Re: Equation editors [Was: Re: CUPS]
Thanasis Kinias wrote:
scripsit David P James:
Please don't judge (La)TeX by LyX ;)
LyX's interface didn't do it for me, either. I just use vim for my
LaTeX instead.
I don't know about anyone else, but I am quite impressed with kate as an
editor of all sorts.
How's
\hat{\sigma}^2
strike you? That's pure LaTeX unencumbered by LyX's GUI.
It strikes me as fairly similar to WP's eqn editor. I've never used
LaTeX before, but I think the same style of formatting is used in the
Discus discussion-board system that the Economics department employs,
though most users haven't figured out that the capability exists.
I took the liberty of putting a PDF showing a couple lines from your
prof's notes up at <http://www.public.asu.edu/~tkinias/foo.pdf>, to give
you an idea of how LaTeX renders math. The source is there, too, at
<http://www.public.asu.edu/~tkinias/foo.tex>.
To be sure, LaTeX has a bit of a learning curve, but if you master it
you'll never want to muck with WP again for math.
It's not that I don't like WP for math; the editor is probably derived
from TeX in some butchered form. I don't know if you've ever used it but
it has a list of all the possible commands and symbols at the left. When
you click on one the command is printed into the editor box, and you can
then press the refresh button to show you what it looks like. That's a
fairly nice arrangement as it allows you to learn what is doing what.
That's where LyX was weak - you could enter LaTeX commands -- if you
knew what they were already, but it [apparently] had no facility to
allow you to learn it. But WP allows you to learn its formatting as you
went, and so by the end of the semester I could create equations quite
quickly with it. The downside of WP is that the output of the equation
editor is an image. The other thing that I really like about WP
generally is the reveal codes pane. I always work with it displayed at
the bottom, giving it about 3 lines of space. It has come in very useful
on numerous occasions when I have had to clean up other people's messes,
especially converted Word documents. It's also very useful in the linux
version as WP under wine has a tendency to not display or incorrectly
display subscripts and superscipts - but with reveal codes on you can
see that it is in fact there, and go on to worry about other things.
***wishful thinking alert***
What I would really like is a word processor/document processor that is
structured much like Mozilla's Composer. The first tab is a "normal"
word processor whilst other tabs allow you to view what is going on in
the background (a la reveal codes, or, I would guess, like a LaTeX
document in its source format - it could use LaTeX-like formatting for
all I care, so long as it is editable as in Mozilla Composer). It would
also have embedded equation generating capabilities in the document
format, so that equations aren't some image but actually part of the
document. It could even have an optional tab for setting the equations,
much like WP's but with a few more graphical options (anyone ever used
Lotus Amipro? - like that), or of course you could also set equations in
the source tab. There could also be optional tabs for building macros
and templates, tables and charts, etc.
I suppose that the "disadvantage" of doing this is that you'd no longer
be able to save the documents in Word format or any other existing word
processor format owing to the fact that equations or any other made-up
characters would not be displayable.
At first, MathML would seem to be a reasonable compromise between these
worlds, but then somehow it didn't quite work out as I can't get my
beloved accents on top of any character correctly in it, at least as
implemented by OpenOffice.
--
David P. James
Ottawa, Ontario
http://members.rogers.com/dpjames/
The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe.
-Dr. Leonard McCoy, Star Trek IV
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