wyswyg editors for tex (was re: replacement for openoffice)

[icantthinkofone]

icantthinkofone wrote:
> Frank Jahnke wrote:
>>> From what little experience I have with PS and *roff the idea of
>>> hacking inline embedded languages just for typesetting sounds stupid
>>> beyond belief....     
>>
>> You have to learn one of the troff macro packages.  -ms is the easiest,
>> but I agree that a wysiwyg document processor is just easier for this
>> purpose.  I'm agnostic about this one, and use Abiword (which I have
>> never had any issues compiling, and do install all of the plug-ins),
>> TextMaker, OO.o, Word or WP.  For this purpose it does not really matter
>> much, and I have all installed, either natively or in a virtual machine.
>>
>> For technical or scientific writing, though, there is nothing that can
>> replace TeX or troff unless you invest a lot of money into adjunct
>> programs for Word.  Even then you still wind up with an ugly document.
>> Sometimes that does not matter (like business letters) but hey, I'm a
>> perfectionist and want my documents to look good in addition to
>> containing good information.
>>
>> FWIW, my "typical" scientific article has over 100 references (which
>> change as the document is written), a lot of partial differential
>> equations and their solutions, graphs, chemistry, tables, images (like
>> photomicrographs), and so forth.  For that troff and TeX are the only
>> way to go unless you want to spend a considerable amount of money for
>> Word add-ins.  By itself Word is not that good, but an ecosystem has
>> developed around it to make it workable.  And it is the standard.
>>
>> I'll stand by my basic recommendation.  For everyday use and Word
>> compatibility, buy TextMaker (and PlanMaker if you use spreadsheets).
>> For the heavy lifting use TeX (or LaTeX or LyX) or troff and its
>> pre-processors and macro packages.
>>
>>  
>>> and since all the more "traditional" (sorry I do not think of any
>>> inline text language as being "traditional")
>>>     
>>
>> Here you are misguided.  The text formatters *are* the traditional way
>> to process documents.  In fact, Unix existed only because its commercial
>> justification was the text processing system.  And that was built on
>> DEC's runoff (with its embedded codes), which the Unix fellows
>> abbreviated to roff, which became nroff for fixed-width character
>> devices, and troff for typesetters.
>>
>> It took WordStar to change that paradigm (there are many other ones, of
>> course, but WS was the gorilla in the late 1970s and early 1980s).
>>
>> Frank
>>
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>>   
> Can you explain the difference between troff and groff.  I thought 
> groff is the more useable troff, or do I have that backwards, or is 
> that only a fbsd replacement?
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And another thing, how do you choose whether to use TeX or troff?  
What's the diff?