Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!munnari.oz.au!uhccux!ames!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!uwvax!spool!bates From: bates@wingra.stat.wisc.edu (Douglas Bates) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: TeX on NeXT Message-ID: Date: 2 Feb 90 00:40:48 GMT References: <90029.123446DLV101@PSUVM.BITNET> <6567@ubc-cs.UUCP> Sender: news@spool.cs.wisc.edu Organization: University of Wisconsin-Madison Lines: 23 In-reply-to: morrison@cs.ubc.ca's message of 30 Jan 90 19:15:06 GMT I would just echo Rick Morrison's comments about TeX on a NeXT. We have 6 NeXT's on our local network - 4 of them for use by our office staff. LaTeX is our preferred text processing method (we do a lot of technical text) but we didn't think it reasonable to have our office staff using LaTeX without being able to preview it on screen. Our choices seemed to be TeX on a Mac (which we tried) or training the office staff to use a Unix workstation. TeX systems for a Mac were not as flexible as the Unix distribution of TeX. Also we wanted compatibility with the TeX and LaTeX that we run on our other workstations. The NeXT was the perfect solution - no need for office staff to learn "vi" or raw Unix commands but still the ability to exchange mail with and mount file systems from our other Unix systems. The TeX previewer is very impressive. Like Rick, I have never seen another previewer for TeX that could also show included PostScript figures and still give good representations of the characters. Running TeX on one of our DECstation 3100's is faster than on a NeXT but I don't find the speed of the NeXT to be a severe impediment. Even when I am writing technical material all day, I spend more time walking down the hall to get coffee than I do waiting for TeX to run.