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Date: Sun 08-Jul-1989 05:54:00 From: Unknown Subject: Jotting down math ideas on NeXT Hi, What do you think is the best way to jot down mathematical idea on a computer? I mean I need Greek characters easily typed into any sort of file. So what is your idea among the following options? 1. Use a word processor like Write-Now. 2. Write into a computer in TeX. It is not actually easy without a VorTeX- type processor running concurrently. 3. Become a typesetting program expert and use either Interleaf or Ventura all the time. 4. Forget electronic paper and jot down on a sheet of paer all the time. And put that sheet in a place you will easily forget. Normal CS guys don't need Greek characters, subscript, super script. But Physicists, Engineers, and Mathematicians like me want to see some kind of innovation desperately. What do you thinnk about this situation, NeXT owners? Hugh gsg0384@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu >From: mark@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Mark Jansen)
Date: Sun 10-Jul-1989 13:54:47 From: Unknown Subject: Re: Jotting down math ideas on NeXT In article <246300016@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu>, gsg0384@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu says: > >What do you think is the best way to jot down mathematical idea on a >computer? I mean I need Greek characters easily typed into any sort of Did you omit Mathematica from your list of options on purpose? Surely, in many cases we'll still doodle mathematically on paper, but if you are going to jot down mathematical notation directly into your computer, then Mathematica seems like a good way to go. o It uses a TeX-like notation. This means that jotting down ideas will be a lot slower than paper. It is hard to imagine what kind of keyboard would make computer-jotting as fast as paper-jotting. Perhaps a pen digitizer pad with character recognition software, but I don't think were quite there yet. o However, after initial jotting, Mathematica manipulates the equations for you automagically. This produces a speedup which *could* makeup for the original slowdown at jot-entry time. o Mathematica also outputs any of your intermediate or final results as either TeX or PostScript, which means you won't have to re-enter them when you write papers. Anyway, of your original choices, I'd use TeX because I already know it. On the Amiga, you can type into your editor, send immediately to TeX running in the background, and have TeX send the results directly to a screen previewer running in another window, so you a very powerful variety of WYSIWYG --- all the power of TeX with nearly immediate visual display of the results. The author of Amiga TeX has been sighted lurking around comp.sys.next, so perhaps we can hope to see the same capability on NeXT soon. >From: ali@polya.Stanford.EDU (Ali T. Ozer)
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