From: friedan@raunvis.hi.is (Daniel Friedan)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: Which is better, OzTeX or Textures?
Date: 25 Jan 93 16:23:40 GMT

jeremy@castle.ed.ac.uk (Jeremy Henderson) writes:

>There is really no doubt that Textures is immensely superior to OzTex. Of
>course, unlike OzTex it costs real money ;-(, but at the "student price"
>it is very good value.

On the contrary, I found Oztex superior to Textures, on my
non-postscript system.

My printer is a Laserwriter IISC -- 300dpi, quickdraw not postscript.

When I compared OzTex with Textures, I found that OzTex prints about 4
times faster on this printer than does Textures.

(Actually, non-postscript printing is not done by Oztex at present but
by another application, James Walker's DVIM72-Mac, which is distributed
with OzTex.)

This was a definitive advantage for OzTex, since I use tex mostly to
read physics preprints distributed over the internet.

Previewing in OzTex was originally not very good, for my needs.  My
main demand on the previewer is that I be able to read without
horizontal scrolling and without squinting.  A 6.5 inch wide line of
text should just fill the horizontal width of my screen.  The fonts
that come with Oztex are standard .pk files at 300, 329, 360 ... which
are fine for my printer but not so great for previewing.  But, because
Oztex uses standard .pk files, I was able to copy a set of fonts at
100, 110, 120 ... from a unix system and use them in Oztex.  With these
fonts, I am happy reading on the screen in the Oztex previewer.  (My
monitor is a 13inch 69dpi Apple High-Resolution RGB monitor with a
display width of 704 pixels, thanks to Maxapplezoom.)  Now that Timothy
Murphy has provided a version of metafont for Macs without MPW (in
pub/Mac/TeX on ftp.maths.tcd.ie), one can make one's own fonts for
previewing (and printing).  With Textures, one is dependent on Blue Sky
Research for fonts.

For composing Tex, the previewer in Textures is better because it has a
very convenient magnifier, which is useful for fine tuning.  Textures
does magnification, but more awkwardly  On the other hand, it is not as
convenient to use an external editor like Alpha with Textures.  I
haven't seen Lightening Textures so I don't know how useful it is for
composing Tex.  As I mentioned above, my main interest is in reading
papers already written in tex.

Textures requires Adobe Type Manager, at least on a non-postscript
system.  I have no use for ATM otherwise, so I found it inconvenient to
have ATM installed.  One of the inconveniences I remember was that all
the tex fonts showed up in the font menus of other applications.

Textures is "more integrated".  Using Oztex requires me to run three
applications -- Oztex (for tex'ing), DVIM72-Mac (for printing) and Alpha
(or any other text editor).  But, under System 7 or Multifinder, this is
a negligible inconvenience.  The separate editor is actually an
advantage.

Both Textures and Oztex seem to me rock solid at actually typesetting
tex.  In my comparisons, Oztex did it somewhat faster (on my Mac IIx).
I seem to remember that the difference was mostly that Textures was
slower inputting the large macro packages that are used in most physics
preprints.

I have the impression that Textures is a fine piece of software.  I
would have been tempted to buy it except for its disasterous printing
speed on my non-postscript LWIISC.

Oztex and DVIM72-Mac are also excellent programs.  Moreover, they are
in the tradition of free tex software.  Andrew Trevorrow, author of
Oztex, and James Walker, author of DVIM72-Mac, have my profound thanks.


       Daniel Friedan <friedan@raunvis.hi.is>