From: brian%jaguar.cs.utah.edu@cs.utah.edu (Brian Sturgill)
Subject: Tex vs WYSIWYG ( was Re: superVGA (and misc top-blowing), et. al.)
Date: 19 Aug 92 01:24:34 MDT
Organization: University of Utah CS Dept

In article <77928@ut-emx.uucp> varmint@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Samir Varma) writes:
>In article <1992Aug15.235739.10958@hellgate.utah.edu> brian%jaguar.cs.utah.edu@cs.utah.edu (Brian Sturgill) writes:
...
>As for including pictures, it's not too difficult in TeX, once you get the
>hang of it.  Any postscript picture (as I'm sure you know) can be sized
>to whatever size you need and placed wherever you like.  It doesn't take
>me much more than one or two tries to get it right.  As for typing equations,
>there is simply no comparison.  In TeX, I simply type away without ever
>worrying about mice, pull down menus, or where the damned square root
>sign is in the menu.  It's easy, its fast and its convenient to simply
You don't have to hunt in menus, just bring down the character set palette
and click the symbol you want.  The palettes are drop down, but if you
run Windows 3.1, they are quite fast.  The palettes are organized by
symbol type, so it's easy to find what you want.
I admit that for drawn-out full-fledged mathematical proofs it's not
optimal, but see below.

>say \sqrt{.....} than to worry about where to find the damned thing, and
>even once you know, you still need to take your hands off the keyboard.
Yes, but then if you're a touch typist... surely your hands fall back
on naturally. :-)

>I like writing my papers as I go along, not worrying about the format.

\sqrt{...} is not worrying about format?  Anything you type in TeX
that begins with \ is "worrying about format".

>
>Finally, the reason for my rather strident tone is that you claimed
>that people who disagreed with you were simply not willing to
>investigate the "so called" powerful WYSIWYG word processors.  I would
>suggest, as I did before, that different people will find different 
>ways of word-processing more efficiently, and just because you can't see
>why they chose what they did, that doesn't mean that they're blind sheep
>who need to be led.
I think you miss the point... this same macros set (with a somewhat
different flavor) could be written in WordBasic. Plus you don't
have to try "one or two" times to get pictures right, etc.
Now if you do alot of mathematical typesetting (you're a physicist
so it's possible), then Word alone may not be enough.  However many
add-on packages are available now... perhaps one of them will allow
you to typeset equations TeX-style but leave you with the other benefits.

>
>Samir Varma
>PS:  Another problem with WYSIWYG word processors is that I can't change
>paper formats with one small change.  Ie, I might write my paper in physrev
>format, double column, but then decide to submit it to North Holland in
>single column format.  For me, that involves changing \physrev to
>\elsevier and re running TeX.  Can't do that with Word now can you?
Of course you can.. provided you setup the macros necessary to do so.
(Which is of course what's going on in TeX.)
The macros are somewhat different in that they would perform a reformat
directly rather than setting a flag that existing macros know about and react
differently according to the setting, but the effect is the same, and
the convenience level is the same. (Actually it might be possible
to do the flag approach too... I'm not an expert yet.)

It seems clear to me that you may have used WYSIWYG processors
before, but you really never explored the depths of their capabilities.
In some sense perhaps you fit in the original group of people I described that
know the text-based processors and don't want to spend the time learning
the new one, even though in the end there are clear benefits.
Your choice!  Oh... I recently saw described a WYSIWYG front-end for TeX
that runs under Windows... if that is of interest I can dig up the
information. (It also shows that there is a group of TeX users that don't
think the use-emacs-to-type-it-in approach is so hot!)

If you want to know more about WordBasic:
Call 1-800-MS-PRESS and ask for the book:
	Microsoft WORD For Windows and OS/2 Technical Reference.
This book also contains the spec for RTF files.

Brian