Re: What Software to Type Math In?

In article <45c6bbF5m2p8U2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Marc Olschok <invalid@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Herman Rubin <hrubin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Marc Olschok <invalid@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Herman Rubin <hrubin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[...]
If there is somebody else available who can take care of the typesetting
aspect of your document, you may as well say "I just want to type it
quickly, the _final_appearance_ of the document is not _my_ business".
And of course this makes sense. The same applies, if the final appearance
does not matter as such, e.g. in a personal not[e] for yourself.
(even in this case, I would feel _very_ uncomfortable with a format that
is not plain text and where readability depends on the existence of a
particular version of a particular software)

What is "plain text"?

Something that I can process with simple editors and other text-tools across
a variety of different platforms, independent of the particular fonts or
encodings available. Something I can e-mail or post in newsgroups without
having to assume any special capabilities on the part of other readers.

If you post TeX, the reader will need a TeX compiler and
reader. If you post LaTeX, a little more. If you post
what we call "mathtex", which leaves off some of the
TeX punctuation, the reader needs to know enough TeX to
be able to tell what you are doing. To do fully what you
want is not possible.

In short: I want to be able to use ed in a dumb terminal, if needed.
I admit that such a notion of "plain text" is a moving target: right now
it is still ASCII for me; in the near future, when all those tools will
have migrated, it will perhaps be Unicode.

To do things with ASCII, you may be able to get away with
the clumsy diagramming of characters; this is not enough.

To me, mixing Latin, Greek, and
Cyrillic characters in a text is "plain text". Put in
subscripts and superscripts with full or reduced size
and crude "half-spacing", and recognizable mathematical
symbols, and you have LOTS of power. I want to be able
to put the characters on the screen exactly where I want
them, and I want it to be read by a fixed-width "editor"
which has the relevant fonts. I would settle for a
"super-ASCII" with the "gazillions" of characters.

You want an Unicode-capable editor.

I want an editor capable of a sufficient amount of Unicode
in fixed-width type. I have not seen such.


The old Apples has a way to put the typewriter decoding for
a particular font in a corner of the screen. One did not
have to mouse the character in, but knew how to type it.

And one needed an Apple to begin with.

There were other PCs with the capabilities. The computer people
tell me that what I want is "trivial"; the people producing the
software insist on giving me features which I do not want, and
not keeping it simple.

If instead, the final appearance matters and can not be delegated to
somebody else, one may as well start right away with the real thing.
As far as I could see, this is to be the situation of the OP.

In many cases, fixed width typing is much easier to read
than typeset material.

As others already pointed out, there is no antagonism between 'typesetting'
and 'fixed width type'. Whether fixed witdh is easier to read depends
on the material and the medium.

I have rarely found fixed width type much harder to read,
and in many situations easier. If you look at articles
printed by photocopying of typed material, they are not
harder to read; they are likely to take more space. I
understand that Italic type was invented to save paper.

Also, the current use of subscripts and superscripts in
typeset material can be quite difficult to read. I first
encountered this when a student asked me what (in TeX)
\upsilon_F was; in this case, it was essentially a standard
use of symbols. It was VERY difficult to see that the
small Greek letter and the capital Roman letter were not on
the same line. This is also the case for much simpler
situations as i_J. In photocopied typed text, with the
"_J" a half line lower, no problem.

Another advantage of at typewriter rather than a typesetter
is that the author has easy control of line breaks. Also,
fixed width fonts are necessary for easy communication.
This goes completely against the typesetting mentality.

Depending on the final format it might also go completely against
the idea of readability. Nobody suggested that you typeset your e-mail.

I still use Berkeley mail for sending email or responding.
The email with this newsreader is like that as well. Email
sent by many of the fancier mailers lacks line breaks, and
can be difficult to handle.

Sure. The same point could be made against special fonts in mail.
Compare "Ji visited Wrzburg" to "Ji\v{r}\'\i\ visited W\"urzburg".
Observe, that I can type the left version directly into LaTeX.

If that right side is supposed to be LaTeX, I cannot read
it. what does the string of characters \v{r}\'\i\ mean? I
do know the TeX way of indication umlauts, but I do not
like it. I would not mind the European typewriter version
of having such things as umlauts and accents as non-spacing
superimposed characters.

In fact, easy documentation depends on plain text format.
This is one of the reasons for using TeX and LaTeX, even if all the
fine points of typesetting are ignored.

I am asking for a plain text format, with a huge character
set. This is feasible. TeX and LaTeX use plain text
CHARACTERS, but not a plain text FORMAT.

There are two issues here.

One is your need for an editor able to handle all these fonts in a
coherent way. The question of typesetting does not even enter here.

This I find not to be a problem, comparer to the massive
overhead of TeX or LaTeX. I compose at the terminal, and I
know what I want it to look like, so I need WYSIWYG to see
if it is doing that. Correcting TeX "punctuation" errors
is extremely difficult and time-consuming, even with my use
of multiple simultaneous windows.

The other is the question, whether TeX or LaTeX could handle such
texts as input. For TeX the answer is most likely 'no' since it is
meant to be frozen. However, LaTeX is acively developed further and
it might well be able to handle this in the fuuture, like it already
can for several encodings, as pointed out in the example above.



Marc


--
This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Department of Statistics, Purdue University
hrubin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558
.

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