Technical Word processor with maths ? - Page 2

I'll second this.

There's a steep learning curve to LaTeX, but it is *SO* very much worth it in the end.

Ya gotta admit, the final product is just too purty.


Edit: LyX, on the other hand... er... ow, my eyes? Good start, but it has a long way to go before I'd consider it polished enough for heavy everyday use. One to keep an eye on though.

You're going to have to describe by what you mean as 'normal'... to strike an é, for instance, I have to hit (on my US keyboard) opt-e, then e again.

You *can* still use the Macros setup, you know... For instance, I just set up in a few seconds that when Cmd-Opt-e (no shift) is pressed, I get é, and another that gives me è when Cmd-Opt-E (shift) is pressed. You can adjust them to be close to whatever you're used to.

Welcome to the wonderful world of umpteen ways to do anything in LaTeX...

fontenc is a package that allows fonts to be included via their definition names (technobabble, ignore this explanation). To be honest, I'm not sure what subtleties of babel may need this for.

babel is the multi-lingual language support package. The old way of doing other languages was to include a french.sty or german.sty in your \\document header. (Ie, \\usepackage{french}) That's still the simplest. But the most fragile. babel fixes a lot of the problems with the .sty files.

For one thing, it lets you have multiple languages in one document, if you need to switch back and forth. Just list the languages you'll be using, with the default last in the list, such as \\usepackage[english, francais]{babel}. Now you can use either, but French is the default. You can also provide language lists to the entire document for *all* packages to pick up by stating \\documentclass[english,francais]{article}. Then you just need to say \\usepackage{babel} later on.

You can switch languages by \\selectlanguage{<language>}, or you can typeset just a snippet via \\foreignlanguage{<language>}[<text>}.

Why all this bother? Because each language has capitalization and hyphenation rules, as well as simple heading titles, and this way you can automatically observe them on the fly.


As to how to make this 'permanent', look into TeXShop's templates. They allow you to set up a blank document however you want. Saves tons of time.

I was afraid you were going to say that.

I'm thinking... TextExtras. Let me look into it and get back to you.

Edit: Just so you know what I'm thinking, there are utilities that allow you set, on a per app basis, text replacement macros. So if you type é in TeXShop, it will insert the proper code into the document on the fly. As for not *seeing* it, I'm afraid you need to talk to Richard Koch and friends, the developers. TeXShop is *not* WYSIWYG, and LaTeX was developed in the 70's before Unicode or even, really, international character support.

Edit2: Or... TeXShop lets you define the scripts to run your LaTeX typesetting job. You *could* have a simple script that strips out the accented characters and replaces them with the proper codes between TeXShop and pdflatex... you'd see é, pdflatex would get {\\'e}. Of course, this would mean that you wouldn't be able to share these files or typeset them outside of TeXShop easily... Oooooh, so many ways to geek out over this.

Strange, when I said you can use your keyboard as always, I meant that you can type directly in the editor characters with accents. It just works and the compilation does not give errors. Oh, perhaps you should change the TeXShop preferences, Document->Encoding->Iso Latin 1.

Actually, it is exactly this kind of writing that gives you total control on layout. If for some reason you want change (continuously) the size or the exact position of your subscripts, or your sub-subscripts, or even the font, you can do it with other special commands. However, LaTeX has some restrictions since it is essentially a set of macros on top of TeX. It is TeX, to be exact, that will leave you to do whatever you want in your document, if you know how to.

About writing speed: at the beginning, it is difficult to write formulas quickly. But when you get used to, it will be much faster and more pleasant.

PB, I just tried this, and it just stripped the characters out completely.

âbcdéfg became bcdfg.

You're going to kick yourself.

Try \\wedge




Edit: There are *hundreds* more symbols, etc, than the palettes show, and new packages can create new ones all the time. (One of the reasons I tend to like rolling my own LaTeX code - no GUI gets them all.) The best synopsis I've seen of the basic installed ones is in Goossens, Mittelbach and Samarin's _A LaTeX Companion_, pgs 218-222. Five pages of nothing but symbols and their commands. Since these are produced by mathematicians for mathematicians, if you don't know what the command is, try just \\<nameofsymbol>. Usually it works, within reason. Those three little dots in an upward facing triangle? \\therefore. \\subset, \\superset, \\leftarrow, \\forall, \\exists, \\sum, etc... they actually make it readable like natural language in many cases.

\\forall x, y \\in S : x = y^3

Easy!

If you have an open document, TeXShop will not apply the encoding modification to that. You first set the encoding in preferences, and then you open a new document to test.

Did that. Set it, made a brand new doc, didn't work.

Since this isn't a problem for me, I'm not going to worry about it.

For some online documentation, look this or this. I am going to sleep now...

See above.

GUI palettes have to be stripped down to only the most common items to be of any real use, otherwise they just become unwieldy and cumbersome to use. So unless you're just doing basic equation typesetting, you're not going to find what you want, most of the time.

Hence, learning the commands. Luckily, as I also pointed out, it's generally easy to figure out, and there is a *lot* of documentation out there. PB's links and my book recommendation will get you far. Also, Kopka and Daly's _A Guide to LaTeX2e_ is excellent.


It's actually in there... I assume the Lagrangian script you're talking about is the mathcal font. (Or, if it's the High German, try \\frak{text}).

But, this is exactly my point - no GUI will get you everything, much better to learn the commands. You'll be quicker in the long run as well.

Nobody requires you to do anything because it will make your life better. They require you to do things to make their lives better. The professional journals that require papers be submitted in TeX do so because it makes the job of the typesetter easier, not to make the author's life better. To believe otherwise is to betray a naïveté greater than that of believers in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.

And, as I stated before, I haven't seen a professional journal *require* TeX submission in several years.

PDF is by far the outstanding winner for preferred format, with LaTeX a distant second, and Word only twice in the last er, 10 years. PDF makes it trivial for the final typesetter, as long as you use the proper LaTeX style or Word template that they provide.

The vast majority of the people in tech submission use LaTeX because they do, indeed, choose to for ease and elegance over tools like Word. PDF frees you to use the tool you prefer, and most people still prefer LaTeX for good reasons.

Unfortunately, in the social sciences and humanities it isn't uncommon for journals to require submissions in Word or WordPerfect format (with Word usually preferred). It is also not uncommon for journals in these areas to refuse submissions in TeX/LaTeX format. Very frustrating, all in all.

Note what I highlighted.

Now, stop and consider that LaTeX is an extensible system with packages and styles (and fonts) floating in from god knows where. It is, if not impossible, highly impractical, for an app designer to let the user customize for *ANY* potential thing to come down the pipe in a graphical format. The Macros in TeXShop take over for this in most ways.


It could be, but do you really mean to say *ALL* symbols? No, just the ones that Expressionist already defines. And that may be great for most folks, but mathematicians are a wily bunch, and you don't want to see what some physicists dream up for notation... Expressionist plain won't work for them. LaTeX will, in textual form. A GUI panel won't. No app designer can predict every possible LaTeX style or package that will come down the pipe, the best they can do is provide an extensible user-customizable method for macros, either to be clicked on in a menu or in a button palette. A glyph palette is quite a bit harder to integrate given LaTeX's odd font support. (Not impossible, but more than slightly difficult.) TeXShop's palette could certainly be beefed up, but as we all know, too much beef drives you mad.


Yup, I have a little document from here that I keep either on screen or as a print out that's my rare symbols cheat sheet.


Cmd-shift-4 will get you a crosshairs cursor. Select the window from corner to corner, and a PDF of that window image will be placed as a file on your Desktop. Upload it to a web server somewhere (.Mac, etc), and provide an Image link in a post here. Simple, no?



Edit: Just to nail this point home a bit more, here's a document that lists *most* known symbols in LaTeX. It's 2.4MB in size. The math section *alone* is 28 pages of symbols.

Do you *really* want to try and use a palette suite with all that??

TeXShop could do more, but what you like someone else has no need for, and vice versa. I really do think that they got the basics well and the rest is handled better by the Macros.

For entirely more LaTeX information than you'll ever need, try http://www.tug.org/.

Nowhere did I say that every professional journal requires submissions in TeX. Certainly I have never been required to submit TeX files. That is true of most journal submissions. High energy physics, however, is one field in which you submit your papers in TeX or you don't get published.

Nor did I say that nobody required it. Only that the circles I run in tend not to anymore. Heck, even the NSF is preferring PDF these days.

Maybe one day they'll get with the program.

Did I say otherwise? I said they use both LaTeX since it is superior in every aspect, typesetting and workflow included.

Or better \\mathfrak{L}. Furthermore, with the euler package ( \\usepackage{euler} ), you have the command \\mathscr{L}, which will put in place the L from the eusm family. The mathrsfs package ( \\usepackage{mathrsfs} ) will transform \\mathscr{L} into something different (it will use the rsfs font family). Obviously, you cannot use at the same time both euler and mathrsfs. At least not directly.

I remember using some special fraktur fonts at the time, but this was under plain TeX; very nice for Lie groups and algebras. I don't know how easy is it to use them in math mode in LaTeX.

OK, I stop here before degenerate this thread into typography. A few links that you (Kali) may find useful:

TeX for the impatient

LATEX pour les d?butants sous MacOS X

Beginners LATEX

NSF has actually relaxed its PDF requirements. When FastLane first went up, you were allowed to submit your proposals only in PDF. PDFwriter-generated PDF files were explicitly forbidden. Today, you are allowed to submit M$ Word documents which are then converted to PDF by NSF's Fastlane servers. Most of my colleagues now submit their proposals to NSF Fastlane in M$ Word format.

The first command will work if you have \\usepackage{amssymb} in your document. It produces a gothic L. For the second one you need \\usepackage{mathrsfs}. It produces a calligraphic L (different from the standard LaTeX calligraphic \\cal{L}). The two packages can be used at the same time, and the corresponding commands are for math mode only (between 2 $, like $\\cal{L}$).

Then use Expressionist.

*shrug*

Everyone has their favorite tool.

Personally, I write LaTeX 'like computer code' because computer code is written that way for a reason: it's legible.

Spacing in math mode can be fine tuned with the following:

Positive space (add space):
thinnest to thickest:
@, \\thinspace \\medspace \\thickspace \\quad \\qquad

thin, med and thick can be replaced with \\, \\: \\; respectively

Negative space (remove space):
thinnest to thickest:
\
egthickspace \
egmedspace \
egthinspace @!

thin can be replaced with \\!



Really, a good text on this subject would do a lot for you.

You can of course use other fonts, whatever you have, but it would be complicated, especially for beginners. See Mathinst
.


Now, what's that?


We discussed that again, that's LaTeX, it will take time, at least some months. If you need to write something now and quickly, use what you know best, not LaTeX. I am sorry, I cannot help you on that.


What do you want to do exactly?


When I have to write something in LaTeX yes, although sometimes I like the return to the roots (X11 editors and xterm; there you write everything from scratch). Unfortunately for me, I have lately to use MS Word (no choice on that, no too often fortunately); not only that, but due to some formal requirements I have to break basic typography rules... You know, Word makes that very easy. Never mind...

*LOL* I think you hit the nail on the head then.

Cool, I didn't realize you could do that.

Nice way to learn LaTeX.

Glad to hear it works that way for you!

By the way, where do you get Expressionist from? I cannot find something to download. Is it a commercial product?