Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!rutgers!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!decvax!decwrl!labrea!rocky!rokicki
From: rokicki@rocky.STANFORD.EDU (Tomas Rokicki)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Old Software (Was: SONIX)
Message-ID: <294@rocky.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: Wed, 6-May-87 21:16:17 EDT
Article-I.D.: rocky.294
Posted: Wed May  6 21:16:17 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 9-May-87 01:51:50 EDT
References: <2990@well.UUCP> <1834@cbmvax.cbmvax.cbm.UUCP> <2598@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Distribution: world
Organization: Stanford University Computer Science Department
Lines: 44
Summary: Comments on AmigaTeX

Tom the Modest comes to the front.

daveh@cbmvax.cbm.UUCP (Dave Haynie) writes:
>                     However...SCRIBE, nroff, TeX, et. al. are HUGE
> programs, and running them on the Amiga is nearly impossible.  A
> friend of mine has Amiga TeX for example.  Very nice package, but to
> make it useful you almost must have a hard disk and an extra couple of
> MB of memory; the distribution takes up 4 floppies and doesn't include
> many fonts which I use in day-to-day work.

Well, they are large programs, but not HUGE.  The TeX executable for
AmigaTeX is currently only 126,752 bytes long.  (If anyone knows of
*any* TeX implementation with an executable smaller than this, I want
to know!)  You do not almost have to have a hard disk and extra memory.
If you only run Plain TeX, it runs quite nicely on a 512K machine with
two floppies.  (But you can't do anything else at the same time, or use
a RAM disk; sorry!)  The distribution is currently only 3 disks, one of
which is LaTeX only.  It also includes IniTeX, and all the macro sources
you need to make new format packages, 91 TFM files, 144 previewer font
files, BibTeX, the previewer, and the TeX source to the manual!  I
developed the entire package on a 512K machine with two floppies.

The next release will contain many more previewer fonts (approximately
700), but will include a new font cacheing scheme, so it is still very
usable on a 512K machine with two floppies.

A nice environment is 1.5M, with which you can run an editor, previewer,
and TeX all at the same time.

>                                             And none of these are
> WYSIWIG in any sense (though AmigaTeX's previewer is close);

Thanks; it's getting better all the time.

I agree with the premise of the original article, though; WYSIWYG systems
*can* be very powerful, they just aren't, yet.

Now a plug.  TeX is not the easiest system to learn, and AmigaTeX is
exactly the same as TeX in every respect.  It is also not cheap, at $200
for the package.  But for beautiful output, nothing compares.  Nothing.
And you have full compatibility with TeX's on any machine in existence
that has a 20-bit address space or larger.

-tom