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From: hedrick@topaz.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Info needed on Scribe
Message-ID: <15624@topaz.rutgers.edu>
Date: Thu, 15-Oct-87 15:49:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: topaz.15624
Posted: Thu Oct 15 15:49:22 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 17-Oct-87 09:25:57 EDT
References: <1221@nrcvax.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 46
To: terry@nrcvax.UUCP


Scribe is in some vague sense the same kind of animal as n/troff.
Howver there are a number of differences in philosophy that may
affect how well you can use it:
  - it was originally intended as a "descriptive" rather than
	imperative language.  That is, you weren't supposed to
	say "put 1 in of space here" and "change to 20 pt Roman",
	but rather you were supposed to describe the logical
	structure of the document and let Scribe do the typesetting.
	In fact this results in a system that is much friendlier
	if you are doing reasonable things, but if you are trying
	to match a precise specification for format, you can go
	crazy trying to figure out how to adjust all the database
	files to get the effect you want.  (Actually, you can
	tell it to put a certain amount of blankspace, but generally
	that is not the right thing to do.)  I prefer Scribe to
	anything else I have seen, but people used to other packages
	find it frustrating.  (There is enough ability to tailor
	formats that you should be able to produce any format that
	you need.  It's just that it is done somewhat differently
	than what some people expect.)
  - it does not have an equivalent of eqn.  It does have facilities
	for setting equations, and they have been getting better
	over time, but they are probably not quite as good as eqn
	or some of the TeX packages.
  - it tries to get the best results on each output device, using the
	best fonts available from that device.  This is in contrast
	to TeX, which supplies its own fonts so that output from
	all devices can be identical.  Scribe's output looks better
	on devices with good native fonts (e.g. Laserwriter).  On
	devices with bad native fonts, you can always set up the Scribe
	database files to use the TeX fonts...
  - there is support for including graphics, in whatever format the
	device expects, e.g. Postscript files for Laserwriters.
	It will automatically move the picture to the specified
	place on the page, but you still have to specify how big the
	picture is going to be.  However Scribe is not in itself
	a graphics package like, for example, pic.  Whether you want
	it to be is another issue.  Probably high-quality graphics
	are likely to be done in a specialized graphics tool, so
	the ability to include it in the document may be all you
	want.  There are full-screen previewers for Scribe, but
	we haven't looked at them.  I would talk to the purveyors
	of them (or directly to Unilogic) to see whether any of them
	provide some sort of graphics support for Scribe.