Slashdot Mirror

It uses a drop-in replacement look-alike, Nimbus Sans, which was donated to the GhostScript project by the foundry URW++. The foundry donated a full drop-in replacement font package covering the basic 35 PostScript standard fonts.

More info:
http://www.tug.org/fonts/deuts...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Typography is a pretty nerdy field.

You bet it is ... this is why we have TeX, because Donald Knuth absolutely hated the layout of an edition of one of his books, and decided he could do far better.

He spent years building a typographic system, because all of these things are important and badly done typography reflects badly on the book.

I had a prof in university who had been a friend, colleageu, and classmate of Knuth, and he published all of his books using TeX, and several other profs who used LaTeX fpr their books and papers.

Which means I knew far more about kerning, em-dashes and en-dashes and other typographic terms than a normal person would long before Word was really WYSIWYG, and why to this day it irritates the crap out of me that it can't do a proper full-justify layout that doesn't look clunky. To my eye, it looks like absolute shit the way Word does layouts, because I know what it can look like. It still can't do proper mathematical notations and layouts.

Anybody saying "why are we talking about this on Slashdot" should turn in their nerd badge and STFU. Word processors still haven't caught up to what TeX can do, and there's a lot of things which go into making a good looking printed page.

It doesn't flow for shit. Compare that to (La)TeX, where it flows not completely naturally, but it makes sense and actually writes in the order it will be, and mostly the order it's said when you say it.

And tools like tex4ht make translation of LaTeX to html a breeze. You get the best of both worlds, with nice LaTeX documents (from which Postscript or dvi or PDF etc. can also be made) translated to html. It will even generate jsMath if you want.

Of course, there's the TeX engine and the default macro packages which are different things.

Actually, I was talking specifically about the generic TeX engine properties that make it virtually impossible to use it for incremental redisplay and similar purposes, so you have to go WYSIWYM instead, [...]

You don't have to. There is a number of options available even as free software. The paper "Revisiting WYSIWYG paradigms for authoring LaTeX" is probably a dozen years old at least, but it does spell out quite a few interesting approaches to various aspects of what usually entails the WYSIWYG buzzphrase. Not every software presented there is still actively maintained, but the different underlying ideas are still worth thinking about and making it easier to think about just which parts of the full WYSIWYG package are actually helpful for getting your work done and which are dispensible or even counterproductive.

Problem is: as far as I know there is no actual choice. I once worked with a guy who used one of these WYSIWYG LaTex editors, and I wanted to edit some of his work. It was the most unreadable code I have ever seen, and thus pretty tiresome to change. I don't know which editor it was, nor do I know if there are better alternatives. Maybe you do?

The main problem is that "WYSIWYG LaTeX editor" usually is a total misnomer because those things tend to export to LaTeX, not edit it. Which means if you take that LaTeX file, make some modifications to it and then send it back, the original writer will be unable to work with your modifications, just like if you had hand-edited the PostScript version of it.

There are no things I know of that can reasonably be called "WYSIWYG LaTeX editors", but there are several tools and workflows that try to bring some of the positive WYSIWYG editor aspects into a typical LaTeX document creation process.

Check out the following rather old paper: Revisiting WYSIWYG Paradigms for Authoring LaTeX. Like with most of the dinosaur LaTeX itself, it has not lost much of its relevance.

wow that was a very long post, i'll just give a little comment:

LaTeX has a very steep learning curve, you really need to work a bit to get used to using it, but the rewards are great: kerning and page layout look professional, and it can do any mathematics (which is why most beta scientists learn how to use it). I don't know how well it runs under MS Windows which is why you see less of it nowadays; many computer users know no better than what's available on MS Windows. But on Linux it runs fabulously; e.g. on Debian
apt-get install texlive
link: http://www.tug.org/texlive/

Native App
Qt App
There are huge differences. Qt doesn't do tool bars correctly. The text isn't aligned correctly in the ring menu. It uses a non-native widget to resize the tool bar. The icons look all out of place, doesn't used the native platform standard icon for the printing.

Actually most of the faults you mentioned in that example are are more to do with the program itself and not Qt. Qt does in fact do toolbars correctly on OS X (see the Qt documentation for specifics) but for some reason the TeXworks developers chose not to do it that way. Also, since icons are just loaded from image files there is no reason the OS X standard icons can't be used (I do agree that Tango icons look rather out of place there and I think some of them like the hand are even thr wrong resolution).

Native App
Qt App
There are huge differences. Qt doesn't do tool bars correctly. The text isn't aligned correctly in the ring menu. It uses a non-native widget to resize the tool bar. The icons look all out of place, doesn't used the native platform standard icon for the printing.

You wrote:

>And even with printing, nobody home prints paperback books.

I do this from time-to-time, to make gifts. One which was featured in the TeX Showcase:

http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/

(look for _The Book of Tea_)

More recently I made a hand bound copy of Frank Lloyd Wright's version of _The House Beautiful_ as a wedding gift.

William

William

My consultancy develops LaTeX systems for various industries, and we also do typesetting for publishers through LaTeX. It's used extensively outside academia (see the list of consultants at but most people keep it quiet because it gives them an advantage over their competitors (there now! I've let the cat out of the bag...)

I work in publishing, so use it quite a bit for any .pdf manipulation which isn't suited to pdftk, and which justifies it (as opposed to using Enfocus PitStop). Examples:

  - in-house ad design system for HS ads in phone books
  - batch processing ads to add a yellow or white background, or to scale them, sometimes asymmetrically
  - batch print graphics w/ filenames --- one instance of that was a several thousand page government publication
  - print processed graphics side-by-side w/ the original to make proofreading easier (while I worked up an AppleScript which would page forward in both .pdfs displayed in Adobe Acrobat w/ a single click people never used it)
  - unreleased system for creating galley versions of magazine / journal articles when the source text was in Typo3
  - custom typesetting system for custom story books, since taken off-line

I also use it for my own design and typesetting:

  - the freely distributed .pdf version of Mike Brotherton's Star Dragon: http://www.mikebrotherton.com/2005/04/20/new-star-dragon-pdf/ (this design made it into the Memoir documentclass along w/ some other things I contributed)
  - some entries in the TeX Showcase: http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/onetype.pdf and http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/peace_on_earth.pdf
  - books which I typeset and print so as to bind them by hand: http://mysite.verizon.net/william_franklin_adams/portfolio/typography/thebookoftea.pdf

William

I work in publishing, so use it quite a bit for any .pdf manipulation which isn't suited to pdftk, and which justifies it (as opposed to using Enfocus PitStop). Examples:

  - in-house ad design system for HS ads in phone books
  - batch processing ads to add a yellow or white background, or to scale them, sometimes asymmetrically
  - batch print graphics w/ filenames --- one instance of that was a several thousand page government publication
  - print processed graphics side-by-side w/ the original to make proofreading easier (while I worked up an AppleScript which would page forward in both .pdfs displayed in Adobe Acrobat w/ a single click people never used it)
  - unreleased system for creating galley versions of magazine / journal articles when the source text was in Typo3
  - custom typesetting system for custom story books, since taken off-line

I also use it for my own design and typesetting:

  - the freely distributed .pdf version of Mike Brotherton's Star Dragon: http://www.mikebrotherton.com/2005/04/20/new-star-dragon-pdf/ (this design made it into the Memoir documentclass along w/ some other things I contributed)
  - some entries in the TeX Showcase: http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/onetype.pdf and http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/peace_on_earth.pdf
  - books which I typeset and print so as to bind them by hand: http://mysite.verizon.net/william_franklin_adams/portfolio/typography/thebookoftea.pdf

William

Not even MIT teaches LISP anymore

So what? That was just an example. Someone who can write a program but who does not know how to use a spreadsheet program is going to be OK, except in cases where their teachers fail them for not using Microsoft's software.

They do all need to write papers

I do not doubt that, but if you have the choice between preparing people for lightweight writing using Word or writing in general using LaTeX, why would you choose Word? Engineers, math majors, etc. need more than what Word gives them; humanities majors need less than what LaTeX gives them. If we are teaching people to use Word, we are not preparing them for technical disciplines or for research; if we teach people LaTeX or something similar, we are not failing to prepare them for non-technical disciplines.

know how to do Boolean searches in google

Which takes all of one day to teach.

insert footnotes in papers

\footnote{Here is a footnote}

Not hard to do, not hard to teach, not hard to learn.

Not play around in the CLI in latex

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LyX

https://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/

http://www.tug.org/mactex/

There are plenty of TeX or similar GUI front ends. Nobody needs to play around; I use AucTeX for almost everything I do.

Wake up

That is an ironic thing to hear from someone who says things like this:

All statistics today is done with Excel

Hm...

http://www.indeed.com/q-Statistics-Spss-jobs.html

http://www.indeed.com/q-SAS-jobs.html

http://www.indeed.com/q-R-Statistics-jobs.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html?pagewanted=all&_moc.semityn.www

In fact, I have several friends who work as statisticians, and not any one of them uses Excel or any spreadsheet package on a day to day basis.

We all know LaTeX allows you to focus on the content and magically comes up with beautiful layouts. I mean the single best page layouts are always in the looks-the-same LaTeX format! And it's so intuitive to use!

Looks-the-same format? Wha...? =)

Also, funnily enough (and relevant to the article), one of the groups who is trying to improve (La)TeX's suitability for modern font technologies and supporting obscure languages is SIL, a group that does, among other things, Bible translations. (The end result is XeTeX, one of the best TeX versions out there right now if you want good PDF output and TrueType/OpenType support out of the box.)

"Given good content to work with, any programmer could figure out how to make it beautiful using LaTeX .. However there isn't a mature, standardized workflow to get from LaTeX to epub", infernalC

"The second talk came from Andrew Ford, who focussed on converting a LaTeX book to ePub format, using the example of his wife’s cookbook of vegetarian recipes. Andrew explained that the ePub format is a combination of XHTML and CSS, and that LaTeXML has allowed a relatively painless conversion process. Looking beyond ePub, conversion to Kindle format (which unlike ePub is closed)."

I dunno, I wrote my TUG 2003 paper on a pen computer running Windows:

http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb24-2/tb77adams.pdf

And I program scripts, and HyperCard-like things using it as well:

http://mysite.verizon.net/william_franklin_adams/portfolio/interfaceconcepts/proportionbar.zip
http://mysite.verizon.net/william_franklin_adams/portfolio/interfaceconcepts/proportionbar.app.sit

And it's very useful for drawing --- I draw up plans for woodworking projects among other things:

http://www.3riversarchery.com/images/Contest2010/WilliamAdamsTakeDownCase.jpg

It helps of course, that I'm using a full-fledged Tablet PC (to be specific a Fujitsu Stylistic 4121 w/ daylight viewable display --- I also use it as a map viewer when travelling).

William

Subject of several theses:

http://www.tug.org/docs/liang/

http://www.pragma-ade.com/pdftex/thesis.pdf

https://www.tug.org/docs/plass/plass-thesis.pdf

(John Hobby's on METAPOST http://ect.bell-labs.com/who/hobby/thesis.pdf )

Probably others. More information at

http://www.tug.org/

and

http://www.latex-project.org/

and

http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page

William

Subject of several theses:

http://www.tug.org/docs/liang/

http://www.pragma-ade.com/pdftex/thesis.pdf

https://www.tug.org/docs/plass/plass-thesis.pdf

(John Hobby's on METAPOST http://ect.bell-labs.com/who/hobby/thesis.pdf )

Probably others. More information at

http://www.tug.org/

and

http://www.latex-project.org/

and

http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page

William

Subject of several theses:

http://www.tug.org/docs/liang/

http://www.pragma-ade.com/pdftex/thesis.pdf

https://www.tug.org/docs/plass/plass-thesis.pdf

(John Hobby's on METAPOST http://ect.bell-labs.com/who/hobby/thesis.pdf )

Probably others. More information at

http://www.tug.org/

and

http://www.latex-project.org/

and

http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page

William

Btw, that script is here: http://www.johanneswilm.org/download/compile

Thank you very much; you have asked many good questions on the tex4ht list, and the answers have also been illuminating. Your script is very specific to your "SANDINISTA DISSERTATION" (copied and pasted from the script). It assumes a very specific file layout, but does not have defaults that cope with the basic simple case of a LaTeX file that includes some images. But thank you for making it available; I think it (and your discussion on the tex4ht list) will help me write a simple program to cope with the basic case.

It may be impertinent of me, but I offer this gratuitous advice: the additional effort to write a generally more useful tool is not great; you can simply write a script to call it with the options that apply to you. Your code can also create directories if they are not present, and give more specific help for the first time user of your program rather than exception backtraces. I guess this is the difference between code written for a specific purpose by a researcher and that by a programmer who wants to make a generally useful tool. I appreciate that your main effort is your research, and that it is generous of you to provide your useful code, which others such as I can benefit from. Your code, after suitable modification by a persevering programmer, is the solution to the question posted in this ask.slashdot article.

Will Robertson made a brilliant presentation on doing that which works w/ xetex and luatex

http://www.tug.org/tug2010/abstracts/robertson.txt

Er, it's the 32nd anniversary of TeX. Or as http://tug.org/tug2010 says, the 2^5 anniversary.

http://www.tug.org/utilities/texconv/textopc.html

The converters being most complete and currently maintained / supported are:

TeX2Word - a shareware LaTeX import filter for MS Word

GrindEQ - a shareware LaTeX import filter for MS Word

latex2rtf - a free standalone LaTeX -> RTF converter for PC, Macintosh and Unix,

TexPort - a commercial TeX/LaTeX to WordPerfect and Microsoft Word converter for PC.

TeX4ht - a free LaTeX to html or XML converter for PC and Unix produces html which is good for loading into Word. TeX4ht relies on other software, it needs at least a full TeX system.

There are also converters to Powerpoint and to FrameMaker (see further below).

That page goes on to give details on other methods of conversion.

That would've required post-processing the .pdf to convert to outlines and a willingness to use technical chicanery to avoid the license terms --- the former was too expensive in terms of server time / effort, the latter wasn't happening.

I considered using my .eps work-around from my TUG2003 presentation, but it would've required a separate pass using Omega, then distilling a several hundred MB file to .pdf then compositing in the text of the letter --- again, too expensive in terms of server processing time.

Here's the paper for the morbidly curious:

http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-2/tb77adams.pdf

Unfortunately, hosting on a Mac OS X box to use the version of Zapfino bundled w/ Mac OS X wasn't an option.

William

Ligatures are mostly decorative these days --- the original reason for them was to handle kerns which intruded into other characters, hence the existence of fi and fl --- also Gutenberg used optional / alternate ligatures to facilitate evening out the spacing of his lines, but that fell by the wayside, and has yet to be reasonably automated (though that was one of the intents of the HZ algorithm which URW developed and Aldus licensed to use in what became Adobe InDesign).

I make extensive use of Zapfino's ligatures in a small ``Peace on Earth'' card which the TeX User's Group mailed out one year:

http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/peace_on_earth.pdf

More discussion of them in:

http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/onetype.pdf

which is a companion piece to the broadside:

http://mysite.verizon.net/william_franklin_adams/portfolio/typography/typefaceterminology.pdf

William

Ligatures are mostly decorative these days --- the original reason for them was to handle kerns which intruded into other characters, hence the existence of fi and fl --- also Gutenberg used optional / alternate ligatures to facilitate evening out the spacing of his lines, but that fell by the wayside, and has yet to be reasonably automated (though that was one of the intents of the HZ algorithm which URW developed and Aldus licensed to use in what became Adobe InDesign).

I make extensive use of Zapfino's ligatures in a small ``Peace on Earth'' card which the TeX User's Group mailed out one year:

http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/peace_on_earth.pdf

More discussion of them in:

http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/onetype.pdf

which is a companion piece to the broadside:

http://mysite.verizon.net/william_franklin_adams/portfolio/typography/typefaceterminology.pdf

William

- paragraph hyphenation is brain-dead one-line at a time
  - one must invoke commands to generate the ToC and Index and remember to re-invoke them if pagination changes
  - documents are non-portable / formatting is dependent on currently installed printer
  - graphics can be embedded and can be nightmarish to get out in a press-ready form
  - citations require third-party extensions which can interfere w/ importing / processing documents (hit Command shift F9 to convert all selected form fields to text)
  - There is no easy way to assign paragraph styles --- one has to build a custom toolbar to have them all available w/ a click, the arrangement of said toolbar is dependent on the _length_ of the stylenames --- why the outline view can't have some sort of pop-up menu or ability to assign more than Heading 1--n and Normal is beyond me
  - local formatting is insidious --- create an InDesign document, assign styles to everything, formatting everything w/ styles, take it into Word, then bring it back into InDesign and one will still have to clear over-rides to keep the text from being formatted as Times New Roman

and all of that doesn't consider stupid / ignorant users and the visually formatted, but not structured documents which they always create. Best indictment of that here:

Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient by Allin Cottrell
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html

If typography were easy, Word wouldn't be the foetid mess which it is.

One will also never use Word as the basis for back-end typesetting systems --- I've done them for customized children's stories and telephone directory line ads --- a co-worker (Jeff McArthur) at my previous workplace developed one which would do customized versions of the CIA World Factbook as a demo --- the original version did the typesetting for a 2,200 page register and the technology was customized and sold to several customers.

Also, to be fair and accurate, Quark XPress and several other DTP programs handle OpenType features in addition to InDesign and XeTeX/XeLaTeX http://www.tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex and the nascent luatex, http://www.luatex.org/ (as well as ant http://ant.berlios.de/).

William
(who wrote a several thousand line WordBASIC macro to handle the formatting for a review journal for a major sci-med publisher so that the text could be pulled into Quark XPress 6, then 7, then finally InDesign CS3 --- I also wrote a xelatex package for typesetting the journal, but that was nixed by my boss 'cause if the journal had been done in TeX it would've been outsourced to India)

I like Computer Modern myself, especially in educational books. It instinctively makes me feel the author is a competent, professional fellow.

It makes me feel like the author just went with the LaTeX defaults. :) I prefer the Utopia + Fourier-GUTenberg font combination. CM is just too thin and light for my tastes.

Use TeX/LaTeX/MetaPost for the drawing and layout engine(s). Use you favorite language as a front end to turn the input data into source files for these programs. Plus, the result output is PDF, which means you can avoid the crap-fest that is Word. http://tug.org/

Alternatively, you can use Asymptote, which is like a modern version of MetaPost. http://asymptote.sourceforge.net/

Seconded. Even better would be XeTeX (or XeLaTeX) because the font handling is so much better. Oh, and learn the Memoir class. It will change your life.

I agree - LaTeX is the answer to the index, crossrefs, sectioning, figures etc. The memoir class is also great, I used it for my thesis. Also learn pstricks to make beautiful figures that are consistent with your document.

But can anybody recommend a good version control system to use with LaTeX, or a way to collaborate on documents in a large(ish) group?

As I have argued ad nauseam here (PDF) and elsewhere, Ebook readers sinply won't take off big-time until the manufacturers forget their proprietary formats and go for something sensible.

Unfortunately, "something sensible" doesn't mean some HTML bodge, RTF kludge, or non-reprocessable binary like PDF, but a persistent, parsable, non-proprietary, standard. Gosh, isn't that what XML was supposed to do?

Presumably nobody uses LaTeX for making charts or for performing calculations (the latter of which is really what's being addressed here).

The PSTricks package can make some really beautiful charts in LaTeX documents.

There's a book called Tex Unbound that gives lots of other ways to make charts in TeX/LaTeX that are way better than Excel output (or most other graphing packages IMO).

I said nothing about the font handling process or font data formats. I said that the *results* are good. Sheesh.

If the Computer Modern font does not please your eyes, you can get any of the 35 standard PostScript fonts with one puny usepackage statement (e.g. \usepackage{times}). The procedure for installing arbitrary TrueType or PostScript fonts is a bit more involved but there are tools and walkthroughs available. See also http://www.tug.org/fonts/.

There are TeX forks like XeTeX that can handle modern digital fonts automatically.

--Bud

It Makes it apparently easier to write things like this: http://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/info/Free_Math_Font_Survey/images/garamondmd.png

Try doing that in a word processor. It is possible, but especially the formula will be not easy to do.

I could imagine a plugin for e.g. OOo that would handle these parts. e.g. a pop-up that will insert the LaTeX part.

Just thinking out loud here.

LaTeX needs more flexibility (positioning accents, stacking symbols together, similarities), and more special symbols (integrals,...). Anyway, it should decide completely against bitmapped fonts and rely on postscript fonts only.

Again, is there anything that XeTeX cannot do with respect to advanced typography? Why PostScript (Type 1?) fonts when you can have OpenType with all the advanced goodies?

This (2MB PDF) is how I learnt, but it was only a 90min guide back then. It tells you everything you need to know and gives examples of code and the formatted output, so making your first document is straight forward and the examples in there have been sufficient for everything I have ever needed to produce.

More documentation here if you need.

I can't speak on behalf of frederec, but I've found a couple of resources to be immensely useful:

1. Tutorial
Covers a breadth of topics and provides enough detail to layout any document.
2. Reference Manual
I mostly use this as a character reference, but it should contain the depth of information that [1] might not provide.

For installation and configuration, there shouldn't be anything google can't find for you. MikTeX is great (Windows) and your GNU/Linux distribution's package manager likely has an all-in-one LaTeX package.

First of all, you have zero chance of finding anything better than LaTeX for mathematical/scientific typesetting. However, there are ways of solving lots of the problems you mention without chucking LaTeX out the window.

1. Frustrated that you're constantly having to download and install new packages, fonts, etc.? Try the everything-including-the-kitchen-sink distribution, TeX Live. If you're running Mac OS X, there's a great Mac-specific version of TeX Live called MacTeX, which also includes a number of front-end apps for editing, managing bibliographies, spell-checking, etc.
2. Hate the standard (La)TeX font, Computer Modern? You're not alone. For free, math-capable fonts (most of which are included in TeX Live/MacTeX), check out this illustrated survey. If you want the ability to use OpenType and other installed fonts on your system, as well as foreign language scripts, unicode, and other modern font features, check out the wonderful Xe(La)TeX and its fontspec package, both included in TeX Live/MacTeX (of course)
3. Want the ability to do real programming in (La)TeX, with a full scripting language? Check out LuaTeX (although it's still very much a work in progress).
4. Want a good LaTeX front-end/editor? IMHO, Scientific Word and Lyx try to hide the complexity behind a WYSIWYG interface -- but this makes things even more confusing, because the complexity is still there, but now it's invisible, so it's impossible to diagnose why your document doesn't look the way you want. What you really want is a text-editor with built-in templates, push-button PDF compiling, and other TeX-specific features. One of the most popular editors (justly so) is TeXShop, for Mac OS X. A cross-platform program called TeXWorks is in development (led by Jonathan Kew, who developed XeTeX), and promises to bring TeXShop's advantages to all platforms. If (like me) you're wedded to Emacs, there's the fantastic AUCTeX editing mode for all things TeX-related.
5. Read LaTeX books designed for users, not developers or those interested in the "theory" of typesetting. This means, in my opinion, to stay away from anything with "Knuth" in the byline. I really like Leslie Lamport's introductory book on LaTeX, which you should be able to track down at almost any university library if you don't want to buy it.

Above all, be patient, and be open to learning. It's understandable that you want to do powerful and flexible document processing, without having to learn a whole bunch of commands. Unfortunately, this has a lot of similarity with people who want to program computers without learning a programming language. ("Why can't the computer just understand what I want it to do, in plain English?") Any program powerful enough to do everything you want is also powerful enough to do lots of things you don't want -- and because the computer can't read your mind, you have to learn how to tell it exactly what you want.

Cheers,
IT

First of all, you have zero chance of finding anything better than LaTeX for mathematical/scientific typesetting. However, there are ways of solving lots of the problems you mention without chucking LaTeX out the window.

1. Frustrated that you're constantly having to download and install new packages, fonts, etc.? Try the everything-including-the-kitchen-sink distribution, TeX Live. If you're running Mac OS X, there's a great Mac-specific version of TeX Live called MacTeX, which also includes a number of front-end apps for editing, managing bibliographies, spell-checking, etc.
2. Hate the standard (La)TeX font, Computer Modern? You're not alone. For free, math-capable fonts (most of which are included in TeX Live/MacTeX), check out this illustrated survey. If you want the ability to use OpenType and other installed fonts on your system, as well as foreign language scripts, unicode, and other modern font features, check out the wonderful Xe(La)TeX and its fontspec package, both included in TeX Live/MacTeX (of course)
3. Want the ability to do real programming in (La)TeX, with a full scripting language? Check out LuaTeX (although it's still very much a work in progress).
4. Want a good LaTeX front-end/editor? IMHO, Scientific Word and Lyx try to hide the complexity behind a WYSIWYG interface -- but this makes things even more confusing, because the complexity is still there, but now it's invisible, so it's impossible to diagnose why your document doesn't look the way you want. What you really want is a text-editor with built-in templates, push-button PDF compiling, and other TeX-specific features. One of the most popular editors (justly so) is TeXShop, for Mac OS X. A cross-platform program called TeXWorks is in development (led by Jonathan Kew, who developed XeTeX), and promises to bring TeXShop's advantages to all platforms. If (like me) you're wedded to Emacs, there's the fantastic AUCTeX editing mode for all things TeX-related.
5. Read LaTeX books designed for users, not developers or those interested in the "theory" of typesetting. This means, in my opinion, to stay away from anything with "Knuth" in the byline. I really like Leslie Lamport's introductory book on LaTeX, which you should be able to track down at almost any university library if you don't want to buy it.

Above all, be patient, and be open to learning. It's understandable that you want to do powerful and flexible document processing, without having to learn a whole bunch of commands. Unfortunately, this has a lot of similarity with people who want to program computers without learning a programming language. ("Why can't the computer just understand what I want it to do, in plain English?") Any program powerful enough to do everything you want is also powerful enough to do lots of things you don't want -- and because the computer can't read your mind, you have to learn how to tell it exactly what you want.

Cheers,
IT

First of all, you have zero chance of finding anything better than LaTeX for mathematical/scientific typesetting. However, there are ways of solving lots of the problems you mention without chucking LaTeX out the window.

1. Frustrated that you're constantly having to download and install new packages, fonts, etc.? Try the everything-including-the-kitchen-sink distribution, TeX Live. If you're running Mac OS X, there's a great Mac-specific version of TeX Live called MacTeX, which also includes a number of front-end apps for editing, managing bibliographies, spell-checking, etc.
2. Hate the standard (La)TeX font, Computer Modern? You're not alone. For free, math-capable fonts (most of which are included in TeX Live/MacTeX), check out this illustrated survey. If you want the ability to use OpenType and other installed fonts on your system, as well as foreign language scripts, unicode, and other modern font features, check out the wonderful Xe(La)TeX and its fontspec package, both included in TeX Live/MacTeX (of course)
3. Want the ability to do real programming in (La)TeX, with a full scripting language? Check out LuaTeX (although it's still very much a work in progress).
4. Want a good LaTeX front-end/editor? IMHO, Scientific Word and Lyx try to hide the complexity behind a WYSIWYG interface -- but this makes things even more confusing, because the complexity is still there, but now it's invisible, so it's impossible to diagnose why your document doesn't look the way you want. What you really want is a text-editor with built-in templates, push-button PDF compiling, and other TeX-specific features. One of the most popular editors (justly so) is TeXShop, for Mac OS X. A cross-platform program called TeXWorks is in development (led by Jonathan Kew, who developed XeTeX), and promises to bring TeXShop's advantages to all platforms. If (like me) you're wedded to Emacs, there's the fantastic AUCTeX editing mode for all things TeX-related.
5. Read LaTeX books designed for users, not developers or those interested in the "theory" of typesetting. This means, in my opinion, to stay away from anything with "Knuth" in the byline. I really like Leslie Lamport's introductory book on LaTeX, which you should be able to track down at almost any university library if you don't want to buy it.

Above all, be patient, and be open to learning. It's understandable that you want to do powerful and flexible document processing, without having to learn a whole bunch of commands. Unfortunately, this has a lot of similarity with people who want to program computers without learning a programming language. ("Why can't the computer just understand what I want it to do, in plain English?") Any program powerful enough to do everything you want is also powerful enough to do lots of things you don't want -- and because the computer can't read your mind, you have to learn how to tell it exactly what you want.

Cheers,
IT

First of all, you have zero chance of finding anything better than LaTeX for mathematical/scientific typesetting. However, there are ways of solving lots of the problems you mention without chucking LaTeX out the window.

1. Frustrated that you're constantly having to download and install new packages, fonts, etc.? Try the everything-including-the-kitchen-sink distribution, TeX Live. If you're running Mac OS X, there's a great Mac-specific version of TeX Live called MacTeX, which also includes a number of front-end apps for editing, managing bibliographies, spell-checking, etc.
2. Hate the standard (La)TeX font, Computer Modern? You're not alone. For free, math-capable fonts (most of which are included in TeX Live/MacTeX), check out this illustrated survey. If you want the ability to use OpenType and other installed fonts on your system, as well as foreign language scripts, unicode, and other modern font features, check out the wonderful Xe(La)TeX and its fontspec package, both included in TeX Live/MacTeX (of course)
3. Want the ability to do real programming in (La)TeX, with a full scripting language? Check out LuaTeX (although it's still very much a work in progress).
4. Want a good LaTeX front-end/editor? IMHO, Scientific Word and Lyx try to hide the complexity behind a WYSIWYG interface -- but this makes things even more confusing, because the complexity is still there, but now it's invisible, so it's impossible to diagnose why your document doesn't look the way you want. What you really want is a text-editor with built-in templates, push-button PDF compiling, and other TeX-specific features. One of the most popular editors (justly so) is TeXShop, for Mac OS X. A cross-platform program called TeXWorks is in development (led by Jonathan Kew, who developed XeTeX), and promises to bring TeXShop's advantages to all platforms. If (like me) you're wedded to Emacs, there's the fantastic AUCTeX editing mode for all things TeX-related.
5. Read LaTeX books designed for users, not developers or those interested in the "theory" of typesetting. This means, in my opinion, to stay away from anything with "Knuth" in the byline. I really like Leslie Lamport's introductory book on LaTeX, which you should be able to track down at almost any university library if you don't want to buy it.

Above all, be patient, and be open to learning. It's understandable that you want to do powerful and flexible document processing, without having to learn a whole bunch of commands. Unfortunately, this has a lot of similarity with people who want to program computers without learning a programming language. ("Why can't the computer just understand what I want it to do, in plain English?") Any program powerful enough to do everything you want is also powerful enough to do lots of things you don't want -- and because the computer can't read your mind, you have to learn how to tell it exactly what you want.

Cheers,
IT

none of us real software nerds (flattering myself again) would ever have thought of writing a program that lets you track your finances, write documents and typeset them

I think you need a couple of history lessons.

He's written some checks. Few of them are cashed - (pdf) On page 10 of this document he explains one.

PDF the only download on the arXiv? How 'bout you get your heads out of Bill Gates' ass and write papers like men!

http://www.tug.org/

Use a front end of choice if you want. E.G.:-

http://www.latex-project.org/
http://www.lyx.org/
http://kile.sourceforge.net/
http://www.gnu.org/software/auctex

A Google search on "tex frontend" will yield many more.

Honest, before all the Deities, it's that simple.

And last but hopefully not least, pdflatex and pdftex. You simply use "pdflatex" in place of the "latex" command to generate pdf output instead of dvi output, with much better quality than latex -> dvips -> ps2pdf (which unfortunately people who don't know better still use).

A big part of this is the excellent TeX environment which has been put together by volunteers working w/ and creating opensource software:

  - TeXshop by Richard Koch (an Apple Design Award winner in 2002) --- http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/math_science /texshop.html
  - Gerben Wierda's i-Installer.app and TeX installation --- http://www.rna.nl/tex.html

and lots of others, all of which has made its way into MacTeX:

http://www.tug.org/mactex/

I wish someone would make a Cocoa version of LyX though.

William

Texmaker is a nice multi-platform LaTeX editor that uses templates. Another option would be TeXShop. As for a good tutorial, the not-so-short guide to LaTeX is a great way to go. Long-short guide LaTeX is simply the best tool for working with research papers and the like with structured formatting and bibliographical information use BibTeX.

> Plus, ACS guidelines generally specify Word files as the desired submission format.

I can't find a statement of preferred format on the site, but they at least accept TeX files, according to this:

http://pubs.acs.org/paragonplus/submission/tex.htm l

If you'd still like to use LaTeX, you may find the following page of interest.

http://www.tug.org/utilities/texconv/textopc.html

Thanks for your response, and have a nice day!

I need to rewrite the entire thing since a lot of it is now outmoded, and will do so when the next version of Keynote comes out. What I have been doing:

• MacTeX. This is a Mac version of TeXLive that comes with everything and the kitchen sink installed.
• Installed with MacTeX is LaTeXiT. This works a lot like Equation Service used to. While the MacTeXtras come with a few others, LaTeXiT mostly outclasses them.

Hope that helps!