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2 TeX for the PC

Although WYSIWYG Windows ``office" software is easier to use for non-technical word-processing, TEX and/or LATEX are still the typesetting systems of choice for many technical documents. This is because

  • they provide a high-quality display for symbols and equations,

  • they have been adopted as standards for electronic document submission to many technical publishers and preprint archives, and

  • they use ASCII text format for the document source files, so that these are portable and can be archived without fear that their format will become unreadable.

Most scientists are familiar with TEX and LATEX and many also have access to PC's running MS-Windows at work and/or at home. TEX-based packages for MS-Windows are therefore likely to be of interest to authors of technical documents for some time, and several comprehensive packages have been developed. Modern publication also calls for format flexibility: output may be needed on paper, as compact single files for electronic document transmission, or as an easily-navigable web with hyperlinks to other material. Postscript, PDF and HTML file clusters, or a mixture of these, are all desirable output formats. Free software for producing all of these formats from a single TEX or LATEX source has been available for some time on the NRAO's Unix/Linux platforms. The same capabilities can also be provided, at zero cost other than disk space and installation effort, on the Win9x, NT or Win2k systems.

Section 2.1 describes a freely-available and well-supported TEX and LATEX package for Microsoft Windows that I have used and can recommend; Section 2.2 mentions alternatives.

Section 3 describes a set of packages that can be installed together to convert LATEX source to HTML.



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2001-04-18