ed@imuse.uucp (Ed Braaten) (12/31/88)
What are the advantages of using TeX over nroff/troff? I've heard a lot about it, but since I don't have access to it, I've never been able to try it out. I chose nroff since it seems to be a standard tool available under most implementations of U**X. What are the major differences in the two systems? Which is more reliable, portable? I had some trouble getting nroff to print all the special characters I need (umlauts & Cyrillic) since the printer I have (Star NL-10) likes to see ASCII NUL's in some of its control sequences. It works now, but since I don't have source to nroff, I had to do everything through the term driving table nroff uses (/usr/lib/term/*). Fortunately, SCO provides source to a generic term driving table which you can use to roll your own. How flexible is TeX in this area? How portable would the solution be? I would welcome any input from those of you familiar with both systems... Best wishes in 1989! ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ed Braaten | "Love the Lord your God with all your Intel Semiconductor GmbH | heart and with all your soul and with Dornacher Strasse 1 | all your strength." Deuteronomy 6:5 8016 Feldkirchen bei Muenchen | West Germany | uucp: ed@imuse.uucp Ph: +49 89 90992-426 -------------------------------------------------------------------------
UH2@PSUVM.BITNET (Lee Sailer) (01/03/89)
In article <318@imuse.uucp>, ed@imuse.uucp (Ed Braaten) says: > >What are the advantages of using TeX over nroff/troff? I've heard TeX is to *roff as C is to FORTRAN. That is, TeX and the roff family are powerful in the hands of an expert, but TeX is more streamlined and elegant, and offers a few features (better math notation support).
peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) (01/03/89)
In article <17998@adm.BRL.MIL>, hxn8477%njitx.decnet@njitc.njit.edu (NJITX::HXN8477) writes: > With TeX and its companion font generator, Metafont, you > can typeset just about any document. What does Tex do about dumb (non-bitmapped) output devices, like letter- quality printers? Everything I've heard about it makes it sound like a great deal if you have a laser-printer, but useless for a dumb output device. What's the story? -- Peter da Silva, Xenix Support, Ferranti International Controls Corporation. Work: uunet.uu.net!ficc!peter, peter@ficc.uu.net, +1 713 274 5180. `-_-' Home: bigtex!texbell!sugar!peter, peter@sugar.uu.net. 'U` Opinions may not represent the policies of FICC or the Xenix Support group.
debra@alice.UUCP (Paul De Bra) (01/04/89)
In article <2602@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes: >In article <17998@adm.BRL.MIL>, hxn8477%njitx.decnet@njitc.njit.edu (NJITX::HXN8477) writes: >> With TeX and its companion font generator, Metafont, you >> can typeset just about any document. > >What does Tex do about dumb (non-bitmapped) output devices, like letter- >quality printers? Everything I've heard about it makes it sound like a >great deal if you have a laser-printer, but useless for a dumb output >device. What's the story? For daisy wheel printers Tex is no good, and neither is troff. Use nroff instead. For matrix printers all sorts of drivers are floating around, both for 9-pin printers (Epson MX100 and the likes) and 24-pin printers (Nec P6/P7 and others). Any printer capable of graphics output can be used, though it helps a lot if horizontal and vertical resolution are similar. On a 9-pin printer one actually uses only 8 pins and and simulates a 24-pin printer by printing 3 rows of 8 dots, each 1/3 of the distance of the pins apart. The reason for doing so is that then the vertical resolution is reasonable (usually 240dpi). NLQ modes on such printers do something similar. So Tex-printing on decent matrix printers can be done. Now the real story is that where laser printers print 4 pages/minute or more (depending on how many fonts have to be downloaded usually) a fast 24-pin matrix printer still needs 2 or 3 minutes to complete just one page, and my old but faithful Epson MX 100 needs 20 to 30 minutes (of continuous printing). Paul. -- ------------------------------------------------------ |debra@research.att.com | uunet!research!debra | ------------------------------------------------------
mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu (01/05/89)
>> With TeX and its companion font generator, Metafont, you >> can typeset just about any document. >What does Tex do about dumb (non-bitmapped) output devices, like letter- >quality printers? Everything I've heard about it makes it sound like a >great deal if you have a laser-printer, but useless for a dumb output >device. What's the story? What does TeX do about non-bitmapped things like letter-quality printers? Simple. It ignores them. It can be used with high quality dot matrix printers, but as it must use graphics mode, it will be slowwwwwww. TeX was designed to make actual books, on actual typesetters. It is a general purpose program for that purpose, but also contains a large amount of stuff for doing mathematical typesetting. Also, mechanisms for generating and properly placing tables, figures, tables of contents, footnotes, endnotes, and references. "Normally" it uses a special set of fonts, designed by (for?) Donald Knuth and extended a bit for Latex by Leslie Lamport. These are stored as bitmaps and downloaded to the printer. For printers, such as actual typesetters and Postscript devices, that have suitable internal characters (at least for text, as TeX really needs its own very special stuff for math) one can provide it tables that describe the size of characters, and devise special printer drivers to use these characters. As far as I know, this is common only for Postscript. The TeX fonts, known generically as Computer Modern, contain Roman-ish and sans-serif fonts in sizes from 5 point to 17 point. Each size has different shape characters (i.e. the letter "a" in 10 point Roman is not the same shape as 5 point blown up by a factor of two.) There are also bold, italic, and bold italic versions, plus a special "math italic" it uses for setting math. And numerous (very numerous) special math symbols. These fonts are available for just about any type printer from 100 dot per inch to 5000 d.p.i. And you can tell it to use, for example, 600 d.p.i. fonts on a 300 d.p.i. device, and get output twice as big (the intent being that photoreduction would give output the same shape as real 300 d.p.i., but higher quality.) Finally, for those totally unfamiliar with it, TeX is a computer language, not a word processor. It is fair to say that you "program" your book.
marzusch@fbihh.UUCP (Ralph-Diether Marzusch) (01/06/89)
In article <47800025@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>, mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes: > Finally, for those totally unfamiliar with it, TeX is a computer > language, not a word processor. It is fair to say that you "program" > your book. True. That's why I don't like TeX. It's like an assembly language - you have to know the machine very well to understand all those error messages. Macro packages like LaTeX help, but you are still using an assembler and get very low level error messages. I'd like to write text using some higher level (and less powerful) text programming language and use a *compiler* that converts my text to plain TeX and gives me high level error messages only. Nroff/Troff are not much better, but at least they make use of preprocessors that *compile* math input, tables or pictures. Ralph-Diether Marzusch -- UUCP: marzusch@fbihh.uucp | Universitaet Hamburg (...!uunet!unido!fbihh!marzusch) | Fachbereich Informatik EAN: marzusch@rz.informatik.uni-hamburg.dbp.de | Schlueterstr. 70 Phone: +49 40 4123 4163 | D-2000 Hamburg 13 (W-Germany)