LaTeX

[Owen Densmore]

OK, sorry to bother folks so much about math notation and all, but ..

It looks like TeX and LaTeX are the de-facto standards for math type  
setting and also for equation formatting .. well ahead of MathML.  
Its also apparently a great word processing system in general.

So the question to all you LaTeX folks, could you let us know which  
of the many implementations you use, and how you use it?

On the Mac, there're several options.  The Mac TeX site
   http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
.. has several distributions, and multiple front ends.  TeXShop and  
iTeXMac are the most popular unified edit/view systems.  But many  
folks simply use good text editors, with easy viewer integration of  
some sort (DVI/PDF).

 From what I can tell, the two approaches are integrated edit/view  
systems, vs your basic text editor using a standalone viewer.  What  
to FRIAMer TeX'ers like??

     -- Owen

Owen Densmore   http://backspaces.net

[Dan Kunkle]

I use LaTeX for pretty much all word processing (on my Mac, and any
other platform I happen to be using). I've briefly tried some of the
front end systems, but I always go back to using a text editor (gvim),
pdflatex from the command line, and viewing the result with any
convenient PDF viewer (Preview on my Mac). I like this setup for two
reasons: it's the same across all platforms I use (mostly Mac and
*nix, but Windows too); and, it's simple.

-Dan

On 12/30/06, Owen Densmore <owen at backspaces.net> wrote:

> OK, sorry to bother folks so much about math notation and all, but ..
>
> It looks like TeX and LaTeX are the de-facto standards for math type
> setting and also for equation formatting .. well ahead of MathML.
> Its also apparently a great word processing system in general.
>
> So the question to all you LaTeX folks, could you let us know which
> of the many implementations you use, and how you use it?
>
> On the Mac, there're several options.  The Mac TeX site
>    http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
> .. has several distributions, and multiple front ends.  TeXShop and
> iTeXMac are the most popular unified edit/view systems.  But many
> folks simply use good text editors, with easy viewer integration of
> some sort (DVI/PDF).
>
>  From what I can tell, the two approaches are integrated edit/view
> systems, vs your basic text editor using a standalone viewer.  What
> to FRIAMer TeX'ers like??
>
>      -- Owen
>
> Owen Densmore   http://backspaces.net
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>

--
[ http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/kunkle/ ]

[Marcus G. Daniels-3]

Owen Densmore wrote:
> So the question to all you LaTeX folks, could you let us know which  
> of the many implementations you use, and how you use it?
>  
TeX is very roughly like Linux distributions in the sense there is a lot
of stuff from the community and then particular assemblies of it for
different settings.   See http://www.ctan.org/starter.html for more.

> From what I can tell, the two approaches are integrated edit/view  
> systems, vs your basic text editor using a standalone viewer.  What  
> to FRIAMer TeX'ers like??
`Word processing' systems like Scientific Workplace
(http://www.mackichan.com) have their fans, but `real' TeX gurus write
TeX and LaTeX like programmers write code.   Of course, there's a wide
range of skill for TeXies as there is for programmers, so there's plenty
of cargo-cult TeX and stylesheets, which I suspect explains why
integrated view/edit systems have had limited success.  I suppose there
is plenty of cruddy HTML/CSS or XML/XSLT/CSS that still manage to mix up
presentation and content as badly..

[chris.e.davis]

Personally - I am a supporter of Vim + a makefile.  When I used to write a
lot of LaTeX - I had fancy bindings in Vim to run a makefile on whatever
file I was editing.

My makefile and style sheets are what really make life easy. Typically the
makefile does all the rendering and cleanup of the cruft files that get
created along the way, then launches Adobe Acrobat Reader to check out the
resulting PDF.

These days I am on a Mac - and I still find myself going to the terminal,
running Vim, and rendering with a Makefile. But - I should point out that
when I was a newbie in the ways of LaTeX - I was addicted to WinEDT.  Nice
editor (I still use it when I forget a tag) and has splell chexing. ;-)  The
greek/AMS symbols on buttons are a great intro for math markup.
     -Chris


On 12/30/06, Owen Densmore <owen at backspaces.net> wrote:

>
> OK, sorry to bother folks so much about math notation and all, but ..
>
> It looks like TeX and LaTeX are the de-facto standards for math type
> setting and also for equation formatting .. well ahead of MathML.
> Its also apparently a great word processing system in general.
>
> So the question to all you LaTeX folks, could you let us know which
> of the many implementations you use, and how you use it?
>
> On the Mac, there're several options.  The Mac TeX site
>   http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
> .. has several distributions, and multiple front ends.  TeXShop and
> iTeXMac are the most popular unified edit/view systems.  But many
> folks simply use good text editors, with easy viewer integration of
> some sort (DVI/PDF).
>
> From what I can tell, the two approaches are integrated edit/view
> systems, vs your basic text editor using a standalone viewer.  What
> to FRIAMer TeX'ers like??
>
>     -- Owen
>
> Owen Densmore   http://backspaces.net
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>

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