Technical Word processor with maths ?

A fairly good list of what's out there can be found here:
http://www.macscience.net/

That's a very disappointing list. I anxiously await the MacOS X 10.x port of FrameMaker. My favorite MacOS word processor is the late and lamented FullWrite 2.x. If only someone would raise it from the grave once more. I totally agree with Kali about Nisus Write Express. How could this veteran Mac developer labor so mightly to deliver such a small and insignificant mouse? Let us hope that Nisus ports Nisus Write to MacOSX.

I wouldn't hold your breath for FrameMaker: it's been long rumored and little seen. The rumors I've heard involve Adobe trying to move the OS9 version over to OS X. This seems wrong to me: they should be porting the unix versions over, which are current at least. Anyway, FrameMaker's pricing puts it out of reach for most.

Nisus Writer Express IS Nisus Write for OS X, or will be whenever Nisus can bring the functionality up. Nisus just seems to be having all kinds of trouble doing this. There is no "port" to wait for.

I use Mellel because, as far as I'm concerned, it's by far the best of the lot. And, unlike Nisus, significant feature improvements appear regularly. The user community is also good and the developers are very good at listening to user feedback and offering support. YMMV.

LaTeX is still the best of course. There are some OS X editors to help you out.

I am not "most." FrameMaker may not be the best possible application, but it is pretty darned good. It has been my mission-critical app for the more than a decade. Frankly, I am dismayed by some of Adobe's comments about FrameMaker. I am, however, also buoyed by the fact that FrameMaker 7.0 uses MacOS X 10-compatible icons. If Adobe doesn't port the application to MacOS X 10.x, I have time to find an alternative.

Nisus/Nisus Writer was always the alternative to my mission critical word processor. I never adopted it, but I knew that it would serve me well if I ever did. Nisus Writer Express can't. I may be forced to look elsewhere. But, again, I have time.

If I were to go with a minimal word processor, I would probably go with Mariner Write. We can agree on this much: YMMV.

Kali,

In my view you should just hold your nose and get into Framemaker anyway. Sure it's not OSX native, but it is extremely stable in Classic.

As for Frame's future -- on the Mac and other platforms -- the current belief amongst Frame geeks is that Adobe's recent termination of Pagemaker provides a clue. In other words, expect something from Adobe based on the InDesign engine, with a whole bunch of add-ons to duplicate Frame's functionality. Just don't expect it soon.

Until that happy day arrives, just lie back and think of Avie.

I didn't say that you were. Given the products mentioned by Kali in the original post, I thought it was worth mentioning that FrameMaker is in an entirely different league in price (and features) from them.


If you're suggesting that Mellel is a minimal word processor and that Mariner Write is a better alternative, then I must disagree on both counts. Mellel isn't trying to compete with FrameMaker, which is much more than a word processor. As for Mariner, I think Mellel is already the stronger app. And being cocoa based and enjoying very active development and enhancement, I expect that will continue to be the case. It is clear the Mellel's developers have set themselves the goal producing for OS X a word processor superior to the old Nisus of OS9, and while they aren't there yet, they're making excellent progress. Already, Mellel is the best OS X native WP for those with multilingual needs, and notes and auto-numbering are very powerful indeed.

I can't say whether it would meet your needs, but Mathematica has word-processing capabilities. It certainly can handle the mathematical part.

You might try e-mailing Mellel's developers about this. They are quite responsive and may be able to tell you when they plan on adding features in this area. Also, they do poll their users about what their priorities for new features are, so they could at least take your vote into account.

Good luck!

You can use though LyX, the WYSIWYG version of LaTeX. It requires a working teTeX installation in the system. I have not personally used it, so I cannot tell about.

To my ears, this sounds like: I want to edit movies but I don't want to learn iMovie or FCP-- why are there no other options?

TeXShop (or other) and teTeX absolutely rock on OS X. So there's just not much interest in a paying app that will cut productivity in half and make output that looks like garbage.

If you are going to be writing technical documents for more than three months, learn LaTeX. The only exception I can think of would be if your documents have to have very complicated layouts, but not much math.

Alternately, you can install teTeX, and Equation Service . You still have to learn the LaTeX equation syntax, but it's really freaking simple and quick. Equation Service runs the snippet you select through teTeX and replaces the snippet with *voila* a PDF image of the equation fully rendered. You can then move that image around in whatever WYSIWYG editor you like.

Very slick. You get LaTeX's superb equation formatting combined with whatever word layout app you prefer.

Me, I'll stick with TeXShop and teTeX, but others may like this approach better. (I use it for quick down and dirty equations over iChat, for instance. )

You can find everything that you need at this website. I recommend iTeXMac as your TeX typesetter and viewer, though you may prefer OzTeX or TeXShop. iTeXMac and TeXShop both require teTeX. You may find i-Installer, an installer/updater for teTeX at one of my links above in this post or on this web page.

Yeah, now we're talking. Me has pointed to the right pages. I like the instructions provided on the TexShop page:

http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/texshop.html

first download the ii2 installer from here:

http://www.rna.nl/ii.html

get that bad boy up and running and install the following in order (quoting from the TeXShop page):

TeX
CM Super for TeX (this is optional, giving additional fonts)
Ghostscript 8 (or Ghostscript 6 if you are using OSX 10.1.5 or lower)
Freetype 2 (this and the next two programs are only required for conversion between various image formats)
wmf and iconv conversion support
ImageMagick
TeX Support: TeX4ht (this is optional, giving a program to translate tex into html)

Now, of these, I only bother with the first three-- I do all my graphics separately. Basically, this is one of those download as you go, so it's kind of a pain for 56k people. Just follow the instructions as they are presented to you, select the default for everything except for possibly paper size depending on where you live. You're going to need admin access to your computer to do the install, but that's pretty much it.

As I said before, I like TeXShop. When I first got X up and running it was the only thing available, and I have never felt the need to switch, but feel free to choose whichever TeX editor you want.

A lot of TeX is learn as you go. So I'm linking to some files so you can see how TeX code gets typeset. Mind you, I'm not very good with TeX: I learned it well enough for my purposes and no more. I hope there aren't too many math mistakes as well.

http://webpages.charter.net/mharvey/tex_files.sit

Yeah, TeXShop is very nice, although I miss OzTeX that I used in OS 9, but this is only a nostalgia side effect, it seems . I find Kali's case rather rare, as I hardly know cases of people who used or use WYSIWYG editors for writing equations and technical documents. TeX/LaTeX is the de facto standard in this domain, no question, especially in Mathematics and Mathematical and Theoretical Physics. And it should be a more general standard because of the unrivaled quality of produced documents, robustness, cross-platform compatibility and incredible configurability and layout control. I have the right to dream, no?

For the simple-minded (like me), there's Math+Magic (www.mathmagic.com), which is like the Equation Editor in MS Word and AppleWorks, but is easy to set up so that commonly used symbols/templates can be accessed with keyboard shortcuts.

It doesn't seem to be worthy of mention for people responding to this thread, but it's good enough for me for math/engineering/physics homework and labs.

Math Magic comes in several flavors, Pro for InDesign, Pro for Quark Xpress, and standalone pro and lite versions. I have always hated MathType/Equation Editor. I have always loved Expressionist. However, I really hate the fact that its developers have decided that MathEQ should require activation.

MathMaker does beautiful equations. I don't think that its lack of mention represents a weakness in the product line. If anything, its low profile may be due to its Korean origins as opposed to the other developers' US origins.

OzTeX has been ported to MacOS X for a couple of years now. It is a Carbon app that works fine on MacOS 9.x or MacOS X 10.x.
You don't anyone who uses FrameMaker? Expressionist? MathType? Equation Editor? MathEQ? MathMagic? Scientific Word/Scientific Workplace? Several of these can export to TeX.
TeX was developed by Donald Knuth to typeset equations because he hated how badly they were being typeset up to that time. However, that was before the desktop publishing era. It would be most cumbersome to use TeX to layout a magazine. However, TeX can layout just about any kind of book and do so very well. The primary reason that scientists use TeX is that their professional journals require TeX. Rather than having to worry about a myriad of document formats in submitted papers, everyone submits TeX files. Each file can then be easily inserted into a particular flow with the guarrantee that it will appear exactly as the author intended while meeting the publication's style guide.

Actually, that's no longer true.

Most submissions (in CS at least) require PDF, TeX is a distant second any more for a submission format. No, we use LaTeX because for our needs (like equations) it's still tops by a large margin. Word would produce that PDF file also, but it's just too painful.

The only two systems I've seen anyone use are LaTeX or Word, and I've seen too many horror stories (and experienced a few) regarding Word to use it myself any more.

Heck, a friend of mine just last night had Word/Win delete his book.

The whole thing.

He's a little upset.

(He tried to save, it wouldn't let him. He checks the file, it's *gone*. It won't let him Save As either. He notes that there are indeed autosave files, so he quits and restarts Word. It deleted *those* on quitting.)

Did I mention that the final document was due at the publisher's this morning?

So why did he use Word? Because the publisher insisted.

My physics prof swears by Scientific Workplace... granted it's for PC, but he's written 4 or 5 of his own personal textbooks on it (none published, but used like the bible on this campus).

I've never seen how difficult it is to use, but generally the faculty here likes it.

oh man!! LyX is AMAZING!!! It is now OS X compatible as well (for the most part). I used it for my senior seminar in college (they required LaTeX), and everyone was amazed at my output. It looks so professional.

And EASY!!!

Way easy. Much better than anything I have used, and no programming!!!


www.lyx.org

lyx takes all the worry and hassle out of latex. You can print automatically to pdfs.

It is extremely nice to use and lets you input whatever you want.

Give it a whirl. One of my favorite programs around.

Check out Textures, from Blue sky research, which is a commercial version of LaTex. An OS X native version is being developed, but the current version does run under Classic. It isn't free, but it is easier to use than many of the other LaTex versions out there. A lot of the math typesetters I work with use Textures to typeset books with.

Blue Sky also has a LaTex-based math plug-in for QuarkXPress called Mathsetter.

I'm sorry, but LyX looks better and it's free. Hmmm....

Actually, he's a lead engineer at Cisco, and one of the most technically knowledgeable people I've ever met, on several IETF Working Groups, etc, etc, etc.

Unfortunately, he has this bad habit of expecting things to work rationally...

So no, very probable, and he's not a computer idiot.

(He also did his physics graduate work in string theory at Rutgers until he basically got bored with it... scary, scary man.)

Odd, I've tried LyX, and to be honest, I prefer typing in the LaTeX manually. I know exactly what's going to happen in that case, and I find that I can *usually* craft a complex equation faster with raw LaTeX code than I can with point and click on a menu.

I kept praying for a good WYSIWYG LaTeX editor, and when I finally got one... I found out I didn't need it. It's a great way to learn LaTeX though, as long as you can see the raw code underneath.

TeXShop has a LaTeX Panel that provides click access to the most widely used math and environment tidbits, in case you forget that one command you need. It also has a Macros menu that's very extensible and quite powerful. (Check the TeXShop site for more macros to add in.) I plop my most commonly used long constructs there. Very quick and easy.

Then use Expressionist.

Everyone's got their own style of working. I find that the LaTeX learning curve is steep, but once you get the knack, it's faster and more powerful.


In TeXShop, pop up the Latex Panel ( Cmd-= ). The International tab gives you single-click to the accented chars, but if you want to do it from the keyboard, you're going to have to use TeXShop's Macros. Open up the Macros Editor (top of the Macros menu), add in macros for the various accented commands, and bind them to easy to remember keys. While typing hit the key, and voila, the command is inserted.

Alternately, you could set up a Completion trigger to make the command for you, and place the cursor where you want it inside the brackets, but that would require hitting right arrow before continuing.

Try LyX man, it's worth it.

For me, it is just so much faster, when I want to make a mu to type \\mu rather than have to cursor around some panel of sybols. For me it is as much an issue of time savings as anything else. Leaving the office around 6 pm, knowing that my colleague will still be mousing around in Word five hours later--- that makes it all worth it.

But if its not for you, then so be it. There must be a way to easily enter French accents, but I have never had to deal with this much, so I can't help there.

Actually, LaTeX is more popular in Europe than it is in the US.


*shrug* I find that it isn't so bad, but then, I'm not using wacky furrin' characters...

I'm curious though... '\\^i' vs. 'opt-i i'... is it really that intrusive? Or does it just look weird to you?

LyX may in fact be a better choice for you, if it allows for opt-i i -> \\^i conversion on the fly.

Declare these

\\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\\usepackage[francais]{babel}

before the \\begin{document}, then use your keyboard as you always did and your chapters etc. will appear in french. And most importantly... chill down. Learning LaTeX takes time.

Yes, I know that. Actually, my post was not clear enough: I am talking about OzTeX running under OS 9 along with Alpha, one of the best text editors in our platform. When the transition to OS X began, Alpha lost the train and there is no finalised OS X version today. In the meantime TeXShop made his appearance...


I know actually a couple of cases of mathematicians who tortured themselves in writing thesis and papers in a Mac with MS Word.


Of course I was not talking about magazines, but about a more generalised use of LaTeX, outside the academic world. Yes, there is some learning, but still...

And why the professional journals require TeX? Because it is way superior in every aspect from anything easily available to science people. That's why scientists use TeX/LaTeX, that's why professional journals require TeX/LaTeX.