amit@umn-cs.UUCP (02/01/87)
The sources for TeX, LaTeX, other macro packages and the device drivers are all available. And many of them are well documented. Much better than troff. This availability encourages programmers to design their own solutions to problems that many of us face. It's quite likely that whenever there's a serious need for some missing functionality, a kind soul will invent it for the rest of us. Sometimes more than one. Examples? The \picture environment in LaTeX is inconvenient and incomplete? Now there is tpic (for AT&T licensed sites), that translates Pic into TeX's \special's. Epic is gaining popularity. There probably are a half-dozen other picture environments out there. The best will survive. Automatic indexing? Look for idx, index. TTY previewer? dvitty and dvidoc. They have still some distance to go before they stack up against nroff, and they will. Need graphs? lgraph. Don't like CM? Probably you're not alone. You can expect other fonts shortly. There are style-files, both text and bibliography, for siam, ieee and acm transactions. Theses styles for various U's. I'm inexperienced with troff, so please let me know if *it* offers this degree of flexibility. And we haven't talked about the output quality. (But maybe that's like comparing $2000 speakers to $5000 speakers. There is difference, but the majority don't care.) Lastly, on our 4.3bsd (Vax/780), Sun 3's and Apollo 320/330's, [La]TeX outperforms troff by a wide margin. And if you hate the interactive session, just turn it off! --Neta Amit (amit@umn-cs.arpa) U of Minnesota CSci