@utrcgw.utc.com:mark@ardnt1 (mark) (03/29/90)
Chris, I personally don't know enough to answer your questions about TeX, but I forwarded your questions to someone here at work who does. His reply is listed below. Mark PS. I also found this posting. Date: 19 Mar 90 13:22:54 GMT From: Tad Guy <@utrcgw.utc.com:tadguy@abcfd01.larc.nasa.GOV> Subject: Re: CommonTex Sender: amiga-relay-request <@utrcgw.utc.com:amiga-relay-request@udel.EDU> To: amiga-relay@udel.EDU Keywords: ftp xanth.cs.odu.edu amiga commontex Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga Organization: NASA/Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA In article <02414.AA02414@sosaria.imp.com> wizard@sosaria.imp.com (Chris Brand) writes: > Where can I get a copy of CommonTex? It was on xanth, but just when I > requested it, it was deleted! Arrrrgh! It was moved to /amiga/commontex.zoo on xanth.cs.odu.edu. It's only disk one of the multidisk CommonTeX distribution. ...tad ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | Mark Stucky | Email: | | United Technologies Research Center | mark%ardnt1@utrcgw.utc.com | | East Hartford, CT. | mast%utrcv1@utrcgw.utc.com | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ on Wed, 28 Mar 90 14:39 EST, "William R(ay) Brohinsky" <RAYBRO%UTRC@utrcgw.utc.com> said: X-Vms-To: UTRCGW::IN%"@utrcgw.utc.com:mark@ardnt1" on 27 Mar 90 22:50:33 GMT, christopher kushmerick <@utrcgw.utc.com:kushmer@bnlux0.bnl.GOV> said: ck> Sender: amiga-relay-request <@utrcgw.utc.com:amiga-relay-request@udel.EDU> ck> Could users of TeX on the amiga plsease respond: ck> What is best product. Is there a PD version (CommonTeX?) ck> What abou the Radical Eye product?. ck> How is documentation? Previewers? Speed? ck> Email responses please ck> Thanks in advance. ck> Chris Kushmerick I am a regular user of TeX on Vax, MicroVax, Ardnt(Unix), and amiga. I use AmigaTeX (from Radical-eye) at home. The documentation is very good, although the $300 package from Rad-I does not include the TeXbook, the LaTeX book nor the METAFONT book. The binder that comes has chapters on setting up for a quick start, using the font-caching scheme, commands to use TeX and METAFONT and the printer drivers, tables for deciding what to say to generate new fonts from the included CM font source. The AmigaMETAFONT program is included with AmigaTeX. If you get just the afore mentioned $300 package, you get those executables, a screen Previewer (called Preview) which can handle around sixteen magnifications including full-page, and the fonts for the screen previewer. There is a previewer for METAFONT, provided by T. Rokicki, which allows seeing each letter as it is compiled. Each $100 printer driver package comes with executable, a set of fonts for that specific printer. The laser-printer drivers will do landscape, as will the X-by-X dot matrix printers. (the Epson is a 240X216 printer, which I would call X-by-Y. A printer with 1:1 aspect ratio is needed to be able to rotate the characters.) The fonts come on six-or-so disks with colored adhesive spots on the edges: the 240X216 epson fonts are yellow-black through yellow-green. The lo-res epson fonts are only four disks, orange- black through orange-orange. (the color for preview's fonts is black-.) I have used the package since late january. That may not seem like much, but I have done the pledge cards for my church's missionary outreach, three official mailings, and seven re-writes of a novel I'm working on, for which I rewrote book.sty and bk10.sty into novel.sty and nv10.sty, and entered and debugged layout.sty (from TuGboat). I do a great deal of work in TeX these days. I have used AmigaMETAFONT on the Levy Greek fonts and the IVRITEX hebrew fonts. Once I corrected the file names (which were messed up by a Vax- IBMPClone-CrossDos-Amiga transfer), everything ran just fine! The previewers do not work exactly alike. TeX's PREVIEW lets you put it on a custom screen, and allows a fair amount of fiddling, like making it show each new page as it is completed. Otherwise, it could track the file as a whole, allowing you to choose which of the already-completed pages to see, or it can look at an entirely different .dvi file while you are compiling another. METAFONT's previewer (DMF, I think) only gives you 2 X magnifications and 4 Y mags, to allow you to adjust to your current WB screen. It will show the next letter when it is done, and you can't `page' back and forth through the character set. The differences are mostly appropriate to the differences in the way that their associated compilers work. You haven't said how much you already know about TeX. I have made some assumptions here (like a minimal experience with TeX or LaTeX). If you are only going on the articals that have appeared in Amazing or Transactor, you are still not getting the feeling for what you need to use a TeX system. Allow me to get pedantic, please: TeX is a typesetting program, which compiles a source document into a form appropriate for display or printing. The output file is called a .dvi file, for DeVice Independence. The .dvi file must be processed to display it (by a `previewer') or to print it (by a printer driver.) TeX is very primitive, and allows extensibility through macros. The TeX that I use is extended by either the `PlainTeX' or the LaTeX macro package. PlainTeX is much more basic, and therefore much more flexible than LaTeX. However, LaTeX lets me do more, faster, when I don't want to do things that it is not designed to do. Even so, I can modify the actions of either of those macro packages by using further macros which I write myself. To operate a bottom level TeX package, you must have two things: TeX an executable (almost always with a macro package) .tfm's a collection of TeX Font Metric files. The .tfm files tell tex how large the letters are and what adjustments to their position are necessary to make them look their best. TeX takes your input source, and typesets a `virtual page' in the .dvi file which tells which characters to use from which fonts, and where to put them. To get printed (or previewed) output, you must have a driver (or previewer) a set of font files appropriate to the device. This is where things get expensive. A latex document automatically loads or names a very large number of fonts. Some are Roman, some are Italic, some are symbols. Each of these may be required in normal, bold, slanted, or some other form. TeX `preloads' a smaller number of fonts. This means that you must have one tfm file for each type and form of font. But when it comes time to create output, you must have not only files for the correct type and form of each font, you must have the right size, and it must be the right size for your device. Increased overhead comes if you intend to use CMR12 at \mag 1000 (computer modern roman 12 point font at it's normal, or `design' size) and CMR10 at \mag 1200 (CMR 10point font magnified by 1.2 to get a 12 point font). If you use a 300-dpi laser, a 240X216-dpi dot matrix printer, and a 100-dpi screen previewer... This leads to a warning. PD TeX's are alright, only if you have access to lots of font and .tfm files, or have METAFONT and a lot of time. To use TeX, you must use TeX fonts---The Amiga's fonts won't do. They take up space. Lots of it. Thomas Rokicki's AmigaTeX package fights this by two seemingly incompatible methods. When you buy a printer driver, you get fonts. Lots of them. If you don't go this way, you don't have a way to get hard copy. On the other hand, even the copious font collection that Tom provides will not always hit every need (cmssdc10 \magstep2 is one that got me recently). So he also gives you METAFONT, which in the AmigaMETAFONT form will produce a complete new CM font at a new magstep in less than 15 minutes. (it did Levy's 256-char greek fonts in about twenty!) You can set up the environment so that AmigaMF will automatically generate any font called for by a document if it doesn't exist, walk away from the Amiga and come back with your document printed, even if you had no fonts on your HD, as long as the CM sources were available! If you do get CommonTeX, I'd appreciate a copy. This is because we don't have ftp offsite here, and my experiences with bitftp@pucc have been dissapointing (to say the least). Mark will know how to get to me. raybro