Equations

[Michel Talon]

Eduardo Morras said:

> Excuse me for the intromision, but i'm reading this thread, waiting 
> for a tiny and easy app (no tex,troff,...) that can do equations as 
> the first message said. Can i think that there is no such app?

There may be some under Windows, but i don't know. Under Unix machines i
don't know anything easier (*) than TeX. For an introduction to students i
have tried the OpenOffice equation editor, it is quite similar (hence
as easy or difficult) to the things you type in TeX, except it has far
less possibilities and does a poor job of formatting. People say me that
the Word equation editor is even worse. By the way, there is a Java
program which transforms OpenOffice equations (and text) into TeX source
(writer2latex), but unfortunately i don't see anything of reasonable
quality to do the converse.

(*) There is a GUI tool which is supposed to ease typing TeX formulas,
because you see them a you type, it is LyX. I have never found it very
intuitive. There is also a mode for emacs which has partly such
functionality. And finally there is more radical departure from Latex
than LyX which is Texmacs (beware, it needs a powerful machine).
Maybe some day it will evolve into an easy to use scientific editor.
At the moment, i have found that using an helping tool like kile
or texmaker (this one exists for Windows) allows students who have never
seen TeX previously to type scientific texts with equations in less
than a day in plain Latex. With troff i have zero experience.

-- 

Michel TALON