Xref: utzoo comp.text:4738 sci.physics:9360 sci.chem:431 sci.math:7659
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!gatech!gitpyr!cheung
From: cheung@pyr.gatech.EDU (S. Y. Cheung)
Newsgroups: comp.text,sci.physics,sci.chem,sci.math
Subject: Re: TeX/LaTeX in scientific publications
Message-ID: <9006@pyr.gatech.EDU>
Date: 18 Aug 89 19:14:34 GMT
References: <8644@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Reply-To: cheung@pyr.UUCP (S. Y. Cheung)
Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology
Lines: 30

In article <8644@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> zqli@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu 
(Zhenqin Li) writes:
>I spent some time in learning LaTeX and typing my thesis.
>But to my dismay, I found that most journals of the American
>Physical Society (APS) and the American Chemical Society (ACS) do not
>accept manuscripts in LaTeX, but accept TeX. Only Stephen Wolfram's
>"Complex Systems" uses LaTeX, to my knowledge. 

Latex is Tex with macros by Lamport (hence the name La(mport)Tex).
Purpose of Latex is to allow the user to write higher level commands,
but you need not use these. Latex also recognize Tex commands.
Tex is the base machinery for typesetting, like assembler language.
Latex is an extension of Tex, a higher level lagguage, like Pascal.
Latex has problems though, many macros interferes with one another
and an user who is only familiar with Latex can wonder for hours
why his document does not looks like what he wanted.

>I wonder why TeX is prefered over LaTeX? If most scientific
					     ^^^^
>institutions do not endorse LaTeX, is LaTeX going to meet
>the fate of Esperanto? Or is LaTeX going to be adopted by
>APS and ACS as well, as more people become familiar with it? 

I don't know that for sure, but I do know that IEEE accepts Latex documents.
In fact, Bibtex (the bibliography manager of Latex) has a style call `ieeetr'
which numbers the bibliography entries ala IEEE format. 
-- 
Shun Yan Cheung
Georgia Insitute of Technology, Atlanta Georgia, 30332
...!{akgua,allegra,amd,hplabs,ihnp4,seismo,ut-ngp}!gatech!gitpyr!cheung