hsd@uvacs.CS.VIRGINIA.EDU (Harry S. Delugach) (04/03/88)
I am soon to begin the production of a large, technical document (namely
my Ph.D. dissertation). All my previous technical documents have been
produced using the UNIX troff family, including bib, eqn, pic, etc.
I also use the -me macros to produce camera-ready citations, index,
table of contents, table of figures, etc.
I recently acquired a Macintosh SE, so I am now contemplating where would
be the best machine on which to work. I am concerned here only with the
document processing, not any simulation or software development tools which
I might need for the actual research.
Is there any Mac software that matches the functionality of *troff
and family? Does anyone out there regularly use embedded citations
which are gathered at the end of a document? How about footnotes?
Does it work for a large document (approx 200 double-spaced pages)?
What are the pros and cons of either?
--
Harry S. Delugach University of Virginia, Dept. of Computer Science
UUCP: ..!uunet!virginia!uvacs!hsd
INTERNET: hsd@cs.virginia.edu
BITNET: hsd2x@virginiaphd@SPEECH1.CS.CMU.EDU (Paul Dietz) (04/03/88)
In article <2328@uvacs.CS.VIRGINIA.EDU> hsd@uvacs.CS.VIRGINIA.EDU (Harry S. Delugach) writes: >I am soon to begin the production of a large, technical document (namely >my Ph.D. dissertation). > >Is there any Mac software that matches the functionality of *troff >and family? Does anyone out there regularly use embedded citations >which are gathered at the end of a document? How about footnotes? >Does it work for a large document (approx 200 double-spaced pages)? I solicited the net for help with this problem some time ago, and am currently in the process of writing THE document. Suggestions were mainly between MS Word, and TeX. For cost and availability reasons, I went with MS Word. Things I like: WYSIWYG editing Multifinder let's me do diagrams, and paste back and forth quickly. Automatic Table of Contents. Index (though I haven't tried it yet.) Things I don't like: Equation processing is crude. Punts when equations get too long. No support for figure or table numbers. No bibliography support. I'm surviving with it so far, but it's not exactly my "dream word processor". Judging by the frequency of these querries, when, oh when is somebody going to make a cheap, decent, technical word processor????? -- 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." _________^__^_________/ / / \\\\-
shebs%defun.utah.edu.uucp@utah-cs.UUCP (Stanley T. Shebs) (04/03/88)
In article <2328@uvacs.CS.VIRGINIA.EDU> hsd@uvacs.CS.VIRGINIA.EDU (Harry S. Delugach) writes: >I am soon to begin the production of a large, technical document (namely >my Ph.D. dissertation). Personally, I would say that anything but LaTeX would be incredibly painful (but then again, PhD students are used to pain, eh? 1/2 :-) ). Elaborate bibliography handling, excellent support for equations, adequate support for pictures (many just paste postscript in), handling for nearly every typographical problem in the known universe, and extreme portability - you can get LaTeX for Unix boxes, Macs, and PCs to produce the same results. (OK, I'm a little biased...) Another advantage is that you can set up "style files" for different types of documents, and most TeX-using universities have styles for their theses. I'd be willing to pass ours along, with the warning that you will probably have to change a few things to make it acceptable for your thesis editor, and there are a couple of bugs that need manual workarounds. Still, once you get it set up right, theses can typically pass the thesis editor on the first try! stan shebs shebs@cs.utah.edu
u14@nikhefh.hep.nl (Daan Josephus Jitta) (04/03/88)
In article <2328@uvacs.CS.VIRGINIA.EDU> hsd@uvacs.CS.VIRGINIA.EDU (Harry S. Delugach) writes: >Is there any Mac software that matches the functionality of *troff >and family? Does anyone out there regularly use embedded citations >which are gathered at the end of a document? How about footnotes? >Does it work for a large document (approx 200 double-spaced pages)? >What are the pros and cons of either? What about an implementation of TeX for the Mac? I wrote my thesis at home on an Atari ST using TeX, and printed it afterwards via the Unix machine on an Apple LaserWriter. TeX will have all the power you need (and is cheap)! Daan Josephus Jitta.
gustav@swanee.OZ (Gustav) (04/04/88)
in article <2328@uvacs.CS.VIRGINIA.EDU>, hsd@uvacs.CS.VIRGINIA.EDU (Harry S. Delugach) says: > > Is there any Mac software that matches the functionality of *troff > and family? Does anyone out there regularly use embedded citations > which are gathered at the end of a document? How about footnotes? > Does it work for a large document (approx 200 double-spaced pages)? > What are the pros and cons of either? > -- No, there isn't any that would match the power and versatility of troff. You can try Textures, or combine it even with LaTeX (if Addison Wesley produced any yet), but you cannot use it to produce any big documents. On my system with 1 Mbyte memory I cannot process documents longer than about 30 to 35 pages (depending on whether it's got pictures embedded in it or not). That means that you'll have to divide the whole document into small chunks. That in turn means that you cannot do any cross-referencing easily. The editor which comes with Textures is rather poor too. Finally, the quality of print out - even on laser printer - is not the best. I had much better results from running TeX and LaTeX on VAX and dumping the output to laser printer. The advantages are that 1) the previewer is good; 2) the machine is yours -- the latter is of importance if you have problems with accessing your UNIX or with its reliability. Other screen oriented text processors available for Mac are really Mickey Mouse staff and completely unsuitable for any serious mathematical text processing. But some of them are not too bad if you don't use any mathematics. Try MacWord.
jonathan@pitt.UUCP (Jonathan S. Eunice) (04/04/88)
Harry S. Delugach writes: > Is there any Mac software that matches the functionality of *troff > and family? MS Word is easy to learn and use, and makes nice-looking documents. The page preview feature is esp. nice. Outlines are claimed, but not very good. It does footnotes well, but does not provide many of the other services you're probably used to from -mX macro packages and the troff front-ends. Making tables (with MacDraw or similar) is particularly painful compared to tbl. Equations are possible but you'll need one of the equation-making programs if you're going to do anything fancy. There is no automatic bibliography/citation support, but it isn't too bad to do manually. Displays are more difficult. Complex parametric figures (as in pic) are not possible, but simple figures are very easy to specify in one of the Draw or Paint programs. Large documents will probably have to be split into several files. They are from two different worlds \(em the embedded command world, and the WYSIWYG world. The flame.wars will begin with the comp.sys.mac people saying: Go with Word. The comp.text people: Go with troff, TeX, usw. Personally, I use both for technical writing, and find both acceptable. Troff/Unix has some real advantages for long documents, in that you can do many things automatically with little sed/awk/etc scripts or troff-helpers that you must do by hand on the Macintosh. The Mac is simpler, though, and doesn't force you do work at such a low level. Most working time is changing the text, not formatting/setting for output. If you have a workstation (or a Mac) with a large screen available, that is probably more important to the ease of editing than which text processor you use. I've also been pretty successful straddling the line, using both for the same document, transferring between formats. If you don't use over-complex formatting, the translation is not really that great, except for tables, figures, and equations. It's easier to go from Mac to Unix, btw.
samia@violet.berkeley.edu (Samia Benidir) (04/05/88)
In article <2328@uvacs.CS.VIRGINIA.EDU> hsd@uvacs.CS.VIRGINIA.EDU (Harry S. Delugach) writes: >I am soon to begin the production of a large, technical document (namely >my Ph.D. dissertation). All my previous technical documents have been >produced using the UNIX troff family, including bib, eqn, pic, etc. >I recently acquired a Macintosh SE, so I am now contemplating where would >be the best machine on which to work. I am concerned here only with the >Harry S. Delugach University of Virginia, Dept. of Computer Science I am in the same situation. Please post any answers. Thanks Samia ____________________ Tahia | ((( __/\__ | El Djazair | ((( \ / | Samia Benidir | ((( /_/\_\ | samia@violet.berkeley.edu |_________|__________|
egv@aicchi.UUCP (Vann) (04/05/88)
> I am soon to begin the production of a large, technical document (namely > my Ph.D. dissertation). All my previous technical documents have been > produced using the UNIX troff family, including bib, eqn, pic, etc. > I also use the -me macros to produce camera-ready citations, index, > table of contents, table of figures, etc. > > I recently acquired a Macintosh SE, so I am now contemplating where would > be the best machine on which to work. I am concerned here only with the > document processing, not any simulation or software development tools which > I might need for the actual research. > > Is there any Mac software that matches the functionality of *troff > and family? Does anyone out there regularly use embedded citations > which are gathered at the end of a document? How about footnotes? > Does it work for a large document (approx 200 double-spaced pages)? > What are the pros and cons of either? > -- > Harry S. Delugach University of Virginia, Dept. of Computer Science > UUCP: ..!uunet!virginia!uvacs!hsd > INTERNET: hsd@cs.virginia.edu > BITNET: hsd2x@virginia Might I offer one suggestion, providing you have the time. There are several word processors about to enter the market. Off hand, the names that come to mind are WordPerfect and FullWrite. While I have not had EXTENSIVE use of the WordPerfect package, I have with FullWrite. I will provide all of the kinds of needs you seek. I have been working on several dissertations for graduate students at the local college (graduate school). The students have been delighted with the look and format of the tables of contents, citations, bibliographies, etc. The papers have some graphics (charts) but not alot. Nevertheless the FullWrite package provides a built-in Draw-like tool for the placement of graphics. You will definitely need a Plus or SE (or even a Mac II) with additional memory if you plan to work conveniently with this package. The outlining feature is my favorite, since it is much more intuitive than that in MS-Word. I would advise though that you wait for the final release version. There are a few 'nasties' that are still around in the pre-release version. But if my experience is any indication the current release is indeed quite useable. Good luck. -- Eric Geoffrey Vann Analysts International (Chicago Branch) (312) 882-4673 ..!ihnp4!aicchi!egv ******************************************************************************* * * * "It is the reply that starts the argument..." * * * * Anonymous * * * *******************************************************************************
mesard@bbn.com (Wayne Mesard) (04/06/88)
From article <1290@PT.CS.CMU.EDU>, by phd@SPEECH1.CS.CMU.EDU (Paul Dietz): > I went with MS Word. > > Things I don't like: > [...] > No support for figure or table numbers. ----- DISCLAIMER: This is crude, and possibly more trouble than it's worth. (So keep your flames to yourself, I'm just trying to be helpful.) I realize that the following description sounds incredibly complicated and obscenely unMacish. But it's not as bad as at reads. If you can make enough sense of it to construct a short demo file, you may find it to be a useful (if obscure) trick. Read the Help File and/or Manual section about Print Merge first. ----- When I need to do figure or table numbering in a Word document, and I think I might be moving things around (thus screwing up the numbering sequence), I use the Print Merge facility to generate the numbers. Here's how it works: ==================================== Method 1 -- Easy ****** * **** If I'm only going to have a few numbers (less than a dozen) I define a field variable for each one at the top of the document. For example: <<SET architectureFIG=1>> <<SET BlackBoxFIG=2>> <<SET throughputFIG=3>> <<SET inputTAB=1> <<SET outputTAB=2>> Then in the body of the document and in the figure captions I type: As illustrated in Figure <<architectureFIG>>, ... and Figure <<architectureFIG>>: Network architecture used in this study. (Not all connections shown.) Then when I want to change the order of appearance, I only have to renumber the <<SET>> statements. No searching through the document for multiple references. Printing: Select Print Merge and click on the Print button in the -------- dialog box. ==================================== Method 2 -- Less Easy ****** * **** **** The other method is to create a file called, e.g., "Ref Numbers" which looks like this: refnum 1 2 3 4 ... Then in the main document, the first line reads: <<DATA Ref Numbers>> and each reference to a figure looks like See Figure <<refnum>>. Word will keep using the same number until you tell it to go to the next one, so before the *first* reference to figures, issue the <<NEXT>> command. For example: By comparing Figure <<refnum>>, above, with <<NEXT>>Figure <<refnum>>, below, we see.[...] Figure <<refnum>> also illustrates[...] might produce: By comparing Figure 1, above, with Figure 2, below, we see.[...] Figure 2 also illustrates[...] Printing: Select Print Merge and click on New Document. Look at the -------- "Form Letters" document that is produced to find out how many reference number you need. Then go back to the main document and choose Print Merge again, enter a "1" in the From field and "N" in the To field, where "N" is the number of references you need. (Otherwise it will print out multiple versions of your document until it uses all the records in "Ref numbers" -- I told you this was crude.) Disadvantages to Method 2: ------------- -- ------ - o You can only have one sequence of numbers per document. However combining Method 1 and 2 solves this problem. For example, use Method 1 for table references and Method 2 for figures in the same document. o It's not easy to mention previous references after they've already been <<NEXT>>'ed. To get around this, the best I've come up with is to set a variable for a ref if it'll be needed later. For example: Figure <<refnum>>: Two tortoises mating.<<SET shellgames=<<refnum>>>> then much later on: As illustrated in Figure <<shellgames>> in the previous chapter... ==================================== Warnings: -------- o Remember to say Print Merge and not Print. o After printing, make sure to go back to the main document window to do further editing. You don't want to be making changes directly to the form letter window. ==================================== For my next number...object oriented images in MacPaint:-) -- unsigned *Wayne_Mesard(); MESARD@BBN.COM BBN Labs, Cambridge, MA Once a Scribe hacker, always a Scribe hacker.
barad@tulane.tulane.edu (Herb Barad) (04/06/88)
In article <23006@bbn.COM> mesard@bbn.com (Wayne Mesard) writes:
*Method 1 -- Easy
******* * ****
*
*<<SET architectureFIG=1>> <<SET BlackBoxFIG=2>> <<SET throughputFIG=3>>
*<<SET inputTAB=1> <<SET outputTAB=2>>
*
*Then in the body of the document and in the figure captions I type:
*
* As illustrated in Figure <<architectureFIG>>, ...
*
*and
* Figure <<architectureFIG>>: Network architecture used in
* this study. (Not all connections shown.)
*
*Then when I want to change the order of appearance, I only have to
*renumber the <<SET>> statements. No searching through the document for
*multiple references.
*
*Printing: Select Print Merge and click on the Print button in the
*-------- dialog box.
I have created a Hypercard stack called Xref that does just this (well,
a little differently). I used this on my dissertation and it worked
pretty good. Also, the HC stack acts as a bibliographic database, so
you can use it for other work.
I did run into some problems, but they were mostly MS Words. For example,
Word has some pretty serious limitations as to the # of variables you can
set in a merge (I think it's 128). Well, I had over 80 references and
enough figures, tables, and equations to exceed that total. This forced
me to work around this by doing some manual substitutions by hand. Also,
it's slow! My entire dissertation took about 40 minutes to process.
However, you don't process the paper until the end and how many times
in your life do you write a dissertation.
It works very well with smaller papers (~20 pages). This stack was posted
some time ago (I believe it's up to version 1.3).
I'm still waiting for FullWrite...
--
Herb Barad Electrical Engineering Dept., Tulane Univ.
USENET/CSNET: barad@tulaneolson@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (olson) (04/07/88)
In article <1290@PT.CS.CMU.EDU> phd@SPEECH1.CS.CMU.EDU (Paul Dietz) writes: > >I'm surviving with it so far, but it's not exactly my "dream word >processor". Judging by the frequency of these querries, when, oh when >is somebody going to make a cheap, decent, technical word processor????? >Paul H. Dietz ____ ____ I will just as soon as I can find a way to eat while I'm doing it. (and after I finish my thesis) Todd Olson olson@helios.tn.cornell.edu
zwicky@pterodactyl.cis.ohio-state.edu (Elizabeth D. Zwicky) (04/12/88)
In article <407@swanee.OZ> gustav@swanee.OZ (Gustav) writes: >in article <2328@uvacs.CS.VIRGINIA.EDU>, hsd@uvacs.CS.VIRGINIA.EDU (Harry S. Delugach) says: >> Is there any Mac software that matches the functionality of *troff >> and family? Does anyone out there regularly use embedded citations >> which are gathered at the end of a document? How about footnotes? >> Does it work for a large document (approx 200 double-spaced pages)? >> What are the pros and cons of either? >No, there isn't any that would match the power and versatility of >troff. You can try Textures, or combine it even with LaTeX (if Addison >Wesley produced any yet), but you cannot use it to produce any big >documents. False. I use MacTeX by FTL, which happily (albeit slowly) crunches my entire Facilities Guide of nearly 300 pages, pictures, cross-references, footnotes, table of contents, fancy fonts and all. For convenience I often do the actual processing on a Sun 3/180, which cuts processing time by a factor of at least 10, but I have done it on the Mac, which is a plain ol' Mac+. The print quality is absolutely identical to that from our UNIX boxes. The previewer is perfectly good, although all the pictures show up as black splotches, and I hate previewing on the small screen. The editor, alas, is lousy in the version I have; I create the source files with the editor from Lightspeed C if I feel like doing it on a Mac. There is a more recent version of MacTeX which supposedly has an improved editor and more neato features, but I've never seen it. (I admit to a bias against troff; all those . commands remind me too much of WordStar, and anything it can do, TeX can do better. Our troff users here are slowly converting to TeX because of equation envy.) Elizabeth Zwicky
daveb@geac.UUCP (David Collier-Brown) (04/23/88)
In article <407@swanee.OZ> gustav@swanee.OZ (Gustav) writes: | Is there any Mac software that matches the functionality of *troff | and family? Does anyone out there regularly use embedded citations | which are gathered at the end of a document? How about footnotes? | Does it work for a large document (approx 200 double-spaced pages)? | What are the pros and cons of either? [ elided nasty reply about Mac software] In article <10321@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> zwicky@pterodactyl.cis.ohio-state.edu (Elizabeth D. Zwicky) writes: | False. I use MacTeX by FTL, which happily (albeit slowly) crunches | my entire Facilities Guide of nearly 300 pages, pictures, cross-references, | footnotes, table of contents, fancy fonts and all. | The previewer is perfectly good, although all | the pictures show up as black splotches, and I hate previewing on the | small screen. Good news, the current version displays the pictures you paste in on top of the (grey) splotches. And the editor has improved, and they added a MacWrite and MS Word input-translator, and it even runs faster. About 4 times, according to my stopwatch. (I live in Toronto, so I went down and benchmarked the critter last year). I finally got disgusted with the version(s) on the Vax and put down a down-payment on MacTeX for our + at work. I expect the Unix ports to improve, but they've got a long way to go to catch up with some of the other TeXs. -- David Collier-Brown. {mnetor yunexus utgpu}!geac!daveb Geac Computers International Inc., | Computer Science loses its 350 Steelcase Road,Markham, Ontario, | memory (if not its mind) CANADA, L3R 1B3 (416) 475-0525 x3279 | every 6 months.