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From: ali@rocky.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Old Software (Was: SONIX)
Message-ID: <293@rocky.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: Wed, 6-May-87 19:53:26 EDT
Article-I.D.: rocky.293
Posted: Wed May  6 19:53:26 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 8-May-87 05:27:09 EDT
References: <2990@well.UUCP> <1834@cbmvax.cbmvax.cbm.UUCP>
Reply-To: ali@rocky.UUCP (Ali Ozer)
Distribution: world
Organization: Stanford University Computer Science Department
Lines: 32

In article <1834@cbmvax.cbmvax.cbm.UUCP> Dave Haynie writes:
>  ....  There seems to be some kind of trend in making software certainly
>easier (for the novice, at least) to use, but at the same time, very much 
>less powerful than software that's existed for many, many years.  
>  ....  I've used markup
>style languages on a mainframe and several minis, and any one of these
>word processing languages (Scribe on a DEC-20, nroff on various PDP-11 and
>VAXen) does so much more for me than the current crop of WYSIWYG word
>processors.  I used Scribe for several large papers, way back from '79
>through '83 (college).

Most people who've used WYSIWYG word processors for any real work like you
describe will agree with you... Someone on comp.sys.mac was saying it takes
far too long for them to change the overall font in MacWrite when they're
working on a fairly long paper and how they just can't wait for the Mac II 
cause it'll do the job real fast.. Etc... Solving the problem of speed 
by throwing hardware at it kind of thing.

In any case, if you guys are interested in *real* word processing type
software for the Amiga, there is TeX (and LaTex, if you've got 1 Meg or
more) available, you know, with a real sharp previewer and everything.
Very much like Scribe but more powerful, TeX is a real nice program for
creating technical documents and books (yes, full books). Tom Rokicki (then
author) loves spending all his free and not-so-free time optimizing the
program and making things run faster! In any case, the availability
of TeX for the Amiga is advertised as well as the Amiga itself is; so
not many people might know about it... (If you're interested, you
should contact Tom Rokicki, rokicki@sushi.stanford.edu. I know he is
on the net as well, but he is just too busy hacking (and too modest) to
say something about TeX himself... So I take the liberty.)

Ali Ozer, ali@rocky.stanford.edu