From: warwick@cs.uq.oz.au (Warwick Allison)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Technical wordprocessors for ST
Date: 19 Nov 92 04:03:18 GMT
Reply-To: warwick@cs.uq.oz.au

madmal@spd.eee.strathclyde.ac.uk (Malachy Devlin - SPD) writes:

>Can anyone recommend a good technical word processor for the ST. ie. one that
>would allow me to enter (large messy) equations (easily)? and also have the
>ability to generate table of contents, tables etc or am I asking to much?

You're not asking too much at all!  The program you've described is LaTeX.


If your serious about it, you should learn to use LaTeX for technical
word processing.  It is available for every machine I can think of,
including Unix, Mac, IBM [all?], Atari ST[e]/TT/Falcon, and Amiga.

And, it's free.

You simply use a regular text editor (or a wordprocessor, if you want, but
they are generally much less powerful that text editors), then feed the
document to LaTeX, which produces PUBLICATION QUALITY documents as output,
which can be either sent to the screen or to a printer, or taken to a
publisher for making into a book even!

LaTeX is very simple.  For example, this is a complete LaTeX document:

----------------------------------------

\documentstyle{article}

\begin{document}

Here is the Pythagorean Theorem:
\begin{math}
	a^2 + b^2 = c^2
\end{math}

Written another way, this is:
\begin{math}
	\sqrt{a^2 + b^2} = c
\end{math}

\end{document}

----------------------------------------

Which produces (approximately - my ASCII drawing skills aren't too good!)

----------------------------------------

Here is the Pythagorean Theorem:

   2     2      2
  a  +  b   =  c

Written another way, this is:

    ________
   / 2    2       2
  V a  + b    =  c

----------------------------------------

The basic skeleton is

\documentstyle{article}
\begin{document}
   ...
\end{document}


Which means you want the document to be an article (rather than,
say, a report or a book) - which tells LaTeX to use certain traditional
settings for margins, title layout, etc.

Above, were I've used:

\begin{math}
        ...
\end{math}


I could have just used \( ... \) as a shorthand.  This causes LaTeX to
use special mathematical symbols and layout.  Notice how easily the
square root was given?  A more "complex" example is:

\begin{math}
	x = \frac{ y+\frac{z}{z+2} }{ y^2+1 }
\end{math}

Which produces

             z
        y + ---
            z+2
  x  =  -------
          2
         y + 1

(Except of course, it uses real graphically positioned, high quality
scaled fonts (the "z/z+2", and superscripts are printed smaller), not
dumb-terminal ASCII!!!!) 

Once you start using LaTeX, everything else seems SOOOO weak!


Also, since LaTeX is used on millions of computers around the world,
all kinds of "style files" are available for it.  For example, if you
want to have the document formatted in two-columns per page, simply
change the document style line to read:

\documentstyle[twocolumn]{article}


Other features of LaTeX include:

	Table of Contents
	Sectioning (and subsectioning, and subsubsectong, etc...)
	Index generation
	Graphics
	Figures
	Tables
	Greek & other mathematical symbols 
	Bibliography and Citations
	Quotations
	Poetry
	Lists

There are drivers for all sorts of screen resolutions, and printers,
and support for Atari-specific things like .IMG image files.

The only thing is, I doubt whether LaTeX can be set-up on a floppy
drive system (ie. you need a hard drive).  But then again, the
word processors on IBM PCs certainly need a harddrive to operate!!!

--
Warwick
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