Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!uw-entropy!mica!charlie
From: charlie@mica.stat.washington.edu (Charlie Geyer)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: WYSIWYG flamage (was Re: what i
Message-ID: <2147@uw-entropy.ms.washington.edu>
Date: 6 Aug 89 04:04:55 GMT
References: <210927@<1989Jul28> <77900017@p.cs.uiuc.edu> <1168@aipna.ed.ac.uk>
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Reply-To: charlie@mica.stat.washington.edu (Charlie Geyer)
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In article <1168@aipna.ed.ac.uk> rjc@don (Richard Caley) writes:

> Ok, why do people think TeX is good for doing math? What am I missing?
> Why is it causing me hours of headaches to get LaTeX ( maybe plain TeX
> is better? ) to let me do other than trivial formulae in a semi-readable
> manner? 

Because it is.  In TeX or LaTeX or AMS TeX one can typeset mathematics
better than it used to be done by hand except at a very few of the best
publishing houses.

Nothing else even comes close.

I have seen two dozen students learn LaTeX here, and it does not seem to
be difficult as long as there are some experienced users around to ask
questions.

If the LaTeX manual is your only source of information, that may be your
problem.  Read the sections on typesetting mathematics in the TeXbook.
There's no need to switch to plain TeX, almost all of it works in LaTeX.