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Re: Latex, Mathematica, and journals

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg109795] Re: Latex, Mathematica, and journals
• From: AES <siegman at stanford.edu>
• Date: Tue, 18 May 2010 02:01:32 -0400 (EDT)
• Organization: Stanford University
• References: <hsr890$bda$1@smc.vnet.net>

In article <hsr890$bda$1 at smc.vnet.net>,
 Murray Eisenberg <murray at math.umass.edu> wrote:

> For Mac OS-X there's TeXShop (with the MacTeX 
> bundle built upon the TeX Live distribution).  Viewing speeds after 
> typesetting varies with these front ends.  All can do reverse-search.
> > 
> On the Mac, for sheer speed of essentially simultaneous typesetting and 
> viewing, nothing [**could**] touch proprietary Blue Sky "Textures". 
>
> [However}, there seems to have been no further 
> development of Textures in the last few years, ...

Textures, sadly, appears to be dead.  It may have been, while it was 
with us, not only an absolutely front-running implementation of TeX, but 
also one the greatest pieces of Mac software ever written.

Join the TeX Users Group  (<http://www.TUG.org>; $50)  and you'll get 
each year a CD or DVD with TeX Live, TeXShop, and a ton of other TeX 
stuff.  TeXShop is, as far as I know, the best currently available 
WYSIWYG (or anyway psuedo WYWIWYG) implementation of TeX for the Mac.  I 
believe you can also download all the necessary stuff from their 
website, without joining.

With TeXShop plus TeX LIve plus any of several inexpensive books or 
manuals on LaTeX, you should be able to handle any and all requirements 
of LaTeX for any journal or publisher.  

The point to LaTeX, in fact, is that you _only_ have to learn, once and 
for all, the basic LaTeX and TeX syntax, which is pretty simple, largely 
self-evident, and not that bad at all.  Individual publishers can then 
distribute packages which you just dump into the LaTeX folder on your 
machine, and in many cases a marked up template file into which you just 
substitute your title, author name, abstract text, etc etc.  By setting 
an initial option you can prepare a typeset ms in a simple report format 
for proofing, or a typeset ms in the exact format used and needed by 
that journal.