[tex-live] Re: commercial TeXs

[Hans Hagen]

Martin Schröder wrote:

>On 2004-06-04 12:24:33 -0700, Charley Bay wrote:
>  
>
>>>Charley Bay wrote:
>>>      
>>>
>>Sebastian replied:
>>    
>>
>>>>I still have questions about other parts of the 
>>>>landscape:  What about some of the 'commercial'
>>>>distributions? 
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>no serious innovation for years, I believe
>>>      
>>>
>>Ah, distractions from the web no doubt.
>>    
>>
> <>
> No, most of them simply smell very funny because they have fallen
> way behind.
>
> BSR, Y&Y, PCTeX and TrueTeX to me seem to be in different stages
> of becoming obsolete as TeX installations (e.g. no adoption to
> new OSs and/or no direkt PDF). None of these IMHO can compete
> with MikTeX or TeXshop. But they have nice fonts. :-)
>
> But there is BaKoMa, which seems to be all-singing, all-dancing.
> And MicroPress with VTeX, which has an integrated PS-RIP and does
> PDF. And Scientific Word/Workplace, which ships with web2c.

what is innovation  ...  maybe 20 years from now rendering docs will be 
obsolete anyway

with respect to 'fallen behind', as long as they serve an audience the 
people working on it can make a living; the is not that much difference 
from a couple of families living of a commercial (maybe old fashioned)  
distribution on the one hand, and 10 families living from using the 
'modern' pdftex as hidden engine  in a page imposition program; once an 
author starts writing the only thing that mattersis that his tex 
environment works: most time is spent on writing; actually the same is 
true for goin gfrom input to output (say tex/xml -> pdf): most time goes 
into solving problems and of course a language/system may help, but in 
my daily live, dealing with  funny input (in spite of being validated) 
and  inconsistent designs (in spite of all those dtp programs) takes 
most of the time -)

also, i'm always puzzled by the 'one and only best sulution' approach; 
why  one tex instead of many tex's, why one  kind of fo-xml instead of  
many  xml-mapping languages; solving everything in one solution is bound 
to fail some time (watch all those big applications getting more and 
more complex); why the monopolies etc; kind of interesting that in a 
'free world' there is always that tendency to 'the one and only 
application'  (kind of applying communism in a capatalist environment)

Hans