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From: jjhnsn@ut-ngp.UTEXAS (J. Lee Johnson)
Newsgroups: net.text
Subject: Re: Alternatives to n/troff?
Message-ID: <2474@ut-ngp.UTEXAS>
Date: Thu, 10-Oct-85 16:44:58 EDT
Article-I.D.: ut-ngp.2474
Posted: Thu Oct 10 16:44:58 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 12-Oct-85 07:54:21 EDT
References: <510@phri.UUCP>
Distribution: net
Organization: UTexas Computation Center, Austin, Texas
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> the system is prepare scientific manuscripts.  The users are a mix of Ph.D.
> biologists, graduate students, and secretarial/clerical people. ...
> 	Slowly, we're getting fed up with the whole nroff scene.  What are
> our alternatives?  Are there "what you see is what you get" type systems
> available that will run under 4.2 on a regular ascii terminal?

How can a WYSIWYG system on a regular ascii terminal display scientific
manuscripts?
 
> 	What we don't want to loose are the nice features available under
> nroff.  We make heavy use of neqn, tbl, and bib; to have to live without
> the functionality provided by these tools would be unthinkable. 

It seems to me your choice is between TeX and Documenter's WorkBench
(device independent troff).  Cost may be the deciding factor. TeX is
usually cheaper, especially compared to a commercial license for DWB.
TeX has eqn functionality built in to it. TeX has no equivalent to
tbl. I'm not sure about bib. Troff has the advantage that it is compatible
with nroff and a wider "class" of devices than TeX. The TeX language
is "nicer", but basically both TeX and troff are embedded instruction
text formatting systems.

The pic preprocessor from the DWB package does simple graphics by invoking
the line drawing functions in troff. There is supposedly a similar
program for TeX.
--
James Lee Johnson, U.T. Computation Center, Austin, Texas 78712
ARPA:  jjhnsn@ut-ngp.UTEXAS.EDU
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