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From: young@ICSC.UCI.EDU (Michal Young)
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Re: Looking for a Text editing system
Message-ID: <3688@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 10-Sep-86 03:05:46 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-smok.3688
Posted: Wed Sep 10 03:05:46 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 11-Sep-86 18:44:12 EDT
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If real WYSIWYG is a requirement, no help here.  But if previewing your
formulas on the screen is sufficient, and you have EGA or Hercules, then
consider PC-TeX.  The output is top-notch --- Don Knuth developed TeX
because he wasn't satisfied with the typesetting of his Art of Computer
programming series. With the LaTeX macro package, input is similar to
Scribe, i.e., you describe your document structurally rather than giving
detailed formatting instructions.  Or you can use AMSTeX, which I believe is
what the American Mathematical Society typesets their journals with.  
For examples of output, see September Byte, pg 338.

There are a couple of downsides: First, as mentioned above, it is not
WYSIWYG --- it does a much better job than WYSIWYG editors (including the
desktop publishing stuff for the Mac), but you usually have to make multiple
runs through the formatter to get things to look just the way you want them.
Second, it demands a lot of horsepower (cycles, memory, and disk) from your
machine.  A PC or clone can run it with 512K, but (according to Dr. Dobbs)
you need an AT to get decent turnaround.  

One other note:  PC-TeX  (and Micro-TeX, from Addison-Wesley) are completely
compatible (input and output)  with TeX implementations on Suns, Vaxen,
etc.  


--Michal Young
  young@ics.uci.edu
  UC Irvine