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From: leathrum@chocorua.dartmouth.edu (Thomas Leathrum)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re:  Why learn TeX?
Message-ID: <19797@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>
Date: 1 Mar 90 05:27:43 GMT
Sender: news@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU
Reply-To: leathrum@chocorua.dartmouth.edu (Thomas Leathrum)
Organization: Dartmouth College
Lines: 36

In Article 180 in comp.text.tex, 
melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) writes:

What advantages are there in learning troff or Tex?  Aren't their days
numbered?  Everyone in the non-Unix world is using word processors.
Why aren't Unix people?  I read in a book about Unix(that black
paperback book from Byte) that the major disadvantage in using a word
processor was that it couldn't handle large documents.  It seems to me
that this limitation has been overcome.

---End of Quoted Material

I agree with you, word processors have come a long way in the last few years, 
and have affected the way many things are written.  But TeX is *NOT* a word 
processor, even in the loosest sense of the term.  It is a typesetting facility
designed with mathematics in mind.  Word processors have  only recently begun
to be able to include reasonable looking mathematics, and even so their output
is targeted at a specific printer.  TeX automatically typesets mathematics
(the symbols are input as TeX control sequences -- TeX takes care of all the
sizing and spacing for you) and outputs a device independent file that you can
print on your little 300dpi laser printer and then send THE SAME FILE to a
publisher who prints it for a journal with a 1500dpi printer.  One day soon,
a word-processing environment may be set up which can generate this sort of 
output, but even so the output routines will be basically the same as the 
current TeX output routines -- so the word processor will actually be doing
something like taking its input and generating TeX output, the same way many
word processors today generate PostScript.  Even so, TeX is much more readable
than PostScript, and so you could customize the output much more easily.  Until
such a word processor is developed, TeX remains the best way to generate clean,
readable, publisher-ready mathematics.  I will be the first to admit that the
use of TeX has become something very esoteric, but that's because the use of
mathematics has (unfortunately) also become very esoteric.

Regards,
Tom Leathrum
moth@dartmouth.edu