terry@nrcvax.UUCP (Terry Grevstad) (10/12/87)
I've been using xroff to produce technical documents. As far as I'm concerned it has been wonderful. However, there is no good graphics package that goes with it. I'm being pushed by higher-ups into getting a good graphics package in here, and because of that, they apparently are thinking of going to another text formatter altogether. Scribe is the current software I'm getting info on. Can anyone give me any practical information on Scribe? Have you used it? Is it any good? Does it have a graphics package, or does it just integrate other graphics packages that we would need to purchase separately? For that matter, what is the best graphics package floating around? Personally, I'd like to find something that would integrate with my xroff, since I already know and like it. I *don't* want to go back to cut and paste, but if I must, I will.
hedrick@topaz.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) (10/15/87)
Scribe is in some vague sense the same kind of animal as n/troff. Howver there are a number of differences in philosophy that may affect how well you can use it: - it was originally intended as a "descriptive" rather than imperative language. That is, you weren't supposed to say "put 1 in of space here" and "change to 20 pt Roman", but rather you were supposed to describe the logical structure of the document and let Scribe do the typesetting. In fact this results in a system that is much friendlier if you are doing reasonable things, but if you are trying to match a precise specification for format, you can go crazy trying to figure out how to adjust all the database files to get the effect you want. (Actually, you can tell it to put a certain amount of blankspace, but generally that is not the right thing to do.) I prefer Scribe to anything else I have seen, but people used to other packages find it frustrating. (There is enough ability to tailor formats that you should be able to produce any format that you need. It's just that it is done somewhat differently than what some people expect.) - it does not have an equivalent of eqn. It does have facilities for setting equations, and they have been getting better over time, but they are probably not quite as good as eqn or some of the TeX packages. - it tries to get the best results on each output device, using the best fonts available from that device. This is in contrast to TeX, which supplies its own fonts so that output from all devices can be identical. Scribe's output looks better on devices with good native fonts (e.g. Laserwriter). On devices with bad native fonts, you can always set up the Scribe database files to use the TeX fonts... - there is support for including graphics, in whatever format the device expects, e.g. Postscript files for Laserwriters. It will automatically move the picture to the specified place on the page, but you still have to specify how big the picture is going to be. However Scribe is not in itself a graphics package like, for example, pic. Whether you want it to be is another issue. Probably high-quality graphics are likely to be done in a specialized graphics tool, so the ability to include it in the document may be all you want. There are full-screen previewers for Scribe, but we haven't looked at them. I would talk to the purveyors of them (or directly to Unilogic) to see whether any of them provide some sort of graphics support for Scribe.
dupree%risk@Sun.COM (Chuck Dupree) (10/16/87)
In article <15624@topaz.rutgers.edu> hedrick@topaz.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) writes, concerning Scribe: > - it tries to get the best results on each output device, using the > best fonts available from that device. This is in contrast > to TeX, which supplies its own fonts so that output from > all devices can be identical. Scribe's output looks better > on devices with good native fonts (e.g. Laserwriter). On > devices with bad native fonts, you can always set up the Scribe > database files to use the TeX fonts... TeX is capable of using native fonts. Like any typesetting program, it needs to know certain metric information such as character heights and widths. If such information is made available to it, TeX can make output that looks as good as the device is capable of. It's true that there are fonts supplied with TeX, as part of the distribution of this public domain program. But TeX has been used to drive typesetters as well as laser printers with whatever fonts are available on the device. Scribe may still be better for certain applications, but font flexibility is an area in which TeX is quite successful. TeX users have generated typeset copy in quite a number of languages and alphabets, partially because Metafont, which is part of the TeX package, can be used to generate arbitrary characters. - Chuck Dupree (dupree@sun.com | dupree%risk@Sun.COM) "This is for me the essence of true romance: Sharing the things we know and love with those of like kind; Libations, sensations, that stagger the mind..."
blackje@sunspot.steinmetz (emmett black) (10/20/87)
Where is there a reasonable previewer for SCRIBE, that runs in SUNview ? [piping thru NeWS was a bit awkward] --Emmett BlackJE@GE-CRD.ARPA ...!steinmetz!crd!blackje