phd@SPEECH1.CS.CMU.EDU (Paul Dietz) (02/07/88)
Thanks to the scadzillions of people who offered advice. The great majority bordered on religous fanatacism in support of TeX. A few others offered up Word 3.0 rather luke warmly. Ok. So it looks like TeX is the way to go. Things mentioned in favor of Word: Price/availability are very good. Good spell checking. Some ability to handle equations. Seamless interaction with other Mac software (i.e. good hadling of MacPaint type files, and the clipboard in general...) Things against Word: Poor Bibliography support. Limited equation handling. Pros for TeXtures: Superb support of equations. Cons for TeXtures: Nobody really went into this... I've used TeX previously in a UNIX environment, and I hated it! The main problem was the lack of a preview feature. (This was several years ago, when I used to actually work for a living...) Everytime I wanted to see what the result would look like, there was a 15 to 20 minute wait. (The main problem being a backlog at the printer.) As for spell checking, the TeX commands really used to louse things up... I could be much happier using TeX on my MacII, *IFF* it has a fast preview feature, and good spell checking. Does the Mac implementation fix these things? And how about Clipboard support? Can I put graphics easily into my documents? Finally, the nitty-gritty: price. Word is available in our campus computer store for ~$80. (Educational discount.) I've never noticed TeX there. What's the going price, and do they have an educational discount? Thanks again for all the replies. I'll post a summary again with the results. Paul H. Dietz ____ ____ Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering / oo \ <_<\\\ Carnegie Mellon University /| \/ |\ \\ \\ -------------------------------------------- | | ( ) | | | ||\\ "If God had meant for penguins to fly, -->--<-- / / |\\\ / he would have given them wings." _________^__^_________/ / / \\\\-