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From: willc@tekchips.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Mac System Suggestions?
Message-ID: <1247@tekchips.TEK.COM>
Date: Thu, 7-May-87 17:54:54 EDT
Article-I.D.: tekchips.1247
Posted: Thu May  7 17:54:54 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 9-May-87 07:42:43 EDT
References: <804@sdcc12.ucsd.EDU> <76000009@uiucdcsp> <690@unccvax.UUCP> <324@swanee.OZ> <5149@ut-ngp.UUCP>
Reply-To: willc@tekchips.UUCP (Will Clinger)
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton, OR.
Lines: 53

In article <5149@ut-ngp.UUCP> cgeiger@ut-ngp.UUCP (charles s. geiger, esq.) writes:
>In article <324@swanee.OZ>, gustav@swanee.OZ (Gustav) writes:
>> It's not a productive idea to use wysiwyg for writing 300 pages long
>> documents like books or theses. To use TeX or troff is much faster and
>> easier. You can get TeX for Mac these days (which is apparently a very
>> good implementation). Why not to have a go at it?
>> 
>Horse hockey.  My job is typing papers, and I've used both systems.
>TeX or troff/eqn is quicker and more straigtforward for TYPING
>mathematics (so far:  I haven't experimented with the new Word's way of
>formatting math yet), but troff is a real pain in the ass compared to
>wysiwyg for formatting and typing plain text.

    [goes on to condemn troff, saying nothing more about TeX]

Then let me speak up for TeX.  A 300-page document is not that different
from software:  Consistency has to be maintained in the face of change,
at the least while it is being written and possibly long beyond.  A typical
change is to use a different font for section headings throughout the
document, while leaving other fonts alone.  This is trivial in TeX but very
tedious in Microsoft Word 1.05.  (I haven't seen Word 3.0.)  Properly used,
TeX lets you delay all such stylistic decisions: page layout, fonts,
indentation, spacing, items, tables, headings, footnotes, marginal notes,
and so on.  You can change such things globally by changing your style
macros.  Most wysiwyg systems handle a few of these things well but fall
short of TeX's abilities.  Furthermore TeX's hyphenation, line- and
page-breaking algorithms are much better than those of any wysiwyg I've seen,
so you don't have to spend as much time messing with such things when you
change something.  Finally, TeX gives finer control than Word 1.05, so if
you care enough you can get better-looking output.  I'll hardly even mention
that TeX runs on a wide variety of machines.

Have you seen Apple's new style of documentation?  I suspect it would be
a lot of work for Apple to convert from its old Word format to the new
(which may also be done in Microsoft Word for all I know).  Maybe that's
why some of the new draft documents have some chapters in the old style
and others in the new.

I've been helping to maintain a programming language manual that was
formatted using Microsoft Word 1.05.  The use of Microsoft Word has made
it too expensive for us to make significant stylistic improvements in the
format.  We have finally bitten the bullet and are now converting it to
TeX format.

We use TeXtures, which does indeed have a previewer.  It also permits
the inclusion of MacPaint pictures, et cetera.  For large or highly
technical documents I would recommend it over wysiwyg, especially for
documents that will be maintained for some time.  For short plain text
documents I still use MacWrite because it is easier to use than Microsoft
Word.  Word 3.0 and similar products may be excellent for the vast middle
ground, but my experience has been at the extremes.

Peace, William Clinger