🚀 go-pugleaf

	I do a lot of technical writing for scientific journals and
conferences.  Soon I will also begin writing my dissertation which I
expect to be about 100 single spaced pages.  I am trying to find out
if there is anything I can use on the Mac that is easier and nearly
equivalent to LaTeX.  LaTeX produces excellent output, but requires a
great deal of effort to do certain types of tasks like including
pictures or modifying document styles.  TeX previewers help, but it
would still be nice to have an overall easier to use system.

	I've never really used a WYSIWIG WP program before I bought my
mac about a month ago.  Since the, I've tried macWrite II and Word 4.
MacWrite II is pretty simplistic.  I can't imagine using it for more
than simple papers --- perhaps the kind you might write in high school
or early college.  Word 4 is much better, but it still falls short in
many ways.  In fact, MacWrite II has some features that Word is
missing, like auto-hyphenate as you type.

	Below are features that I would like in a WP program.  I would
appreciate hearing how people handle these in Word, as well as, any
other programs that support the features.  My guess is that FrameMaker
might be closer to what I need, but it isn't out yet, and is priced
exorbitantly high with no word yet about whether it will be discounted
for education.  (I only paid $69 for Word 4.)

	- Automatic numbering of sections, lists, and figures.  Word
understands headings, but it doesn't know how to automatically
renumber them.  Idealiner numbers and renumbers as you add and move
section headers, so I would think that it would simple to do.  Also,
Word doesn't seem to understand anything about figures.  I hate to
think of going through and numbering figures by hand.

	- References to other parts of the document.  Things like "see
section 3.2 for further information" and "as shown in figure 3 on page 24."
Again, I don't want to have to do all this numbering by hand --- that's what
computers are for.

	- Bibliographies in various formats.  Word doesn't seem to
know anything about references.  I would like to be able to enter
a database of references in a single format and have the WP suck in the
ones that I need and format them according to the style that I select,
including the pointer to the reference in the text.  I'm looking for
something similar to BibTeX.

	- Support for environments.  For example, I would like to make an
enumeration or description environment and apply it sections of text.
Word's styles seem a bit too primitive to do this (but they are
better than nothing).

	Frankly, I am amazed that it is so hard to find WP programs
with these features.  Such features are quite common in many
documents.  The Mac rags always complain about LaTeX being hard to
use, but it looks to me like it might be easier to use to produce
sophisticated documents.

	Finally, I have OzTeX, but it really doesn't fit well with the
Mac environment.  Because LaTeX+BibTeX require a lot of repetitions, it is
much easier to drive from a command line interface with history.  I
also don't like the built in postscript driver.  One of the nice
features of TeX is it's device independence.  On a multitasking system
there is really no need to bundle all of this together.
(I've been spoiled by AmigaTeX.)

	---Todd




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Todd R. Johnson
tj@cis.ohio-state.edu
Laboratory for AI Research
The Ohio State University