kayvan@mrspoc.Transact.COM (Kayvan Sylvan) (05/31/90)
Has anyone done a TeX presentation before?
I need to do a presentation to my company to convince people to use
TeX rather than Troff (or to use both at the very least).
Please help me keep TeX alive here!!!
Our needs are mostly in documentation...
I've been using the Texinfo package to produce online documentation as
well as printed manuals.
Some of the concerns that people have here:
TBL - is there an equivalent table facility?
PIC - ditto for pictures/line drawing graphics?
If I can find some neat and elegant way to do FLOW CHARTS in TeX, It
would be really great!!
learning - is there any training available? Most of us are at least
familiar with TROFF and the macro packages, some of us are quite
expert. What will it cost us for people to learn a new system?
Can anyone help?
Please??
Thanks!
---Kayvan
--
| Kayvan Sylvan @ Transact Software, Inc. -*- Los Altos, CA (415) 961-6112 |
| "If Donald Knuth had written X windows, it would be named Echhh windows." |
| --- Marc De Groot |walter@hpsad.HP.COM (Walter Coole) (06/05/90)
I'm not real familiar with troff, so I can't give you a detailed comparison, but there is a tables macro set that produces nice tables fairly easily and there is PiCTeX, which provides a picture environment (LaTeX has its own picture environment). Several people report success using TransFig to translate PIC to TeX. The big differences are religous: TeX is (mostly) user-supported and quasi-public-domain and works well with Gnu Emacs and the tools for it are (mostly) user-supported and quasi-public-domain; troff is (originally) an AT&T product and works with a lot of (mostly) AT&T products, nroff, PIC, eqn, S, etc. I think TeX has an edge in handling mathematics; but troff may be better for documents that may need to be sent to an ASCII device (nroff being the standard way to handle man pages). I think the main choice is how your organization prefers to spend resources; troff is available as a commercial, fully-supported product with a fairly high price tag; TeX is available free, but will require some local support to install.
grunwald@foobar.colorado.edu (Dirk Grunwald) (06/05/90)
>>>>> On 4 Jun 90 21:27:57 GMT, walter@hpsad.HP.COM (Walter Coole) said:
.... ...
WC> handle man pages). I think the main choice is how your organization
WC> prefers to spend resources; troff is available as a commercial,
WC> fully-supported product with a fairly high price tag; TeX is available
WC> free, but will require some local support to install.
---
several companies support TeX, and if you have $$, you can pay them to
set you up. ArborTeX comes to mine. Also, you can get TeX for PC's and
Mac's for free, making it a nicely portable environment.