doug@xdos.UUCP (Doug Merritt) (09/25/89)
In article <4593@amiga.UUCP> jimm@batgirl.UUCP (Jim Mackraz) writes: >I suggest we determine which is more common in the *subscribers* >environments, and that this means more than whether there are backslashes >in there. > >I expect that people might frequently print the equations out, esp. >from the more useful postings. But the *most* common use is still simply reading articles online. Even the articles I save (several in this group so far), I'm not going to print out. This is 1989...I work online! And despite working in a relatively well equipped office with lots of modern workstations, I don't have access to any software package which can put pretty printed equations on my workstation displays. (Also while it's gratifying to envision that people are going to immortalize our postings in beautifully formatted laser printed postings to frame and hang in their offices and admire endlessly. But that seductive vision is mostly a mirage. It simply won't happen often enough to justify using that as a basis for considering a standard equation format.) There's only *one* common denominator, and that's plain text. Arguing over, say, eqn vs. LaTeX in terms of readability makes sense. Arguing over which is more commonly available does not. Neither one is "commonly" available (as a percentage of readership). If you really want to push this issue, your best bet is to find a way to get an equation prettyprinter (for both display and printer) into people's hands in a form they can use with news. It should initially support plain ascii pretty printing (like Macsyma does for formulae), plus optionally support for Suns, Apollos, NeXt (or more to the point, X windows). Then work with the guys who distribute news software, and get it incorporated into the next release of news. And hopefully into the next release of 'less', also (my favorite display pager). Eventually this would result in a reasonable percentage of the Unix systems on the net having the ability to read news with equations automatically pretty printed to the display. Note that even then, there'd be gripes from all the Usenet folks on non-Unix systems (e.g. IBM mainframes, DEC 10/20's, Mac's, Amiga's, PC's, etc), of which there are a fairly large number. Porting the equation-reading news software to some of these boxes would be a good idea, and it'd help, but there'll always (well, for a long time) be those people who *still* don't have it available. So it'd *still* be necessary for the equations to be *easily* readable without preprocessing. This may sound pretty pessimistic. Don't get me wrong, I would very much like to see this ability commonly available, and I would like to see the above plan put into effect. I just think that there are severe pragmatic limitations on what you can expect. By the way, this is an issue very similar to that of internationalization. It's currently a big deal with companies like e.g. Sun and AT&T to prepare hardware and software systems that can deal effectively with non-English languages (e.g. Japanese). Lots of work is being done in that area, and sometime in the next few years you can expect to see a lot of systems that can deal with Kanji, latin character diacriticals, etc. It would make sense to integrate the issue of equation pretty printing; there are many similar issues and many similar hw/sw requirements. Perhaps those of you with an interest in display of equations could contact groups working on internationalization and talk to them about meeting common goals. Until then, it's easy to see there won't be a standard. Some people will continue posting LaTex, others eqn, others plain text, etc. I'm tempted to make a pitch for *preparing* for the eventual standard by making sure that whatever we use is easily machine recognizable, like e.g. LaTeX. But it is significantly less readable before preprocessing, and besides which people who don't have access to it aren't likely to know it well enough to use it in their postings anyway. Oh, well. Doug -- Doug Merritt {pyramid,apple}!xdos!doug Member, Crusaders for a Better Tomorrow Professional Wildeyed Visionary