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Aucbvax.5727 fa.info-vax utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!info-vax Tue Jan 12 16:05:44 1982 TeX and Scribe >From RYLAND@SRI-KL Wed Jan 6 20:03:08 1982 To clarify a little here:

(a) Scribe is wonderfully human-engineered. TeX is not. Scribe doesn't do math very well at all; TeX does it wonderfully (look at Knuth Vol II, 2nd Edition for some samples of what it does). TeX is a typesetting language. Scribe is a document production system (has lots of built-in features for bibliography use, etc). (These are clearly oversimplifications, but nonetheless fairly accurate.)

(b) Scribe costs $30K to businesses from Unilogic, Inc, and something less to educational institutions. Scribe runs on -10's, -20's, VAXes running both Unix and VMS, and soon, IBM systems. Scribe can drive the most popular typesetters and Xerox printers.

(c) TeX is free. Versions exist for a plethora of machines, including Vax Unix and Vax VMS. The VMS version comes from OMSI and is fairly poor, because DEC's Pascal, on which it's based, is very poor. It promises to get much better as the Pascals available on the VAX get better.

TeX produces device-independent output, and requires further drivers for your favorite output device; some fairly exotic devices have been made to work with TeX, but count on having at least a Versatec-resolution device. -------

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