root@helios.ucsc.edu (De Clarke x2630) (11/10/88)
I've just been catching up on sun-spots v6n242-v7n8 (whew!) and have noticed a lot of people asking about TeX previewers and so forth. Some responses mentioned FrameMaker; no one mentioned a product that we purchased and so far ar rather pleased with, called Publisher and made by a little outfit by the name of ArborText. The usual disclaimers apply; I don't work for these people and none of them are my cousins or anything. But it's a nice product. Basically it runs under suntools and provides you with an editor (rather too X11/uwm-y in character, like a Mac editor that mutated) and a preview window; preview, print and edit are all done from the same application. We've been using TeX under VAX/VMS for many years, and so this strikes us as real nifty keen. It's reasonably fast even on a 3/50. (The Sun-4 version is supposed to be out, uh, two months ago now. Well, they've been very apologetic at least.) The manual is excellent; for those who have suffered through and with Knuth's TeXBook for half a decade, it's a treat. Publisher also comes with a paint and a draw program; they share some of the mutated-Mac weirdness of the user interface, but you can get used to them fairly quickly. You can get PS dumps out of them; you can get PS, TeX source (ugly as sin, but TeX) and SGML (?) out of Publisher. ArborText's support team has been friendly and responsive (better than Sun hotline, these days) and they have a good edu discount -- it cost us about $900 per station. Now, can anyone tell me whether we should have bought FrameMaker instead, what it does that we can't now do, and what it costs? Not that we can afford to switch horses, I'm just curious. If you write direct to me, I will summarize and re-transmit. de PS -- (flame on) I agree whole-heartedly with the Sun customer who said the 800-number team was asleep at the wheel. I have given up on the 800 number altogether and get all my support via hotline. This was great for the first few months, response time was one to two days and the hotline people are smart and friendly; but lately (mid-Oct on) I haven't heard a peep out of them and have about five reports/questions in. Have they all got the flu? Have they caught the Dreaded DEC Disease of non-stop meetings and trainings? Has AT&T kidnapped them? (flame off) voice: 408-429-2630 fax: 408-429-2730 email: root@helios.ucsc.edu root@portal.bitnet
rodgers@maxwell.mmwb.ucsf.edu (12/04/88)
In article <2190@kalliope.rice.edu> Sun-Spots@Rice.edu writes: >X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 7, Issue 20, message 10 of 12 > >... no one mentioned a product that we >purchased and so far ar rather pleased with, called Publisher and made by >a little outfit by the name of ArborText. "The Publisher" has been in use under a campus-wide license at UC Berkeley for over a year now, but the reaction there is mixed. One of the MAJOR drawbacks at present is that the TeX files produced by The Publisher are NOT portable to other machines which have TeX; they can only be manipulated within The Publisher environment, which negates one of the great potential selling points of such a system--the use of a highly portable formatting language. ArborText claims that this will eventually be dealt with... R. P. C. Rodgers, Statistical Mechanics of Biomolecules, Dept. of Pharm. Chem., University of California, San Francisco CA 94118 (415)476-8910 (ARPA: rodgers@cca.ucsf.edu, BITNET: rodgers@ucsfcca, UUCP: ...ucbvax.berkeley.edu!cca.ucsf.edu!rodgers)