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From: jpalfke@parcvax.Xerox.COM (J. Peter Alfke)
Newsgroups: comp.text.desktop
Subject: Re: TeX for personal computers
Message-ID: <26132@sun.uucp>
Date: Thu, 20-Aug-87 15:12:38 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.26132
Posted: Thu Aug 20 15:12:38 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 22-Aug-87 11:41:39 EDT
Sender: news@sun.uucp
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Organization: Xerox PARC
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Approved: desktop-request%plaid@sun.com

Clare Chu writes:
>I am trying to decide on what type of computer to buy, a PC compatible
>or a Mac Plus.
...
>Ideally I want to get the cheapest printer, as I'm only doing this to
>turn in reports to my boss so it doesn't need to be laser printed.

It sounds like your formatting is not going to be terribly complex, so why use
TeX at all?  Get a Mac and use Word or even MacWrite, and you should be able
to turn out nice documents much more easily than with TeX, and it's all
what-you-see-is-what-you-get.  And of course Mac documents can go from
Imagewriter to LaserWriter with no problem.

About the only uses I can see for TeX on the Mac are (1) Very complicated
formatting, esp. of mathematics, and (2) compatibility if you already have
lots of TeX files.

I've bashed my head against a bit of TeX, and if I could have done it all with
Word / MacWrite, I would have.

						--Peter Alfke
						  jpalfke.pa@xerox.com
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