🚀 go-pugleaf

tlm@nextasy.physics.mcmaster.ca (Tom Marchioro) writes:
  [someone else brings up the subject of using TeX for tables]
> This might be a good time in this thread to say to the friendly community
> of NeXT software hackers, "make this for me!"  I think it would be fairly
> easy for someone who knows NeXTstep and a little TeX to make a GUI
> front-end table driver for TeX.  Then, using the new -E option of dvips
> (which drives TeX to encapsulated postscript) you'd have a table
> you could resize (presuming you used PS fonts only, possible but
> non-trivial) drag and drop, etc. etc.  
> 
> The biggest problem would be that you probably couldn't *edit* the table
> once you'd made it, since that would require going back to TeX from an
> EPS file, a no go from the start.

The developer could do the same trick that EquationBuilder does.  Punch out  
postscript comments in that EPS file, using them describe the table in some  
format that the program would recognize.

> Why has someone not made a NeXTstep driver for tables?  The answer is 
> almost certainly that most people don't need tables very often (I think
> I've made only one in all my professional publications --- not a large 
> number to be sure :-}  and anyone who knows enough TeX to write the App
> also can easily knock out that once-a-year table when they need it.

I'm certainly not a heavy-duty DTP person, and I've had to create tables on  
a number of occasions.  I usually make do with tab-stops & fiddling with  
tabs.  I suspect that more people might use tables if there was an  
application which made tables easy to do.

It's not that people don't need tables, it's that they don't need them  
enough to go thru the hassle of getting their program to generate a table.

--
Garance Alistair Drosehn     =     gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu
ITS Systems Programmer            (handles NeXT-type mail)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute;           Troy NY    USA