From: tlm@nextasy.physics.mcmaster.ca (Tom Marchioro)
Subject: Re: What DTP/WP do tables (other than Frame)?
Organization: McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 05:46:23 GMT

jeffo@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (J.B. Nicholson-Owens) writes:
: tlm@nextasy.physics.mcmaster.ca (Tom Marchioro) writes:
: >While there are many possibilities, you might also want to consider
: >TeX, which is *free* (in the sense that it's bundled) and is capable of 
: >making virtually any kind of table, including fancy rules, equations, 
: >mixed entries, a wide range of fonts, etc. etc.  
: 
: Yes, TeX would be a good answer to my problems if only it's power and
: cross-platform re-useability came with a GUI.  Unfortunately, I don't
: have the time to learn another programming language, yet I still have
: the need to be able to graphicly manipulate everything I do.  A
: GUI-oriented DTP seems to be the only solution for me.
: 
: I hear it's quite capable of doing anything, which is good, but I wish
: that it's power wasn't dependant upon one learning a language.  I know
: that there are GUI previewers and debuggers (similar to Yap, except
: for TeX and not Postscript), but what I need is 100% GUI, no new
: language learning needed.
: 

This might be a good time in this thread to say to teh friendly community
of NeXT software hackers, "make this for me!"  I think it would be fairly
easy for someone who knows NeXTstep and a little TeX to make a GUI
front-end table driver for TeX.  Then, using the new -E option of dvips
(which drives TeX to encapsulated postscript) you'd have a table
you could resize (presuming you used PS fonts only, possible but non-trivial)
drag and drop, etc. etc.  

The biggest problem would be that you probably couldn't *edit* the table
once you'd made it, since that would require going back to TeX from an
EPS file, a no go from the start. 

Why has someone not made a NeXTstep driver for tables?  The answer is 
almost certainly that most people don't need tables very often (I think
I've made only one in all my professional publications --- not a large 
number to be sure :-}  and anyone who knows enough TeX to write the App
also can easily knock out that once-a-year table when they need it.

But this raises an interesting point:  there is *one* NeXT app which might
do a lot of what you want (particularly once 3.0 arrives) and that's
EquationBuilder.  Although it's designed to be a GUI equation driver
for the NeXT it's matrix facilities also allow you to make certain types
of tables.  Best of all, the output is pure EPSF and can be reopened and 
edited.  (the hard part with EqB would be things like putting boxes around
the entries, captions, etc. but this might be  done by dropping the finished
product into, say, Diagram!).  Grab the EquationBuilder Demo from sonata
(it's in 2.0-release/demos I think), install it, bring up the Help panel
and read document 09Tables.rtfd for a description of how to use the matrix
facilities to make a table  (it would be fairly easy to make most of what
you posted).

Other than that there's not much to satisfy you out there, but I think
something can also be said about forming reasonable expectations:  If
you really want to make unusually formatted tables on an ongoing basis
which can be put into other applications, manipulated graphically, etc.
then you're in a small minority.  Best to take a system which demands some
time (like the LaTeX tabular environment, or, perhaps, Frame, but I don't
know it well enough to say), but gives you everything  you need,
and learn it once and for all.  You may not live long enough to see a 
developer tackle this problem.

Best --- Tom

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