Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!aries!mcdonald
From: mcdonald@aries.uiuc.edu (Doug McDonald)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: TeX on the Mac
Keywords: TeX
Message-ID: <1989Nov19.204051.27699@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 19 Nov 89 20:40:51 GMT
References: <17141@netnews.upenn.edu>
Sender: news@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (News)
Reply-To: mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (Doug McDonald)
Distribution: usa
Organization: School of Chemical Sciences, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Lines: 44

In article <17141@netnews.upenn.edu> ferris@eniac.seas.upenn.edu.UUCP (Richard T. Ferris) writes:
>I was wondering whether TeX on the Mac has any fundamental
>advantages over TeX on the PC?  Are there any special features
>which make the editing process easier (i.e. more WYSIWYG)?
>Or is it just that the font selection is greater?  I have been
>using a PC program called SBTEX for a while now and it works
>fine for my LaTeX stuff but I sometimes get a little sick about
>not being able to see it on screen as I'm working on it and 
>having to deal with the rather limited selection of fonts.
>Thanks for the info.
>
TeX is TeX (except version 3 of course). To be called TeX it has to
be able to do everything TeX is supposed to. So no, TeX on the
MAc won't do anything that TeX on a PC can't. It doesn't have any greater
font selection - on a PC you can use any of the roughly 30 fonts
that come with TeX or Latex, any font you generate with Metafont,
any Postscript font you can find a font metric file for. (Of course
the mapping of odd characters with the Postscript fonts is a problem
unless you make them your primary fonts and rehack plain.tex and lplain.tex.
And Postscript fonts are seriously lacking for technical purposes.)

There are many previewing programs available for PC's. Some (dview)
are fast but work only for plain TeX. Some cost ***gag*** money.
Some, like my dvivga and dvimswin, are spiffy (but slow on a regular
pc). Mine will allow you to view your file at any size, allow
panning and zooming etc. They don't directly show Postscript fonts
on the screen, though, but you could substitute a similar CM font
for text purposes.

My dvimswin, for Microsoft Windows allows, using a 386 PC, 
simultaneous viewing of a file (or several files), editing,
and running TeX. Incidentally, a full TeX can't be made WYSIWYG
while typing in input. TeX's line breaking, page breaking, and
figure positioning capabilities are simply too global for that. 
In certain cases (Latex & Bibtex together) they will require
multiple passes through the source file before figuring out where
things go. The best that could be done is to have WYSIWYG line
breaking.

*********ADVERTISEMENT********
Try using dvimswin and TeX on a 386 PC! They are all free.

Doug McDonald
(mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu)