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Re: Documentation & Help Desk suggestions




Paul,

> I know there is more information on the Rice web site, but I find:
>   http://www.cs.rice.edu/CS/PLT/Publications/
> very intimidating. This is in part because I don't easily use all the
> file formats. I don't think I've ever used DVI (what is it?) and I have
> Ghostscript for PS but usually forget about it, and the fonts look bad
> in the version I have. Also there is just so much to wade through there
> I don't know where to begin.
 
"DVI" means "Device Independant". This format is a lot older than PDF,
probably as old as Postcript, or even more.

DVI files are the output of a text processing system called TeX,
invented
by Donald Knuth in the seventies, while he was having trouble typsetting
his very famous books "The Art of Computer Programming". A second progam
is used to transform DVI files into postcript ones, for printing. This 
system runs on almost everything, IBM mainframes included, and I've been
told that TeX has been used (it probably still is) to drive
photocomposers.

TeX is a "marker" typesetting language which is used to produce very
high
quality outputs like the one required for books. As it is low level,
many 
extensions have been designed for it. One of the most important ones, 
LaTeX helped describing documents in structured terms. It is a standard 
in the academic world, and most implementations come with macros for 
important journals (Science, Nature, Astronomy & Astrophysics, and so
on). 
A WYSIWYM software, called LyX has been created on top of it. It's
available 
both for Linux and win32 (with Cgywin).

When you are writing books, especially if they are large, very
structured 
and have complex tables, equations, figures and so on, this set of
systems 
can do amazing things and the result are of very high quality. I don't
know 
if it's still the case, but there was a time where books from MIT Press, 
Addison Wesley, Morgan Kaufmann and other major academic editors
"smelled" 
LaTeX.

This is why you are very likely to find DVI and PS documents in the
academic
world.

For Ghostscript and ghostview, the result may depend a lot of the set of 
fonts you have. Of course, having a recent version of this software may
help too.

Regards

Marie-Noëlle Baechler