ferris@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Richard T. Ferris) (11/20/89)
I was wondering whether TeX on the Mac has any fundamental advantages over TeX on the PC? Are there any special features which make the editing process easier (i.e. more WYSIWYG)? Or is it just that the font selection is greater? I have been using a PC program called SBTEX for a while now and it works fine for my LaTeX stuff but I sometimes get a little sick about not being able to see it on screen as I'm working on it and having to deal with the rather limited selection of fonts. Thanks for the info. RF Richard T. Ferris ferris@eniac.seas.upenn.edu University of Pennsylvania
ghe@nucthy.physics.orst.edu (Guangliang He) (11/20/89)
In article <17141@netnews.upenn.edu> ferris@eniac.seas.upenn.edu.UUCP (Richard T. Ferris) writes: > I was wondering whether TeX on the Mac has any fundamental > advantages over TeX on the PC? Are there any special features > which make the editing process easier (i.e. more WYSIWYG)? > Or is it just that the font selection is greater? I have been > using a PC program called SBTEX for a while now and it works > fine for my LaTeX stuff but I sometimes get a little sick about > not being able to see it on screen as I'm working on it and > having to deal with the rather limited selection of fonts. > Thanks for the info. > > RF > Richard T. Ferris > ferris@eniac.seas.upenn.edu > University of Pennsylvania I never used TeX on IBM PC so I don't much about that. I have played with TeX on a UNIX(tm) machine and TeXtures(tm) on the Mac. The big advandage of TeXtures is that you can paste graphics directly into your TeX document. Although you can do this on a UNIX machine with some other program such as psfig... but TeXtures is much easy to use. ======================================================================= USMAIL: Guangliang He | INTERNET: ghe@PHYSICS.ORST.EDU Department of Physics | BITNET: hegl@ORSTVM.BITNET Weniger Hall 301 | Oregon State University | Corvallis, OR 97331-6507 | PHONE: (503) 737-4631 =======================================================================
mcdonald@aries.uiuc.edu (Doug McDonald) (11/20/89)
In article <17141@netnews.upenn.edu> ferris@eniac.seas.upenn.edu.UUCP (Richard T. Ferris) writes: >I was wondering whether TeX on the Mac has any fundamental >advantages over TeX on the PC? Are there any special features >which make the editing process easier (i.e. more WYSIWYG)? >Or is it just that the font selection is greater? I have been >using a PC program called SBTEX for a while now and it works >fine for my LaTeX stuff but I sometimes get a little sick about >not being able to see it on screen as I'm working on it and >having to deal with the rather limited selection of fonts. >Thanks for the info. > TeX is TeX (except version 3 of course). To be called TeX it has to be able to do everything TeX is supposed to. So no, TeX on the MAc won't do anything that TeX on a PC can't. It doesn't have any greater font selection - on a PC you can use any of the roughly 30 fonts that come with TeX or Latex, any font you generate with Metafont, any Postscript font you can find a font metric file for. (Of course the mapping of odd characters with the Postscript fonts is a problem unless you make them your primary fonts and rehack plain.tex and lplain.tex. And Postscript fonts are seriously lacking for technical purposes.) There are many previewing programs available for PC's. Some (dview) are fast but work only for plain TeX. Some cost ***gag*** money. Some, like my dvivga and dvimswin, are spiffy (but slow on a regular pc). Mine will allow you to view your file at any size, allow panning and zooming etc. They don't directly show Postscript fonts on the screen, though, but you could substitute a similar CM font for text purposes. My dvimswin, for Microsoft Windows allows, using a 386 PC, simultaneous viewing of a file (or several files), editing, and running TeX. Incidentally, a full TeX can't be made WYSIWYG while typing in input. TeX's line breaking, page breaking, and figure positioning capabilities are simply too global for that. In certain cases (Latex & Bibtex together) they will require multiple passes through the source file before figuring out where things go. The best that could be done is to have WYSIWYG line breaking. *********ADVERTISEMENT******** Try using dvimswin and TeX on a 386 PC! They are all free. Doug McDonald (mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu)