Re: Printing under OS X

[Tim McNamara]

Garglemonster <garglemonster@my-deja.com> writes:

>>>>>> On Wed, 21 Jan 2004 08:59:03 -0600, Tim McNamara <timmcn@bitstream.net> 
>>>>>> said:
>
>
>     >>  AucTeX is not a (La)TeX distribution.  It is only an emacs
>     >> package for making dealing with (La)TeX files easier.  In
>     >> order to do anything useful with LaTeX files, you'll need to
>     >> install a LaTeX distribution.
>
>     Tim> Yes, thank, I was able to figure out the essentials.
>     Tim> Mainly I want to be able to send articles for publication
>     Tim> formatted in LaTeX, so- as it turns out from my research- I
>     Tim> would be perfectly satisfied with a previewer rather than
>     Tim> being able to print hard copies.
>
> but even if you do that, latex/tex have to chew on the files first.
> whether you have them spit the files out in the direction of the
> screen or the printer, you still need tex/latex.  the upshot is that
> you pretty much need a full tex installation even to preview files.
> you could run latex on someone else's machine that you access
> remotely, but that's hardly worth the trouble.  if worse comes to
> worse, just get the source for tetex and compile it yourself.
> texlive is another option.

Ah, well, rapidly becoming more trouble than its worth!  With limited
hard drive space, the excessive mechanics of a full install of all the
various libraries and binaries, sorting out all the dependencies,
etc., is too much of a PITA.  It's at times like these that the rather
Byzantine architecture of the Unix filesystem becomes annoying.

Pity, really, as it looks to me like LaTeX ought to be renderable
along the same lines as HTML and not require 100+ megabytes of stuff
to do even the simplest task.

> and besides, you will want to print out your stuff for editing.

A fountain pen is so much simpler.