ari@well.sf.ca.us (Ari Davidow) (05/08/91)
I am working with a textbook manufacturer on ways to facilitate the typesetting of math. TeX, per se, simply doesn't cut it. It's an amazing tool for generating math, but it's typographic and font capabilities (at least, insofar as I am aware, which isn't as far as it might be) are far too limited for our purposes. Despite its limitations, for the moment we are using Penta systems, and Penta Math as the type backend. We are looking at several specific messes, and trying to come up with solutions that will enable us to say to authors, "if you use one of these programs, we can save your keystrokes and formatting for typesetting." If nothing else, it appears that TeX could serve as a common demoninator between front and back ends. Maybe we're wrong about TeX's typographic capabilities and it provides a sane backend. Maybe there are simple PC or Mac front ends that offer TeX compatibility, or TeX export capabilities. I'm open to any suggestion, and certainly won't mind being shown wrong about any of what I think I know in the preceding paragraphs. ari davidow ari@well.sf.ca.us "If there were a computer for the rest of us, it would know how to work in the languages other than English that the rest of us speak."
jg@prg.ox.ac.uk (Jeremy Gibbons) (05/15/91)
> [TeX's] typographic and > font capabilities (at least, insofar as I am aware, which isn't > as far as it might be) are far too limited for our purposes. I'm not sure I understand you. TeX can use any PostScript font (as long as you are prepared to print the result on a PostScript device), and it can also use Bitstream fonts (with the help of a package from Personal TeX Inc to convert Bitstream outlines to the bitmaps that TeX understands). That should give you enough fonts to be getting on with. As for typographic capabilities... TeX isn't much good for fancy page makeup, with text flowing around diagrams etc. (TeX's linebreaking and pagebreaking algorithms act asynchronously; TeX builds paragraphs and adds them to a `scroll', every now and then cutting off enough for a page. When a paragraph is made into lines, TeX doesn't `know' where it will go on the page and so can't change the line lengths accordingly. TeX *can* handle page makeup where all parts of the text are the same width--for example, for a grid-oriented layout--because this does fit into its `scroll' model.) Jeremy *-----------------------------------------------------------------------* | Jeremy Gibbons (jg@prg.oxford.ac.uk) Funky Monkey Multimedia Corp | *-----------------------------------------------------------------------*