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From: zwicky@pterodactyl.cis.ohio-state.edu (Elizabeth D. Zwicky)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,comp.text
Subject: Re: Dissertation on a MAC vs UNIX
Message-ID: <10321@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 12 Apr 88 14:28:46 GMT
References: <2328@uvacs.CS.VIRGINIA.EDU> <407@swanee.OZ>
Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Organization: The Ohio State University Dept of Computer and Information Science
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In article <407@swanee.OZ> gustav@swanee.OZ (Gustav) writes:
>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. 

False. I use MacTeX by FTL, which happily (albeit slowly) crunches
my entire Facilities Guide of nearly 300 pages, pictures, cross-references,
footnotes, table of contents, fancy fonts and all. For convenience
I often do the actual processing on a Sun 3/180, which cuts processing
time by a factor of at least 10, but I have done it on the Mac, which is
a plain ol' Mac+. The print quality is absolutely identical to that
from our UNIX boxes. The previewer is perfectly good, although all
the pictures show up as black splotches, and I hate previewing on the
small screen. The editor, alas, is lousy in the version I have; I create
the source files with the editor from Lightspeed C if I feel like doing
it on a Mac. There is a more recent version of MacTeX which supposedly
has an improved editor and more neato features, but I've never seen it.

(I admit to a bias against troff;  all those . commands remind me
too much of WordStar, and anything it can do, TeX can do better.
Our troff users here are slowly converting to TeX because of
equation envy.)

Elizabeth Zwicky