Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!rutgers!princeton!udel!burdvax!sdcrdcf!ucla-cs!sonia!khayo
From: khayo@sonia.cs.ucla.edu (Erazm J. Behr)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: TeXtures and MacTeX
Message-ID: <9877@shemp.UCLA.EDU>
Date: 13 Dec 87 06:00:11 GMT
References: <3643@ames.arpa>
Sender: root@CS.UCLA.EDU
Reply-To: khayo@MATH.UCLA.EDU (Erazm J. Behr)
Lines: 47
Keywords: disappointed with TeXtures.
Summary: huh?

In article <3643@ames.arpa> woo@pioneer.UUCP (Alex Woo) writes:
>I have been using various versions of TeX and LaTeX for several
>years and like the fact that it is device independent so that
>files created on one machine can be viewed or printed somewhere
>else.  Unfortunately I have been very disappointed with TeXtures.
>Here are some specific complaints:
>
>1.  It is incomplete since it does not include "initex" or "virtex"
>and therefore cannot easily use large macro packages.  Since TeXtures
>does not include LaTeX, I mistakenly tried to \input lplain.  This
>takes a long time and TeXtures coughs on the embedded form feeds.
   I'm not surprised! But TeXtures does (if we settle on the singular)
include initex. You can create your formats, as long as you have
enough memory (in the manual it says you need a Mac + to do that, but
you actually need a Mac + *with >700K RAM available* (my estimate). If
you're using a RAM disk, TeXtures may decide to ignore your \dump
commands. A-W are also going to release their macro packages (LATeX
at least - I'm not sure about AMSTeX) soon.>
>
>2.  TeXtures seems to be able 6 months behind the OS.  Currently, it 
>is impossible to print under system 5.0 or multifinder.  
   I haven't tried newest systems, but if that's so - call A-W and
*complain*! This would be a major bug. The person to speak to is
Alan Baker at their software? educational? division.
>
>3.  While the integrated editor/typesetter/previewer is nice, in many
>ways I prefer the old fashion environment that is common on mainframes.
>I prefer a different editor than TeXtures and I don't want the
>overhead of previewing.  
   Well, that's a matter of taste - I've always thought the previewer
made the TeX/Mac combination worth 10 times their cost; if I just wanted
mainframe TeX, I would type TeX source in MockWrite or something and then
simply transfer the file to our VAX (actually, I'm doing just that most
of the time - but *after* looking at the typeset pages. Otherwise my
neighbor's Timex/Sinclair would do just as well :-)
   I don't know the answer to any of your questions, but I do have a
complaint about TeXtures: I'm using it with minimal memory/disk space,
so I had only the essentials in the system. What I saw was unbelievably
odd behavior - weird page sizes, bombs, scroll bars worked unreliably etc.
After a while I traced the problem to the absence of a printer driver. A
pre-release vsn. didn't act up like that, and it seems strange to me that
a $450 program would not warn about it like others that need a driver do.
A minor but annoying deficiency.                            Eric


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