One thing that hasn't been emphasized enough in this thread is the  
beneficial effect of TeX for the scientific community,
in particular the mathematical, physical, and chemical sciences. TeX  
has made it possible to easily&freely
prepare and distribute manuscripts. There even is a preprint server  
(www.arxiv.org) that accepts mostly TeX,
giving worldwide access to many papers that would after their  
publication only be available through
expensive journals. I don't know whether anybody has ever estimated  
the costs that all these benefits
would have if one was using alternatives to TeX. It must be in the  
billions of dollars.

Besides the ability of TeX to typeset formulas and its costs,  it is  
its level of standardization that makes it
so useful for scientists: TeX is an extremely well-defined system.
My 15 year old TeX files still `TeX',  despite changing computers and  
operating systems multiple times.
The only drawback for the scientific community is that there is no  
easy way to parse TeX into
Mathematics, i.e. make the formulas one can typeset intelligible to a  
computer algebra system.
This is of course possible now with MathML.

Matthias
___________________________________________________________________________________
If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the 
Wiki!

maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
webpage  : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net
archive  : https://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/
wiki     : http://contextgarden.net
___________________________________________________________________________________

Reply via email to