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From: doner@henri.ucsb.edu (John Doner)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps
Subject: Re: Mathematical & scientific characters.
Message-ID: <10987@hub.ucsb.edu>
Date: 2 May 91 19:51:02 GMT
References: <19851@slice.ooc.uva.nl>
Sender: news@hub.ucsb.edu
Reply-To: doner@henri.UUCP (John Doner)
Organization: University of California, Santa Barbara
Lines: 44

In article <19851@slice.ooc.uva.nl> morgan@ooc.uva.nl (Chris Morgan/RIKS) writes:
=Hi all,
=
=I'm currently doing battle with one of the UNIX buffs here who insists
=that he can produce higher quality output for his technical journal
=papers using his UNIX box and TROFF/NROFF etc,. than with my Macs.
=
=I have seen his output which is indeed of a high quality - credit
=where credit is due (#$@*&%#@$). He insists that he cannot produce
=output of similar quality on the Mac because - to use his words - there
=is no way to control accurate line, character paragraph spacing etc., and
=you cannot control accurately the thickness of the characters etc. Well,
=I have to agree with him where MS-Word is concerened. BUT I have recently
='discovered' the wonderes of PageMaker 4.0. With PagaMaker, it took me about
=an hour of trial and error before I could ACCURATELY reproduce his style
=of output - BUT I did it.
=
=My only problem now (and its too late for me to back out AND save face
=at this time) is reproducing all the mathematical and scientific characters
=which he requires. I know there are tricks to do this is MS-Word and I know
=there is the Symbol font set. BUT these 2 sources alone are simply not
=sufficient in supplying every type of technical sysmbol which my user
=needs.

He's right; troff will do much better than MS Word or some such when it
comes to formatting a technical document.  He's wrong if he thinks you
can't do it on a Mac.  The premier system for these purposes is not troff,
but TeX.  That is available on both Unix systems, Macs, PC's, even Ataris.
The Mac has a particularly nice version called Textures, costing about
$300, and an almost-as-good public domain (i.e., FREE) version called
OzTeX, which you can get via anonymous ftp from
         midway.uchicago.edu         (in pub/OzTeX)
My "almost-as-good" refers not to the quality of the output, which is
exactly the same, but to user interface features where the commercial
product appears to have a slight edge.

TeX itself is a freely available typesetting language and system
designed by Professor Donald Knuth of the Computer Science Department
at Stanford.  It is widely used; we use it for all our technical
typing here in the UCSB Math. Dept.; a company I consult for uses it
for all their technical reports, and so on.  Forget about troff.

John E. Doner	doner@henri.ucsb.edu	(805)893-3941
Dept. Mathematics, UCSB, Santa Barbara, CA 93106