[comp.text] Thanks and answer for: ** troff and latex **

iu@grasp.cis.upenn.edu (SiuLeong Iu) (07/21/89)

  Thanks for all the following people in answering my question which
I proposed in the article 4638 of comp.text about the difference between
the Troff and Latex:

  Dan Barrett, Anita Eijs, Scott Barman, Jeff Lo and Ronald van der Pol.

Some comments, which I got from Ronald, are from the book "The unix
text processing system" by Kaare Chistian.

  The answers are summaried as follows. Since I only know the troff,
I can not justify the  viewpoints about Latex, and I treat Tex and Latex are
the same thing although they are not.

- The main difference is that LaTex defines the scope of the command clearly.
  Latex is easier to "nest" commands and has some convenient features such
  as automatic table-of contents generation, atuotmatic numbering of chapters
  & sections and lots of mathematical symbols. TEX's page formatting
  is more sophiticated than Troff's, it has a better understanding of
  character shapes and the rules for positioning one character next to another.
  You can also create your own symbols from Latex. Many news books in computer
  science, mathematics and phyiscs are prepared using Tex or LaTex. 

- Troff is the most often used UNIX formatter becasue it was available first
  and it has been significantly extended to handle specialized jobs.

- The program tr2tex and tr2latex translates troff file into Tex file and
  Latex files respectively. Texi2roff converts GNU Texinfo files to troff
  file. (I am still looking the above programs, especially the tr2latex.)

- There is a troff previewer for X window coming out now in the newsgroup
  comp.source.x. The companies Elan and SoftQuad have commercial products
  of such previewer. For Latex, xdvi is the previewer.

SiuLeong Iu (iu@grasp.cis.upenn.edu)