On 6/12/07, Lloyd Kvam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Thanks very much for your suggestions. On Mon, 2007-06-11 at 20:07 -0400, Bruce Labitt wrote: > If she is doing a mathematically intensive paper, hands down, use > LaTeX. (Or LyX) The other word processors don't even come close.
I used LaTeX for my Mech. Eng. labs in college and a few other places. If you're typesetting equations, TeX is it. I would've loved to have LyX back in the day (I learned LaTeX on VMS and DOS FWIW). One nice thing is that you don't have to worry about the style as much. LaTeX does that. You mark equations, references, lists, titles, chapters, etc with labels much like HTML. LaTeX worries about fonts, indentation, numbering, references to the Bibliography, etc. Oh, it's very cross platform FWIW. I've used it on VMS, DOS, Windows, MacOS 7, Unix, DTSS, Dot Matrix printers, ink jet, laser, etc. Same source document works on all of them. Same DVI (to display or print) too. I was involved in a conversion of LaTeX docs to MS Word 4 on Macintosh to convert to the MS Help system. The document had hundreds of equations and EPS images. It had to be converted into small chunks to work with Word. The Macintosh went from an SE to a Quadra 800 to an emulated Macintosh on Solaris and it still had speed and memory issues. The original LaTeX could be process with no problems on the original SE. To be fair, the secretaries doing the conversion were very familiar with LaTeX and were new to Word. A Word expert may have had more success. One of the programmers took a few days to make a wysiwyg LaTeX previewer that worked much better then the MS Help. I've been providing long-range tech support since she switched to Linux.
Hopefully the latex processing flow is easy to package up into a shell script or Makefile. I've installed everything with latex or lyx in the package name. So she'll need to master latex commands and I'll assist with the processing flow as necessary.
I think Mathmatica can output to LaTeX. Other programs might as well. I see that Maple and Mathematica are available for Linux, so either of
those could be an option.
There are some free math applications that might substitute. http://math-blog.com/2007/06/02/3-awesome-free-math-programs/ That said, if you need a particular tool that isn't free, you should get it. An example of this is Fortran still being used for scientific programming. The math libraries are battle hardened for use, speed and above all accuracy.
One > can find document styles that match professional publications if that is > desired. There is a learning curve, of course, but the quality of the > typesetting is unparalleled. For the content, you are on your own. :) I expect she'll manage the content OK. She does try to avoid futzing with her computer - that gets handed off to Dad.
Just like most engineering types :-) They use the tools and the results are what matter, not how they get there.
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