to embed equations inside drawings inside tables. [Does anyone know the limitations workable orderings of the preprocessors? RJB] Paul Rubin <phr%ucbernie@UCB-VAX.ARPA> pointed me to the matrix formatting macros in AmSTeX, described in "The Joy of TeX" by Mike Spivak. Brian Reid <reid@SU-GLACIER.ARPA> pointed me to a guy named Victor at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, DC. Brian's comment: "It's all written in Cobol, but wow, can it format tables!" Richard Furuta <Furuta@Washington> provided me with a reference to "TABLE: Object Oriented Editing of Complex Structures" by Ted Biggerstaff et al., published in the IEEE Conference on Software Productivity. TABLE is an interactive front end to tbl they built to demonstrate the view that "the software development is a process of editing complex structures". Thanks to all the respondents. There surely must be other gems out there. Cheers Rick Beach Xerox PARC