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There are far more feature rich notebooks systems that include more than just TeX: http://www.sagemath.org/tour.html
But if you want primarily TeX plus computer algebra (Maple) it exists but it is commercial. http://www.mackichan.com/

Used to work there. Honestly, you can't beat it for mathematics editing, graphing, etc. Saves in Latex if you want. Free trial downloads too if you want to give the tires a kick.

http://www.mackichan.com/

I'm very excited about the Sage project. I started using Mathematica in 1989. Sage offers the ability to cut off pieces of mathematica analysis software and combine them into other apps. Especially with the web driven interface which makes for an easy API. So I think you are making the right choice. It will be hard for you to beat Maple / Mathematica on the desktop but a free web based system offers the potential to swamp them. The same way a decade ago MathCad probably had 10x the number of users of Mathematica and Maple combined, before they kept raising the price.

If I may make a suggestion, in terms of IDE I'd say get integrated with a web based word processor and offer something like Scientific Workplace.

This is not a stupid question. Let me say at the outset that I avoided LaTeX for years and boy, was I wrong. LaTeX proponents often talk about the pretty formatting, but for me the advantage is the robust document structure you easily create.

LaTeX pretty much requires you to create a structured document, and the document class you're using automatically handles the formatting, display, and numbering, and it is easy to do extensive cross-referencing of equations, tables, figures, etc. By structured I mean that you create entries like

\section{This is my first section}

This creates a new automatically numbered section, creates a formatted section head, and resets all equation and subsection numbering. Entries automatically show up in a table of contents if you elect to create one (a one-line command). If you create structured technical documents, it's fantastic. Tables are a pain, but for me that's the one big weakness. And the more you have to control the detailed formatting of specific pages (which I don't need to do), the less you will want to use LaTeX.

Yes you can do all this in Word or OpenOffice, but it requires setup and in my experience almost *no* user of those programs bothers to do it. It's just too much of a pain. With LaTeX, on the other hand, it's hard to extensively change the default formats (this is what the OP meant by creating a new document class) but the standard classes for articles and books are fine for many people. New LaTeX users have to overcome the urge to tweak the formatting. Once you just leave it alone, it's liberating. You can focus on content and logical structure, and the result is a decent-looking document.

It appears to me that there is a movement *towards* the use of LaTeX in economics (my field), most commonly by using Scientific Word. This is just an impression, and I can't speak about other fields.

Finally, the experience one has with LaTeX will depend on the front end (which can simplify entering equation and structure commands). Lots of folks use Scientific Word. I use Emacs/AucTeX. I am *very* happy with that combination.

I have not tried it, but I was a programmer for the ancestor company 25 years ago, and, at the time, it was a pretty good system. It claims to be able to import / export LaTex. It was designed by a mathematician so it is fairly complete. Free trial download available. http://www.mackichan.com/

I have no connection with the company other than 1 year of employment a quarter century ago...

And that's the problem right there. You have to learn, and read, the syntax yourself.

No. You don't. My father is a chemistry professor and has been for something like 40+ years now and he did learn the syntax himself (he used to write his papers in a text editor) but now he uses a WYSIWYG application:

MacKichan Software - The Home of Scientific WorkPlace, Scientific Word, and Scientific Notebook

The papers he sends to journals look very, very close to what the journal actually prepares for publication, although it's not exactly the same because journals have their own style that they change things to match.

• Scientific Workplace (proprietary, win32 only
• LyX (F/OSS)
• TeXmacs (F/OSS)
• AbiWord (F/OSS, not the best TeX editor (but I had none of the problems you had))

Lets look at the history of the BSD license. The most impressive piece of software which was licensed under BSDish terms in the 1980s was X. Every single X implementation was proprietary, to the extent that the freely available X's were worthless. The software community had to start from scratch to re-implement X and this took many years (XFree project). This probably set the Unix desktop (as well as free desktops) back 8 years or so.

Lets pick another example. The BSD kernel itself. Companies have proven completely unwilling to make substantial improvements in the way they have with the Linux kernel.

Lets pick another example TeX. During the early 1990s lots of companies made huge improvements to TeX and LaTeX. A good example being scientific word for windows (later workplace) this is BTW still available but it hasn't improved much in the last 10 years. Adobe and TeX came out about the same time and could very well have partnered with TeX if TeX had been under a GPL license (i.e. similar to what MySQL is doing). Instead they both went their own ways and WYSIWYG/Bitstream/PCL ended up winning which was worse than either solution.

There is a long history of BSD and GPL licenses now and the evidence of which one supports a free software community better is pretty clear.

If you want to benefit from it without learning it, you can use a number of GUIs. Scientific Workplace on win32 (commercial, but good to push on those using Word) or LyX (F/OSS) for nearly any platform or many others. Even abiword can write LaTeX!

It isn't difficult to learn & becomes much more powerful when you eventually ditch the GUI & either use a quality TeX-focused editor like KILE (KDE), TeXnicCenter (win32), TeXShop (OS X) (all F/OSS) or your favorite multi-purpose editor. I prefer vim with LaTeX-Suite.

The best way to learn is to look at other code. Either get some from peers, from the net, or make some in either the GUIs or the friendlier editors. Then just write.

If you need a reference, you can usually learn to google for how to do something (or post to comp.text.tex). I maintain a list of www links. You might find something useful, but I can't suggest the best starting point from that list. The best introductory book I've used is Guide to LaTeX. The other books in LaTeX Companions are also excellent for reference, particularly The LaTeX Companion.

Absolutely. For example you have Microsoft Word which is a word processor from Microsoft and you have Scientific Word which is a totally unrelated LaTeX based word processor from MacKichan Software. Since "Word" is a generic name, both companies are equally entitled to use it in their product names. The fact that Microsoft is better known is irrelevant.

• LyX for Linux/Unix, or Windows with cygwin
• TeXnic Center for Windows only (GPL), works with MikTeX
• Scientific Workplace for Windows only (commercial)
• Textures for Macintosh, another commercial product

I started a small document scanning service a few years ago. (I am no longer in that business). The biggest issue in OCR accuracy is pre-process. (in particular de-skew and grayscale removal). If the page is skewed even a couple of degrees OCR will fail miserably. I have had superb results using TMSSequoia Scanfix software which automatically cleans-up and straightens the page nicely. Its expensive but worth-it if you have a lot to scan. I believe that they still have a demo available.

My experience has been that the consumer OCR software is considerably MORE accurate than industrial versions that cost 20X as much. I obtained excellent OCR accuracy using Scansoft's Textbridge software which utilized the Xerox Textbridge engine. Scansoft appears to have purchased Omnipage OCR and discontinued the Textbridge OCR line. I found that I achieved much higher accuracy with Textbridge then with Omnipage after the document was processed by Scanfix. Textbridge did not have some of the features of Omnipage but Textbridge was faster and better at OCR. I would definately download the Textbridge 98 demo that is still floating around on the web.

Both Textbridge and Omnipage OCR were vastly superior to anything else I previewed, including Adobe's OCR engine. OCR can be surprisingly accurate but the source image needs to be free of distortion. Sometimes you will need to break up the page into several using photo-editing software since no OCR can inteterpret the structure of a document very well.

I suspect that you will be better off just typing in the mathematics in by hand. Maybe a visual LATEX editor like Scientific Workplace would be helpful. The LATEX output could be manipulated using a parser to put the equations into the simpler forms that you need while keeping the raw equation in a form that could be used for other purposes later on.

Honesty, 10pgs/hour is pretty good so it doesn't sound like you are doing all that much touch-up. I suspect that using Scanfix will provide the greatest boost in productivity.

BUT! He records his voice and captures the entire lecture to a movie as well that he then burns to cd's and hands out the following day. Now these movies are slow as hell to load and the audio is pretty bad. As far as I am concerned they're just not nearly accessible and easily referred to as the posted class notes.

I appreciate his effort though. I just don't think I like video lessons. I'd prefer to wait on an interactive holographic professor.

If not LyX you may be thinking Scientific Word for Windows which is commercial, sold by TCI soft