millgram@husc4.HARVARD.EDU (Elijah Millgram) (05/12/89)
A little while ago I asked for info in TeX/LaTeX for the ST,
and promised to summarize for the net. Here it is. I can't
vouch for the reliability of the information; this is just
what other friendly net-people have passed along.
For those few who don't know: TeX is a typesetting-oriented
document formatter due to Knuth; LaTeX is a Scribe-like
interface to TeX that allows you to abstract away from
the typesetter's frame of mind that typifies TeX. LaTeX
was written by Leslie Lamport. TeX is very good at math
typesetting; LaTeX is very good at academic-style papers.
There is also Bibtex (makes bibliographies),
SliTeX (makes transparencies), and AMS-TeX (more math).
Although TeX and LaTeX have their bugs and weak areas, for
my purposes (I'm a philosophy grad student), I haven't found
anything that comes close, and I've used a number of powerful
document formatters. End of blurb. :-)
A commercial version of TeX for the ST is available from
Tools GmbH
Kessenicher Str. 108
5300 Bonn 1
West Germany
Tel.: 0228/230088
This has been described as "a very close approximation
to the real thing". They have TeX, a GEM-based screen previewer,
and several drivers (Epson FX MX P6 LQ/SQ Laserjet+ Oki muline SLM804).
Tools also has Metafont. Manual available in German and English.
Costs 198 DM; LaTex is 70 DM extra.
This TeX won't run on a 1040 *with* TOS in RAM. A Mega 2
is comfortable. Will work "with some careful planning,
or a lot of disk swapping" on a 1 meg ST w/double sided drive.
Distributed on 7 double-sided disks, so the total disk requirement,
if you install everything, is 4-5 meg.
Okay for tables, complicated formulas, "more involved pictures will
exceed TeX capacity". (This is probably a reference to LaTeXs
picture environment. This is a pain in the ass to use in any
case, so if it is, no loss.)
Another German company selling TeX is Kettler.
They are reported to be out of business, but also taken over.
No further info.
There is a PD implementation written in C. It will handle files
which give trouble to ST-TeX (the Tools version). Source available.
DVI drivers include a mono ST driver and a dvi-to-epson driver.
This latter just barely fits on a 1040--there's no room for
anything else but a shell that does nothing but read a line and Pexec()s it.
There are drivers by Nelson Beebe, patched for the ST by John Dunning;
these reportedly compile under GNU C, but not Mark Williams C.
Places to look: Data Library 15 of the ATARIPRO forum on CompuServe.
Lakesys archive.
CIS ST file area.
score.stanford.edu (ftp)
june.cs.washington.edu
celray.cs.yale.edu
him1.cc.umich.edu (has all 3 pd versions)
dsrg.ces.cwru.edu (anonymous ftp)
science.utah.edu (Beebe print drivers)
The consensus seems to be that TeX is happy on a Mega 2 and up,
and a hard disk is a very good idea. You can squeeze on to a
1040 if you try really hard. Nobody had specific complaints
of the form ``The TeXbook says you can do so-and-so, but it won't...'',
which is encouraging.
Thanks, everybody!
Lije
Elijah Millgram millgram@husc4.harvard.edu
Custom Philosophy... ``All work done on the premises.''