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From: h...@uvacs.CS.VIRGINIA.EDU (Harry S. Delugach)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,comp.text
Subject: Dissertation on a MAC vs UNIX
Keywords: bibliographies, index(es), table of contents,
Message-ID: <2328@uvacs.CS.VIRGINIA.EDU>
Date: 2 Apr 88 22:18:54 GMT
Organization: U.Va. CS Department, Charlottesville, VA
Lines: 21
I am soon to begin the production of a large, technical document (namely
my Ph.D. dissertation). All my previous technical documents have been
produced using the UNIX troff family, including bib, eqn, pic, etc.
I also use the -me macros to produce camera-ready citations, index,
table of contents, table of figures, etc.
I recently acquired a Macintosh SE, so I am now contemplating where would
be the best machine on which to work. I am concerned here only with the
document processing, not any simulation or software development tools which
I might need for the actual research.
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?
--
Harry S. Delugach University of Virginia, Dept. of Computer Science
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From: gus...@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 <2...@uvacs.CS.VIRGINIA.EDU>, h...@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.
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pterodactyl.cis.ohio-state.edu!zwicky
From: zwi...@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: n...@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Organization: The Ohio State University Dept of Computer and Information Science
Lines: 33
In article <4...@swanee.OZ> gus...@swanee.OZ (Gustav) writes:
>in article <2...@uvacs.CS.VIRGINIA.EDU>, h...@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