🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <E5f$a51@cs.psu.edu>, melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) says:
>
>What advantages are there in learning troff or Tex?  Aren't their days
>numbered?  Everyone in the non-Unix world is using word processors.
>Why aren't Unix people?  I read in a book about Unix(that black
>paperback book from Byte) that the major disadvantage in using a word
>processor was that it couldn't handle large documents.  It seems to me
>that this limitation has been overcome.
     TeX does not seem to be a word-processor to me, but rather a document
preparation package.  If you insist on writing straight text, I agree that TeX
is, in general, overpowered and perfectly good results can be obtained from
any word-processor or even text editor.  However, where TeX excels is in the
addition of chemical/mathematical/special language symbols.  It figures out
sizing by itself, reformats pages/equations/paragraphs, automatically
calculates indices, footnotes, table of contents, figure numbering, etc.
The output from TeX is close to being beautiful (IMHO).  The only drawback is
a bit of a problem with the learning curve, and the fact that one cannot see
one's results instantly - but there are many dvi previewers out there.  And
with the addition of including postscript graphics files into TeX, even that
difficulty has been alleviated.

     I would say that TeX is a scientific document preparation programme.  For
what it is designed for, nothing else compares (though something like ChiWriter
is arguably close).
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|  Arnold Gill                        |                                     |
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|  BITNET   : gilla@qucdn             |       I wouldn't have said it.      |
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