keeshu@nikhefk.UUCP (Kees Huyser) (03/22/90)
Several friends of mine and I recently were talking about TEX and
various word processors on the Mac. The idea came up of "hey, why
can't any of the Mac WP's produce TEX?" This discussion went
further, and finally we came to the conclusion "yeah, why not?!?"
So an idea was born. However, to get the Big Boss to say OK, go do
this, we need to show some interest. Hence this mini-survey. If you
could e-mail replies to these questions with any other comments or
suggestions we would be grateful.
No promises here--this is just an idea for a project, and if we can
generate enough interest we may be able to swing it. So,
1) Which Mac WP would you choose to have such output from? Why?
2) Produce raw TEX or LaTEX?
3) Equations--should there be some mechanism to imbed them? Edit
them as text? We're not jumping at the idea of building a TEX
previewer right off the bat, but how important would that be?
4) Most importantly, how many people do you know that would use it?
The more response we can show, the better the chances.
Thank you for any and all responses. I'll post a followup when we
know anything further.
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/* -------------------------------------------------------------------- */schwer@unix.SRI.COM (Len Schwer) (03/22/90)
In article <636@nikhefk.UUCP> keeshu@nikhefk.UUCP (Kees Huyser) writes: > >Several friends of mine and I recently were talking about TEX and >various word processors on the Mac. The idea came up of "hey, why >can't any of the Mac WP's produce TEX?" This discussion went >further, and finally we came to the conclusion "yeah, why not?!?" > Well here's a little rain for your parade: I agree that there might be an initial market for such a WP program, because when a novice trys to learn any markup type language there seems to be an overwhelming numbe rof things to learn at once. But the real power of LaTeX/TeX is that they are a programming language which can be made to produce both beautiful documents and pieces of shit that are required by some journals not to mention most goverment agencies. Thus to have a WP program that out puts TeX would require it either provide a very simple format or be able to imbed TeX commands. The former is nearly useless and the later means you might as well cut out the middle man. Also, there already is a Mac product for WYSIWYG equations that outputs TeX (can't recall it's name, but it's usually advertised in MacUser.) And TeXtures has a fine previewer; probably so does the PD OzTeX. P.S. If you want to write an application with a ready and willing market, write an editor the emulates the VAX EDT editor. There is a huge installed base of EDT/EVE users that are getting more and more Macs on their desktops. But just like a markup language, people are unwilling to learn a new system if they can adapt an old one. --Len Schwer