🚀 go-pugleaf

Thanks to the scadzillions of people who offered advice.
The great majority bordered on religous fanatacism in
support of TeX. A few others offered up Word 3.0 rather
luke warmly. Ok. So it looks like TeX is the way to go.

Things mentioned in favor of Word: 

Price/availability are very good.
Good spell checking.
Some ability to handle equations.
Seamless interaction with other Mac software 
	(i.e. good hadling of MacPaint type files, and the clipboard in
	general...)

Things against Word:

Poor Bibliography support.
Limited equation handling.

Pros for TeXtures:

Superb support of equations.

Cons for TeXtures:

Nobody really went into this...

I've used TeX previously in a UNIX environment, and I hated
it! The main problem was the lack of a preview feature. (This
was several years ago, when I used to actually work for a
living...) Everytime I wanted to see what the result would look
like, there was a 15 to 20 minute wait. (The main problem being
a backlog at the printer.) As for spell checking, the TeX
commands really used to louse things up...

I could be much happier using TeX on my MacII, *IFF* it has a fast
preview feature, and good spell checking. Does the Mac implementation
fix these things? And how about Clipboard support? Can I put
graphics easily into my documents?

Finally, the nitty-gritty: price. Word is available in our campus
computer store for ~$80. (Educational discount.) I've never noticed
TeX there. What's the going price, and do they have an educational
discount?

Thanks again for all the replies. I'll post a summary again with the
results.

Paul H. Dietz                                        ____          ____
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering        / oo \        <_<\\\
Carnegie Mellon University                        /|  \/  |\        \\ \\
--------------------------------------------     | | (  ) | |       | ||\\
"If God had meant for penguins to fly,             -->--<--        / / |\\\  /
he would have given them wings."            _________^__^_________/ / / \\\\-