jhs@MBUNIX.MITRE.ORG (11/16/88)
Bill Oswald writes... > I have been reading a lot of information on the net about TeX. > What in the world is TeX? I know, I know, but you see I just crawled > out from under a rock :-). TeX is a language and and interpreter program for typesetting mathematical text. It was written by Donald Knuth, better known as author of "The Art of Computer Programming". TeX has a lot of the flavor of "nroff" and "troff" from the unix world, but goes a lot further in terms of what you can typeset. With TeX, you can typeset just about any mathematical notation you can imagine, and it comes out looking as pretty as any textbook's rendition of similar material. TeX is definitely the "state of the art" for mathematical typesetting. The language is a little intimidating, so that non-programmers, especially, are sometimes put off by it. However, it is very systematic so anyone with the knack of programming will get the hang of it quickly. I just went through this myself in the last couple of months and found it actually kinda fun to learn. You quickly get to the point that most standard things are easy to do and only occasionally do you run into a tricky problem that takes awhile to figure out. If you have the benefit of a "style file" which defines the format of the document you want to write, it is a lot easier than if you had to start from scratch. Style files for various journal formats are widely available. TeX is often criticized as being "an obsolete word processor" and "not WYSIWYG" (What You See Is What You Get). These comments are true, sort of, but TeX is still the only game in town once you get past the level of needing subscripts, exponents, Greek symbols and integral signs. TeX produces textbook quality, as compared to the crude "typewriter" look of most lesser programs. Also, WYSIWYG may be fine for typesetting a one-page display advertisement, but as soon as you start typing lengthy documents, you NEED the consistency that you get by letting the program construct the precise format. TeX with a "previewer" program to put the resulting text on the screen is probably the answer, especially with multi-tasking so you can run your text editor and the previewer simultaneously in different windows. The Amiga has such an environment, called Amiga-TeX. I think a good interactive environment like this would end the "WYSIWYG" argument for good. By the way, insiders will tell you that TeX is pronounced so that it rhymes with "blecch". (It is really the Greek letters Tau Epsilon Xi.) -John Sangster / jhs@mitre-bedford.arpa