Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!pacbell!ames!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!uw-entropy!mica!charlie
From: charlie@mica.stat.washington.edu (Charlie Geyer)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: WYSIWYG flamage
Summary: Full page equations considered harmful
Message-ID: <2153@uw-entropy.ms.washington.edu>
Date: 8 Aug 89 00:38:37 GMT
References: <210927@<1989Jul28> <8800031@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Sender: news@uw-entropy.ms.washington.edu
Reply-To: charlie@mica.stat.washington.edu (Charlie Geyer)
Organization: UW Statistics, Seattle
Lines: 20
Expires:
Sender:
Followup-To:


In article <8800031@m.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu writes:

> I find troff math is extremely hard to write, and very tricky to debug
> (like it took me over an hour to get a full-page equation with several
> cases to work).

Ah yes, now I see your problem.  A full-page equation, literally?  No
wonder you're having problems.  Try defining some of the terms that have
independent meaning so that it can be reduced to reasonable size.  No
one bothers to read a monster like that.  Have you ever seen one in a
real math book?

> On a PC, you could *draw* the equation in about 5 minutes, despite its
> complicated nature.

And I bet it was still unreadable and ugly.

No offense intended, but I hate seeing papers containing stuff like
that.