Re: Formatting mathematics

["D. Michael McFarland" <mcfarlan@xxxxxxxx>]

"Thomas G. Lockhart" <lockhart@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>I'm certain that just about everyone on the list has more experience
>than I on this, but I was suprised to discover that what I had thought
>would be the preferred route to typeset output, TeX, did not work for
>me. A couple of reasons for this:

I should have provided more background.  I've been using TeX for some
time, and have always managed to make LaTeX + amsmath do more or less
what I've wanted.  SGML is appealing because of its cleaner separation
of structure and appearance; although realistically I expect to have
to hack the latter at some level, I'd rather that not be in the source
files.  Maybe I just can't resist the challenge (but maybe I should).

>1) TeX input seems to be the weakest of the supported backends.
>[....]

I've had varying results with jadetex on simple documents, but
generally can get output at least as good as the RTF versions.  In the 
long run, I think TeX will make a great back end.

>2) but even if this weren't the case, for better typeset output you will
>probably want to go through the document and clean a few things up. For
>example, you will probably want to adjust a few page breaks and figure
>positions to get things a bit prettier.

This is an excellent point.

>The RTF output seems to be
>better suited to this, although not perfect.

I'm hoping to avoid editing anything but the source file (and style
sheets).  I view RTF in Applix, not MS Word, and that presents its own 
problems; I'd hate to depend on editing it.

Thansk for your thoughts.

-- Michael


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