Re: Printing under OS X

[Garglemonster]

>>>>> On Wed, 21 Jan 2004 17:31:58 -0600, Tim McNamara
>>>>> <timmcn@bitstream.net> said: 


    >> the upshot is that you pretty much need a full tex installation
    >> even to preview files.  you could run latex on someone else's
    >> machine that you access remotely, but that's hardly worth the
    >> trouble.  if worse comes to worse, just get the source for
    >> tetex and compile it yourself.  texlive is another option.

    Tim> Ah, well, rapidly becoming more trouble than its worth!  With
    Tim> limited hard drive space, the excessive mechanics of a full
    Tim> install of all the various libraries and binaries, sorting
    Tim> out all the dependencies, etc., is too much of a PITA.  It's
    Tim> at times like these that the rather Byzantine architecture of
    Tim> the Unix filesystem becomes annoying.

I've only done this with a ppc mac running linux, but tetex is pretty
easy to compile and install.  Took a while, but it was
straightforward.  Dunno how much of a pain it would be on OSX.  (Does
it have tar, cc, make and all that?  Some of those commercial unices
were a pain that way.)  There's not much we can do about the drive
space problem, though.

    Tim> Pity, really, as it looks to me like LaTeX ought to be
    Tim> renderable along the same lines as HTML and not require 100+
    Tim> megabytes of stuff to do even the simplest task.

The point of tex & latex is to output stuff through the printer that
looks good.  That's not a big concern with html where you don't know
what browsers with what settings people will be pointing at your
document.  Anyway, if you don't mind html approximations of your latex
files, you could just "compile" them with one of the latex to html
converters.  You could even set up auctex to do that.  There are
several options on this front.

    >> and besides, you will want to print out your stuff for editing.

    Tim> A fountain pen is so much simpler.

Depends on how much text you have and what it is.  Editing longish
articles can be a pain with pens & notebooks.  Verse would be
different.  I do compose with a fountain pen, but at some point all my
writing goes through emacs/auctex to latex and out my printer.  Then i
unleash my editing "51" and m800...


-- 
garglemonster@my-deja.com

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