> From what little experience I have with PS and *roff the idea of > hacking inline embedded languages just for typesetting sounds stupid > beyond belief....
You have to learn one of the troff macro packages. -ms is the easiest, but I agree that a wysiwyg document processor is just easier for this purpose. I'm agnostic about this one, and use Abiword (which I have never had any issues compiling, and do install all of the plug-ins), TextMaker, OO.o, Word or WP. For this purpose it does not really matter much, and I have all installed, either natively or in a virtual machine. For technical or scientific writing, though, there is nothing that can replace TeX or troff unless you invest a lot of money into adjunct programs for Word. Even then you still wind up with an ugly document. Sometimes that does not matter (like business letters) but hey, I'm a perfectionist and want my documents to look good in addition to containing good information. FWIW, my "typical" scientific article has over 100 references (which change as the document is written), a lot of partial differential equations and their solutions, graphs, chemistry, tables, images (like photomicrographs), and so forth. For that troff and TeX are the only way to go unless you want to spend a considerable amount of money for Word add-ins. By itself Word is not that good, but an ecosystem has developed around it to make it workable. And it is the standard. I'll stand by my basic recommendation. For everyday use and Word compatibility, buy TextMaker (and PlanMaker if you use spreadsheets). For the heavy lifting use TeX (or LaTeX or LyX) or troff and its pre-processors and macro packages. > and since all the more "traditional" (sorry I do not think of any > inline text language as being "traditional") Here you are misguided. The text formatters *are* the traditional way to process documents. In fact, Unix existed only because its commercial justification was the text processing system. And that was built on DEC's runoff (with its embedded codes), which the Unix fellows abbreviated to roff, which became nroff for fixed-width character devices, and troff for typesetters. It took WordStar to change that paradigm (there are many other ones, of course, but WS was the gorilla in the late 1970s and early 1980s). Frank _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
