[comp.text.tex] "MacTex" or "Textures" anyone? Was: Looking for Mac version of TeX

czychi@bernina.ethz.ch (Gary Czychi) (12/05/90)

Hi,

I am not sure, but I think that either 'MacTex' from Personal Tex Inc. and
'Textures' from Kellerman-Smith are two other 'Tex' programs for the Mac.

Does anyone know something about these products? Newspaper articles, usenet
articles, other product infos? 

Thank you very much for any help.

Gary


    Gary T. Czychi                University of St.Gallen, Switzerland

    czychi@csghsg52.BITNET  or  czychi@alpha.unisg.ch (preferred host)
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doner@henri.ucsb.edu (John Doner) (12/05/90)

In article <1990Dec4.204921.352@bernina.ethz.ch> czychi@bernina.UUCP (Gary Czychi) writes:
>
>I am not sure, but I think that either 'MacTex' from Personal Tex Inc. and
>'Textures' from Kellerman-Smith are two other 'Tex' programs for the Mac.
>
>Does anyone know something about these products? Newspaper articles, usenet
>articles, other product infos? 

I have both.  Textures is a mature product, very stable, well
supported.  Has a very good preview feature.  At $395 list (or is it
$495?) it is way too expensive.  However, many University bookstores
have it for $125.  MacTex was also pretty good, but a bit slower.  It
automatically made more use of Postscript fonts, e.g., substituting
Times-Roman for Computer Modern (although you could get Computer
Modern for it for a small charge).  The built-in help was a definite
plus, and the editor offered { and $ balancing.  The price was even
more out of line, $795 with no University discount.  I say 'was'
because I haven't heard from the company in several years and I don't
think they're in business any more.

I have Textures 1.2.  They have recently come out with a 2.0 version,
which should be a substantial improvement.  Among other things, it
allows up to 10000 control sequences instead of 3000.

John E. Doner	       | "The beginner...should not be discouraged if...he
Mathematics, UCSB      | finds that he does not have the prerequisites for
Santa Barbara, CA 93106| reading the prerequisites."
doner@henri.ucsb.edu   |      --Paul Halmos, Measure Theory

hucka@eecs.umich.edu (Michael Hucka) (12/06/90)

As Bobby Bodenheimer's recent article (of 2 Dec.) on Frequently Asked
Questions about TeX also points out, "OzTeX" (now version 1.3) is an
excellent, free implementation of TeX 3.0 for the Macintosh.  

I have been running it on a Mac IIcx at home and have been very happy with
it.  OzTeX 1.3 provides TeX, LaTeX, a dvi previewer, BibTeX, MakeIndex, and
the ability to print to PostScript printers as well as ImageWriters and
Quickdraw printers like HPs.  Further, full sources are available, as well as
MetaFont and other utilities; you can ftp them from midway.uchicago.edu.
OzTeX was written by Andrew Trevorrow.

It works very much like a real tex, producing the familiar .dvi and .ps
files.  

Compared to TeXtures (in my opinion): TeXtures seems somewhat faster and has
a somewhat better previewer, and of course, their proprietary (and
non-portable) mechanism for including Mac figures in documents.  OzTeX does
support \special commands for including PostScript files, which makes it just
about equivalent to TeXtures for including pictures (for me, anyway) since,
on a Mac, you can always produce a PostScript file instead of printing a
diagram.  Besides, I have found the results more portable to other machines
-- e.g., I can copy all the files to a Unix machine, run TeX 3.0 and, modulo
small tweaks to the \special commands, have things come out as expected.

Mike
Disclaimer: these are my own opinions.
--
Mike Hucka                     | Internet: hucka@caen.engin.umich.edu    
University of Michigan AI Lab  | 1101 Beal Ave., Ann Arbor, MI 48109 

p554mve@mpirbn.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de (Michael van Elst) (12/07/90)

In article <7649@hub.ucsb.edu> doner@henri.UUCP (John Doner) writes:
>I have both.  Textures is a mature product, very stable, well
>supported.
>I have Textures 1.2.  They have recently come out with a 2.0 version,
>which should be a substantial improvement.  Among other things, it
>allows up to 10000 control sequences instead of 3000.

Now that Textures is mentioned, I have a question. Is it possible
(and how) to convert .pk or .gf font files I'm using with UNIX TeX
to the format used by Textures ?

Thanx in advance,
-- 
Michael van Elst
UUCP:     universe!local-cluster!milky-way!sol!earth!uunet!unido!mpirbn!p554mve
Internet: p554mve@mpirbn.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
                                "A potential Snark may lurk in every tree."

ken@csis.dit.csiro.au (Ken Yap) (12/07/90)

>As Bobby Bodenheimer's recent article (of 2 Dec.) on Frequently Asked
>Questions about TeX also points out, "OzTeX" (now version 1.3) is an
>excellent, free implementation of TeX 3.0 for the Macintosh.  
>...
>It works very much like a real tex, producing the familiar .dvi and .ps
>files.  

:-) No surprise. Because it IS a real TeX. It passes the trip tests.
And you can preview DVI files from elsewhere.  By the way, making a PS
file is not a requirement of being TeX.

I too, recommend it. For free, it's hard to beat.

hanche@imf.unit.no (Harald Hanche-Olsen) (12/08/90)

In article <1418@mpirbn.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de> p554mve@mpirbn.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de (Michael van Elst) writes:

   Now that Textures is mentioned, I have a question. Is it possible
   (and how) to convert .pk or .gf font files I'm using with UNIX TeX
   to the format used by Textures ?

Last time I looked (and I admit that was long ago), the answer was no.
(If that has changed, will someone please speak up?)  For exactly that
reason, I quickly lost interest in Textures.  With OzTeX, the answer
is yes.

- Harald Hanche-Olsen <hanche@imf.unit.no>
  Division of Mathematical Sciences
  The Norwegian Institute of Technology
  N-7034 Trondheim, NORWAY

lampard@janus.trl.oz (Greg Lampard) (12/13/90)

In article <HUCKA.90Dec5204733@kite.eecs.umich.edu>, hucka@eecs.umich.edu (Michael Hucka) writes:
> As Bobby Bodenheimer's recent article (of 2 Dec.) on Frequently Asked
> Questions about TeX also points out, "OzTeX" (now version 1.3) is an
> excellent, free implementation of TeX 3.0 for the Macintosh.  

I certainly agree with this.  I've only had two problems with it; the first 
is that it ran out of memory on one of my files, but I got around that
problem fairly easily (BTW Is it possible to increase the stack sizes??).
The second problem is more serious, and concerns the inclusion of figures.

> Compared to TeXtures (in my opinion): TeXtures seems somewhat faster and has
> a somewhat better previewer, and of course, their proprietary (and
> non-portable) mechanism for including Mac figures in documents.  OzTeX does
> support \special commands for including PostScript files, which makes it just
> about equivalent to TeXtures for including pictures (for me, anyway) since,
> on a Mac, you can always produce a PostScript file instead of printing a
> diagram.  

I haven't found things to be quite as simple as this.  I have had no
success including PostScript generated my MacDraw II and Canvas into my
LaTeX documents using the \special command.  The LaTeX part prints OK, but 
the space where the picture should be comes out empty.  Maybe I'm doing
something dumb, but including figures in OzTeX is not as straight-forward 
as it might be, IMHO.

============================================================================
  Greg Lampard					    Optical Networks Section
  Internet:  g.lampard@trl.oz.au     Telecom Australia Research Laboratories
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bill@ut-emx.uucp (Bill Jefferys) (12/14/90)

For all you fans who get OzTeX:

Stuffit Classic will NOT work on some of the .sit archives in
the midway.uchicago.edu ftp archive. I think that it cannot 
handle archives with as many files as some of the font archives
have. Instead, use UnStuffit 1.5 or Stuffit 1.5.1; these both 
seem to work OK.

And be sure to do the ftp in BINARY mode, as well as using
MacBinary mode to download to the Mac. Either Kermit (-i option)
or xmodem (-sb) works to download from a UNIX machine.

Bill

-- 
If you meet the Buddha on the net, put him in your kill file
	--Robert Firth

hucka@engin.umich.edu (Michael Hucka) (12/14/90)

In article <23356@janus.trl.oz> lampard@janus.trl.oz (Greg Lampard) writes:
> In article <HUCKA.90Dec5204733@kite.eecs.umich.edu>, hucka@eecs.umich.edu (Michael Hucka) writes:
[... text deleted ...]
> > Compared to TeXtures (in my opinion): TeXtures seems somewhat faster and has
> > a somewhat better previewer, and of course, their proprietary (and
> > non-portable) mechanism for including Mac figures in documents.  OzTeX does
> > support \special commands for including PostScript files, which makes it just
> > about equivalent to TeXtures for including pictures (for me, anyway) since,
> > on a Mac, you can always produce a PostScript file instead of printing a
> > diagram.  
> 
> I haven't found things to be quite as simple as this.  I have had no
> success including PostScript generated my MacDraw II and Canvas into my
> LaTeX documents using the \special command.  The LaTeX part prints OK, but 
> the space where the picture should be comes out empty.  Maybe I'm doing
> something dumb, but including figures in OzTeX is not as straight-forward 
> as it might be, IMHO.

Hmm.  I have not tried MacDraw II or Canvas, but here is how I included
PostScript produced from some MS Word tables using the command-f trick.  It
turned out in those cases that the figures were being placed too high (in one
case it was so high it was off the page).  (I had *assumed* that this was a
problem specific to the particular postscript files I had -- perhaps it's
not?)  OzTeX lets you supply arbitrary PostScript code after the file name in
the \special command.  So I put in something like
	\special{filename.ps 0 -250 translate}
which caused the figure to be shifted 0 points horizontally and -300 points
vertically, thus lowering it to the proper position.

You're right that this is not as straight-forward as it might be; TeXtures is
easier.

Mike
--
Mike Hucka                     | Internet: hucka@caen.engin.umich.edu    
University of Michigan AI Lab  | 1101 Beal Ave., Ann Arbor, MI 48109