Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!purdue!bu-cs!bloom-beacon!husc6!psuvax1!psuvm.bitnet!uh2
From: UH2@PSUVM.BITNET (Lee Sailer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Jotting down math ideas on NeXT
Message-ID: <89191.095447UH2@PSUVM>
Date: 10 Jul 89 13:54:47 GMT
References: <246300016@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu>
Organization: Penn State University - Center for Academic Computing
Lines: 32

In article <246300016@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu>, gsg0384@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu says:
>
>What do you think is the best way to jot down mathematical idea on a
>computer?  I mean I need Greek characters easily typed into any sort of

Did you omit Mathematica from your list of options on purpose?  Surely,
in many cases we'll still doodle mathematically on paper, but if
you are going to jot down mathematical notation directly into your
computer, then Mathematica seems like a good way to go.

o It uses a TeX-like notation.  This means that jotting down ideas
  will be a lot slower than paper.  It is hard to imagine what kind of
  keyboard would make computer-jotting as fast as paper-jotting.  Perhaps
  a pen digitizer pad with character recognition software, but I don't
  think were quite there yet.

o However, after initial jotting, Mathematica manipulates the equations
  for you automagically.  This produces a speedup which *could* makeup
  for the original slowdown at jot-entry time.

o Mathematica also outputs any of your intermediate or final results as
  either TeX or PostScript, which means you won't have to re-enter them
  when you write papers.

Anyway, of your original choices, I'd use TeX because I already know it.
On the Amiga, you can type into your editor, send immediately to TeX running
in the background, and have TeX send the results directly to a screen
previewer running in another window, so you a very powerful variety of
WYSIWYG --- all the power of TeX with nearly immediate visual display of
the results.  The author of Amiga TeX has been sighted lurking around
comp.sys.next, so perhaps we can hope to see the same capability on NeXT
soon.