🚀 go-pugleaf

	I run an 11/750 (4.2bsd) system which supports about 100 users,
most of whom are not computer people.  One of the (major) things we do with
the system is prepare scientific manuscripts.  The users are a mix of Ph.D.
biologists, graduate students, and secretarial/clerical people.  We've
recently gotten a major grant to expand our facility, and will probably be
getting some Suns, a laser printer, and an array processor.  Enough
background.

	Slowly, we're getting fed up with the whole nroff scene.  What are
our alternatives?  Are there "what you see is what you get" type systems
available that will run under 4.2 on a regular ascii terminal?  What better
tools of this type are there available on the Sun?  How well can they
integrate text and graphics?  Now we just do a ".sp 6i" (or whatever) in
the nroff source, and paste the figures in later.  It would be real nice to
be able to insert graphics right in the manuscript.

	We're not committed to WYSIWYG; if there are imbedded-instruction
systems which are easier to deal with than nroff available, we might be
interested in them.  I know about Scribe and TeX only from causal reading
about them; comments on these would be appreciated.

	What we don't want to loose are the nice features available under
nroff.  We make heavy use of neqn, tbl, and bib; to have to live without
the functionality provided by these tools would be unthinkable.  The
current implementation of that functionality, however, leaves a lot to be
desired.  There are all sorts of strange interactions between the various
preprocessors, error reporting is all but non-existent, and the whole thing
is generally difficult to master, especially for people with no background
in computers.

	So, does anybody out there have magic answer?
-- 
Roy Smith <allegra!phri!roy>
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016