Re: Documentation

clay@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:

On Feb 22, 3:37 am, Andor <andor.bari...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Clay wrote:
On Feb 21, 4:47 pm, robert bristow-johnson <r...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
...
well, MS Word is not cra*** software.  it's downright crappy.  but, if
you're stuck with it, what's the state of the Equation Editor (that
used to be a side tool with Word, but i don't have a current version,
so i dunno)?

r b-j

Robert,

Word's equation editor is incentive to not use many equations in a
document.

That's what they say: Word users are better presentators at scientific
congresses than LaTeX users because they use less formulae :-).

However, I don't agree: recently I had to use powerpoint for a
presentation, and I managed to cram in enough equations on one page,
thank you. I thought that the equation editor (MathType 5.0) is rather
neat! LaTeX stuff just looks more, well, scientific.

I guess this is the old WYSIWYG vs. Markup argument. I use both.

I used to use Tex (either Latex or AMS_Tex) but they didn't
deal well with images. Is that improved now?

LaTex (or Tex) is intended for publications. If it didn't do well with
images, you made a mistake using it.

Who also offers a good
Tex compiler these days?

I use MikTex for windows.

Regards,
Andor

Hello Andor,

Thanks for the comments. I'm probably dating myself, but I use to use
pctex from the 80s. (after 20 years I likely need to update it!) The
Tex language while great for publications did not allow for directly
inserting images and such. This wasn't a lack of skill but rather the
then language didn't support it. In fact the first versions of Tex
that started to allow actual images were printer dependent which Tex
is not supposed to be.

So what I was getting at was how was the language modified (extended)
to cleanly handle images. Drawings were never a problem although they
were time consuming. Even Lamport's book (author of the LaTex macro
package) failed to show images because at that period in publication
history images were always treated separately from the rest of the
doc. The LaTex manual had you leave gaps for the images.

Clay,

There was a package that came out about 20 years ago called PiCTeX that
generated pictures in (La)TeX code, so that it really was device
independent. As I recall, it was developed by a professor who was
writing a book on probability theory. However, it wasn't widely used
then and it has certainly fallen out of use these days.

There is apparently a relatively new package that is like it called
dratex. I don't know anything about it, and in fact just ran into it in
writing this response (see the UK TeX FAQ p.90:

ftp://cam.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/uk-tex-faq/letterfaq.pdf

).

Usually (La)TeX authors these days "cheat" and use essentially
device-dependent methods to embed graphics. These methods can be
partitioned into two classes: a) those that don't rely on (La)TeX in any
manner to generate the graphic (e.g., you generate it in Visio, export
it as an eps or other suitable file format, and then simply refer to the
exported file in your (La)TeX code), and b) those that use a LaTeX
package to actually generate the graphic. There are two main packages
in use today that allows you to do that: 1) PSTricks, and 2) TikZ/PGF.

PSTricks allows you to do essentially anything postscript can do, so
it's pretty powerful, although it can get tedious. It is what I've used
for a few years now, and I think it produces excellent quality
graphics. You can see an example of my usage of it in Figure 10 in the
sample document

http://www.digitalsignallabs.com/alg.pdf

More samples are at

http://tug.org/PSTricks/main.cgi?file=examples

--
% Randy Yates % "I met someone who looks alot like you,
%% Fuquay-Varina, NC % she does the things you do,
%%% 919-577-9882 % but she is an IBM."
%%%% <yates@xxxxxxxx> % 'Yours Truly, 2095', *Time*, ELO
http://www.digitalsignallabs.com
.

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