Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!munnari.oz.au!bruce!monu1!monu6!vac131f
From: vac131f@monu6.cc.monash.edu.au (Rik Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.applications
Subject: Re: TeX (was Re: When will new WordPerfect be available?)
Keywords: WordPerfect, TeX
Message-ID: <1991Jan15.030916.7012@monu6.cc.monash.edu.au>
Date: 15 Jan 91 03:09:16 GMT
References: <8133@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu> <510@pallas.athenanet.com> <1991Jan12.223304.28382@contact.uucp> <517@pallas.athenanet.com>
Organization: Monash University, Caulfield Campus
Lines: 72

wally@pallas.athenanet.com (Wally Hartshorn) writes:

>In article <1991Jan12.223304.28382@contact.uucp> ben@contact.uucp (Ben Eng) writes:
>>Unlike a WYSIWYG system, such as WP5 or a page layout program, TeX
>>handles all the kerning, paragraphing, spacing, margins, page breaks,
>>indenting, centering, and other subtle details automatically.  Title
>>pages, Abstracts, Tables of Contents, List  of Figures, List of
>>Tables, Chapters, Sections, Subsections, Bibliographies, References,
>>footnotes, figures, tables, references to numbering of
>>tables/figures/etc, ALL numbering (page, chapter, section, etc.), and
>>virtually everything else is all done for you.
first of all, you seem to be talking about LaTeX, a set of macros for
TeX, written by Leslie Lamport.

>I know very little about TeX.  You say it does all of this stuff
>automatically?  How could it do that?  I'm confused.  Suppose I say
>that I want a table of contents.  I still have to go through and tell
>it what to include in the table of contents, right?  How is that any
>different from the way WordPerfect does things?
For example, when you start a new section in a LaTeX documet, you say
something like:
\section{Testing}
and LaTeX will number it (one more than the previous section), and put
it in bold, large letters, etc. (this is all customisable, so you can
have all your sections numbered in roman numerals, or italics instead
of bold).

If you say you want a table of contents, you just say:
\tableofcontents
and LaTeX will take all your \section, \subsection, and \subsubsection
commands and put them in the table of contents with the page number,
in a nice format.

Everything else is similar.  LaTeX is a `logical' text processor,
which means you have much less control of how the text looks visually,
and much more control over the logical layout of the document.  You
tell LaTeX that you want a certain type of section heading, and it
will always have that style of section heading.  Of course, if you
want to put some kind of strange layout, that is completely up to you,
but it is MUCH easier to do it logically.  The result is, generally,
your LaTeX document looks much better than its wysiwyg counterpart,
because everything is lined up, and the headings all look the same,
and are indented the same amount, and your tables of figures are
centred, etc.  With wysiwyg, you are expected to do this yourself, and
with a large document (I did a 60 page document recently), this is
quite difficult.

There are many large technical and scientific books written using
LaTeX.

>There are some nice WYSIWYG word processors for the Amiga, but none of them
>seem to have all of the features of Word Perfect.
I agree, but if you are interested in the non-wysiwyg text processors,
LaTeX has at least as many features as Word Perfect, and many more
different ones.

>Do you know what the list price of AmigaTeX is?
sorry, but I'm sure someone will know (try comp.text.tex), I use
PasTeX, which is available via ftp.
If you are interested in LaTeX, you should be able to find plenty of
information in comp.text.tex (try the monthly postings).

>Wally (uunet!pallas!wally or wally@athenanet.com)
Rik.

ps.  if you haven't realised, I quite like LaTeX :-)
 Feel free to ask me about it.
-- 
Rik Harris -  rik@sola.fcit.monash.edu.au               | Build a system that
who died of administration on the 20th of December 1990 | even a fool can use,
(was) Faculty of Computing and Information Technology,  | and only a fool will 
Monash University, Caulfield Campus, Australia          | want to use it.