Re: What Software to Type Math In?

Herman Rubin <hrubin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <45c6bbF5m2p8U2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Marc Olschok <invalid@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Herman Rubin <hrubin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Marc Olschok <invalid@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Herman Rubin <hrubin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[...]
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.

The reader will need TeX or LaTeX to _typeset_ the document and
some viewer/printer in order to look at the result.
But in order to read or manipulate the documents source, no TeX is needed.
This is the point of using plain text for _the_source_ instead of
some format, which can only be manipulated with some special program.
And (in the context of my above remark) of course I know what I do.


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.

Well, this is why markup languages (as html and TeX) are so popular.

Actually further down in this posting you provide a perfect example
why it is sometimes a good idea to restrict to ASCII.

[...]
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.

Did you try Yudit? (e.g. <http://www.yudit.org/>)

I have no experienc with it, but it may be a little step towards
your need.



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.

I fear the two groups interpret your question in different ways.
When you mention "type mathematics" the latter group will think of
"typesetting mathematics" just as I did before, when I failed to take
the original phrase literally. But, as you pointed out you do not want
or need this.

[...]
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.

There is no disagreement here. I also use ordinary text terminals
with fixed-width fonts and hard line breaks, but only wanted to remark
that different output media may have different demands.

But here is the promised example you provided in favour of
plain ASCII:


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.

The \v puts a "czech hook" accent over its argument, \' puts an / like
accent over its argument (which here indicates a long vowel), \i is a
dotless i and "\ " was just a leftover from the TeX source in order to
ensure a space (see e.g. the TeXbook). As I said, LaTeX can work with
different input encodings, so you would not need type these TeX makros.

But the interesting question is:
could you read the equivalent text on the left side?

Of course the headers of my postings include the necessary information
about charset and encoding (yours do _not_, which is tolerable as long
as you post within the ASCII subset of iso-8859).

But a terminal that can handle only ASCII will not display the indicated
characters correctly. A terminal that can handle iso-8859-1 will display
the german umlauts and the long i but will incorrectly display a
scandinavian \o (o with a slash) instead of the hooked r.
You would need an iso-8859-2 capable terminal in order to view it correctly,
which is why I rarely post outside ASCII in english speaking newsgroups.

Moreover, your newsreader has lost these characters completely at least
when you incorporated the quote in your response.
What _has_survived_ is the TeX source, which is plain ASCII.

Marc
.

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