From: dhosek@hmcvax.claremont.edu
Subject: Re: Which is better, OzTeX or Textures?
Organization: Quixote Digital Typography
Date: 27 Jan 93 00:23:54 PST

In article <friedan.727979020@raunvis>, friedan@raunvis.hi.is (Daniel Friedan) writes:
> 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.

Actually you can use any PS font (if you have ATM) and Blue Sky
will supply for free a program to import TeX bitmap fonts. Also,
the default window sizes, placements and magnification for the
previewer can be set up to meet your requirements quite easily.
 
> 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 does _not_ require ATM. Blue Sky has been pushing the
"Classic Textures" bundle which uses CM in type 1 format and
unfortunately is much slower than PKs on low-memory/slow systems
but does take less disk space to store/distribute. You can still
use bitmap fonts with Textures.
 
> 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.

The current version of Textures is no slower than twice as fast
as what you timed, likely faster. I'm an infrequent user of
Textures (I only use it when I teach classes for TUG), but the
speed change was noticable.
 
> 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.

It might be faster now, can't say. My guess is that the bulk of
the processing time was dealing with ATMs rasterization. An extra
couple of meg or even just changing the defaults in ATM can
dramatically change the processing for quickdraw
devices/previewing.
 
> 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.

-dh
Don Hosek                  
dhosek@ymir.claremont.edu  
Quixote Digital Typography 
714-621-1291


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