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A few weeks ago, I posted a question about the relative merits
of Textures and Oztex. At the time, I offered a summary of the responses.

A few of the email responses were (alas) lost in the electronic ether
due to a quirky mailer we had during a change in fileservers. I intend to
maintain the messages below and I would be elated to hear other opinions,
complaints, or compliments about either package, other Macintosh tex utilities,
and anything else concerning TeX/LaTeX on the Mac for which people would like
a sympathetic ear :). If the additional mailings are enthusiastic, I'll
post another summary.

Slainte mhath,
Rob.
spence@miles.cs.uiuc.edu

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Original question:

>I have been watching this group for some time and have seen little
>(at least recently) discussion of the relative merits of Textures 
>and OzTeX. Is their anything that one has that the other has?
>Are the implementations that different, or are the differences
>only subtle?
> 
>Slainte,
>Rob
>spence@miles.cs.uiuc.edu

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From: Norris Preyer <NPREYER@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU>

Good idea--I'm eager to see your summary.  ost important difference
to *me*, and why I stopped using Textures, is that it's based on
the mac font manager, which means (a) enormous font files, (b) lots
of conflicts between several hundred fonts in several different 
suitcass and those installed in the System file or linked with
Suitcase II, and (c) inability to space characters precisely, which
leads to peculiar spacing especially in 11pt [I've had some conver-
sations with Blue Sky about this, and (once I convinced them there
was a spacing problem) learned the only real answer was to pay yet
more $$ and get the postscript fonts], and (d) inability to use
standard .pk fonts unless you happen to own MPW.  Textures has
some nice features, but these are killers.

Norris Preyer

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From: orloff@surya11.cern.ch (Jean Orloff)

I am using TeXtures regularly and only tried OzTeX for implementing my
psbox macros (to include postscript figures into TeX in a machine
independant way).

+TeXtures: the principle of an "all in one", the ability to see
		figures in your text wihtout printing it.

-TeXtures: the price (TeX itself is FREE, remember?) which you
		finally pay only for the editor and the dvi-viewer,
		the editor which has a few unnerving features:

		1: no way to protect a line from being rewrapped: this
		is most unconfortable since the wrap-mode rewraps
		automatically what follows when you're inserting text.
		This makes a mess out of commented lines... it also
		ruins nice indentations you can set up for macros or
		displayed equations.

		2: no autosave. On TeXtures 1.2, where crashes due to
		bad memory management where extremely frequent, this
		just meant losing the whole of a typing session in the
		middle of a field of bombs...

+OzTeX: the price, your freedom to choose an editor, the ability to
		use standard TeX fonts, which you can get from any ftp
		server
-OzTeX: I've heard of some problems for including figures, but I think
		they're over now

Good luck with your survey...

Jean

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From: barry@reed.edu (Barry Smith)

The differences are not exactly subtle...  I don't have a detailed comparison,
but let me try a quick outline, off the top of my head:
 
Textures:
  integrated application (editor, TeX, preview, print)
  Macintosh orientation (easy to install and use, compatible with other apps)
  interactive TeX interface (Lightning)
  huge TeX memory model (mem_max > 500,000,000)
  PostScript and/or bitmap fonts (Computer Modern)
  commercial level of support (800 number, etc.)
  active development (4 full-time programmers)
  higher performance (and Lightning Textures Phase II in June)
  $695, $495 academic
 
OzTeX:
  TeX orientation
  bitmap fonts only
  sources available
  free
 
In general, it's pretty much what you might expect: Textures is a
commercially-supported product, leading the field in ease-of-use, reliability,
performance, and features; OzTeX is a (very) credible public-domain
implementation of the standard TeX system.

For the professional TeX user, it's trivial to justify the cost of Textures.
(And the novice TeX user will have a MUCH easier time getting into TeX via
Textures.)  People who already know TeX (or have friends who do) will find OzTeX
perfectly acceptable, and better than most TeX implementations on other systems.

NB: I'm not merely biased, I'm the author of Textures!  On the other hand,
Andrew Trevorrow (author of OzTeX) is a personal friend, and I recommend
OzTeX without hesitation to those for whom price is the primary concern.

This is *very* sketchy; if you would like to discuss it further, please *call*
me at 800/622-8398. (I find email slow and more than a little one-sided.)

Barry Smith, Blue Sky Research
barry@reed.edu
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--
Rob Spence
University of Illinois
spence@gog.cs.uiuc.edu