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Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!columbia!rutgers!cbmvax!daveh
From: daveh@cbmvax.cbm.UUCP (Dave Haynie)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Old Software (Was: SONIX)
Message-ID: <1852@cbmvax.cbmvax.cbm.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 7-May-87 11:36:47 EDT
Article-I.D.: cbmvax.1852
Posted: Thu May  7 11:36:47 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 9-May-87 04:48:10 EDT
References: <2598@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Distribution: world
Organization: Commodore Technology, West Chester, PA
Lines: 57

in article <2598@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>, walton@tybalt.caltech.edu (Steve Walton) says:
> Summary: Give me WYSIWIG or give me TeX
> I think Dave and Leo are talking about two entirely different things
> here.  Leo's point was that better music programs than the current
> Amiga crop exist for much smaller and less powerful machines, on which
> we are all agreed.  However...SCRIBE, nroff, TeX, et. al. are HUGE
> programs, and running them on the Amiga is nearly impossible.  

I see you point, but I don't think any of these are beyond the capabilities
of the Amiga.  TeX already exists, nroff is certainly big under UNIX; about
650K here, though most of that is uninitialized data; the code that's
loaded at run time is only about 57K's worth.  Sounds like it could just
about run, as is, on a 1 meg Amiga, which will soon be the standard anyway.
And Dr. Dobbs has been publishing a version for MessyDOS machines, written
in C, these past few months, that's supposed to be very UNIX nroff compatible
(is there a XENIX nroff?), and while SCRIBE is probably the largest of the
three, I ran it on a DEC-20, which can "only" address 256K of memory for any
one job (in 36 bit words, but still less memory than I've got on my Amiga at
home).  Even with 90% of the functionality of nroff, there's still room left 
for WYSIWYG.

> 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. 

I would expect so; I want a powerful system for a powerful machine.  Maybe
that's the point, though; no machines in the PC market are currently shipping 
with a standard memory configuration of more than 1 meg.  And until the Amiga,
there weren't any that officially supported more than 1 meg.  

> And none of these are
> WYSIWIG in any sense (though AmigaTeX's previewer is close); they are
> more like extremely obscure programming languages for commanding
> printers to produce output. 

nroff's certainly hard to read, though I've found many of the SCRIBE commands
to be rather obvious (i.e. @Chapter(CHAPTER TITLE) versus 
.sh 1 "CHAPTER TITLE").

>      Granted, more powerful formatting would be nice.  But we don't
> have to give up WYSIWIG for it--just look at MicroSoft Word.  I'd
> gladly pay $250 for an Amiga version (that's what the Mac one lists
> for).  We certainly shouldn't cripple our wonderful graphics engine
> formatters with from text-only computers which are too big anyway.

Certainly not.  But if it can't get the job done, or you end up fighting
it get your results, than all of the WYSIWYG in the world isn't worth that
much.  I really like WYSIWYG over markup for ease of use, I just don't
think that such programs have to be 90% good-looking-text-editor and only
10% formatting-tool.  Keep the WYSIWYG, but put some power behind it.

>     Steve Walton, guest as walton@tybalt.caltech.edu
-- 
Dave Haynie     Commodore-Amiga    Usenet: {ihnp4|caip|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh
"The A2000 Guy"                    BIX   : hazy
	"These are the days of miracle and wonder" -P. Simon