Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!ucsd!sdd.hp.com!hplabs!hpl-opus!hpnmdla!hpsad!walter From: walter@hpsad.HP.COM (Walter Coole) Newsgroups: comp.text.tex Subject: Re: TeX presentation? Message-ID: <13590008@hpsad.HP.COM> Date: 4 Jun 90 21:27:57 GMT References: Organization: HP Signal Analysis Division - Rohnert Park, CA Lines: 16 I'm not real familiar with troff, so I can't give you a detailed comparison, but there is a tables macro set that produces nice tables fairly easily and there is PiCTeX, which provides a picture environment (LaTeX has its own picture environment). Several people report success using TransFig to translate PIC to TeX. The big differences are religous: TeX is (mostly) user-supported and quasi-public-domain and works well with Gnu Emacs and the tools for it are (mostly) user-supported and quasi-public-domain; troff is (originally) an AT&T product and works with a lot of (mostly) AT&T products, nroff, PIC, eqn, S, etc. I think TeX has an edge in handling mathematics; but troff may be better for documents that may need to be sent to an ASCII device (nroff being the standard way to handle man pages). I think the main choice is how your organization prefers to spend resources; troff is available as a commercial, fully-supported product with a fairly high price tag; TeX is available free, but will require some local support to install.