Xref: utzoo comp.sys.mac:14978 comp.text:1783
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!munnari!mimir!wacsvax!swanee!gustav
From: gustav@swanee.OZ (Gustav)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,comp.text
Subject: Re: Dissertation on a MAC vs UNIX
Message-ID: <407@swanee.OZ>
Date: 4 Apr 88 04:21:23 GMT
References: <2328@uvacs.CS.VIRGINIA.EDU>
Organization: El. & El. Eng., Uni. of Western Australia
Lines: 28

in article <2328@uvacs.CS.VIRGINIA.EDU>, hsd@uvacs.CS.VIRGINIA.EDU (Harry S. Delugach) says:
> 
> Is there any Mac software that matches the functionality of *troff
> and family? Does anyone out there regularly use embedded citations
> which are gathered at the end of a document? How about footnotes? 
> Does it work for a large document (approx 200 double-spaced pages)?
> What are the pros and cons of either?
> -- 

No, there isn't any that would match the power and versatility of
troff. You can try Textures, or combine it even with LaTeX (if Addison
Wesley produced any yet), but you cannot use it to produce any big
documents. On my system with 1 Mbyte memory I cannot process documents
longer than about 30 to 35 pages (depending on whether it's got
pictures embedded in it or not). That means that you'll have to divide
the whole document into small chunks. That in turn means that you
cannot do any cross-referencing easily. The editor which comes with
Textures is rather poor too. Finally, the quality of print out - even
on laser printer - is not the best. I had much better results from
running TeX and LaTeX on VAX and dumping the output to laser printer.
The advantages are that 1) the previewer is good; 2) the machine is
yours -- the latter is of importance if you have problems with
accessing your UNIX or with its reliability.

Other screen oriented text processors available for Mac are really
Mickey Mouse staff and completely unsuitable for any serious mathematical 
text processing. But some of them are not too bad if you don't use any
mathematics. Try MacWord.