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From: laser-lovers@uw-beaver (laser-lovers)
Newsgroups: fa.laser-lovers
Subject: Re: Table formatters and sample tables (summary)
Message-ID: <1790@uw-beaver>
Date: Wed, 26-Sep-84 15:35:30 EDT
Article-I.D.: uw-beave.1790
Posted: Wed Sep 26 15:35:30 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 4-Oct-84 02:21:25 EDT
Sender: root@uw-beave
Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
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From: Beach.pa@XEROX.ARPA
In my previous message, I requested information about table formatters,
interactive front ends for table formatters, a Scribe table
preprocessor, and tables with math or equations included.  Unfortunately
the answers were not encouraging.

Sonnenschein.es@Xerox.ARPA pointed out that the Xerox Star 8010
workstation has interactive table formatting. [Shame on me for not
mentioning it before! RJB]

Mark D Senn  pointed out that 'naked' TeX works fine
for tables using the templates designed by Donald Knuth in "The
TeXbook".

Creon Levit  suggested pic, the picture language
preprocessor for  device independent troff under Unix.  eqn, pic, and
tbl can be used in succession to embed equations inside drawings inside
tables.  [Does anyone know the limitations workable orderings of the
preprocessors? RJB]

Paul Rubin  pointed me to the matrix
formatting macros in AmSTeX, described in "The Joy of TeX" by Mike
Spivak.

Brian Reid  pointed me to a guy named Victor at
the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, DC. Brian's comment: "It's
all written in Cobol, but wow, can it format tables!"

Richard Furuta  provided me with a reference to
"TABLE: Object Oriented Editing of Complex Structures" by Ted
Biggerstaff et al., published in the IEEE Conference on Software
Productivity.  TABLE is an interactive front end to tbl they built to
demonstrate the view that "the software development is a process of
editing complex structures".


Thanks to all the respondents.  There surely must be other gems out
there.

Cheers
Rick Beach
Xerox PARC