From: Stewart Russell Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Jason L. Tibbitts III Subject: REVIEW: AmigaTeX 3.1h Keywords: application, page layout, typesetting, TeX Path: menudo.uh.edu Distribution: world Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.applications Reply-To: Stewart Russell AmigaTeX is a full implementation of the TeX document preparation and typesetting system for Amiga computers. It includes automatic font generation using Metafont, virtual font mapping, PostScript font support, and Encapsulated PostScript and IFF graphics extensions. AmigaTeX makes good use of the Amiga's facilities, and at US$300, offers superb value for money. [ This review appeared in issue 12 of Jeff Walker's Just Amiga Monthly (JAM) magazine, but in a slightly different form. I tried selling this around most of the UK Amiga magazines, but they weren't interested. Feel free to use this review in any user magazine --- contact me at the Reply To: address if you want some pictures. I don't get around on Usenet much, so if you need me, use the Reply To: address. This review was not really intended for TeXperts, so please excuse any totally obvious bits. Stewart C. Russell Glasgow, Scotland. ] Page layout is a skilled job. Anyone who has looked at a badly DTP'd page will know this. Typesetting is a very skilled job, especially when difficult layouts such as mathematical formulae are involved. Universities generally have a large computer installation, and the facilities for publishing books papers written in house. Computers are great at keeping track of large numbers of measurements, which is essentially the basis of typesetting. The TeX Cycle TeX creates documents in its own special way. First, create your source file; AmigaTeX has no text editing facilities of its own, so you can use whatever editor you are happiest with. Next, run your source through the TeX program to create a device-independent (DVI) file, which contains all the page layout information. Then preview the layout on the screen viewer, which gives as good a picture of each page of the document as is possible on a computer screen. If you are happy with what you got out of the previewer, you send the DVI file through one of the printer drivers. With luck, you will have a document to cherish, output at the best quality your printer can manage. On a standard implementation of TeX, you would need to exit the text editor before running TeX, then exit TeX before running the previewer, and so on. With a 1 MB Amiga, you will probably be forced to do the same with AmigaTeX. With more memory, TeX and Preview can coexist. Preview responds to signals from TeX, telling it when it is free to display a page. With an ARexx-compatible text-editor, the whole package becomes completely interactive, with errors in the source being highlighted via a return code from TeX. Since Usenet's graphics facilities tend to zero, it's not worth including any TeX source or output here. Wander across to a university library, and flick through some books on TeX. You'll see what TeX source looks like, and more importantly, the superb results it can create. Macros TeX requires macro packages to become usable. AmigaTeX comes with two general purpose packages, Plain and LaTeX. Plain TeX allows control over every aspect of the page layout. Sometimes this means that the document gets so full of command sequences that it becomes impossible to read. LaTeX tries to maintain the flow of the document. It lacks some of the powerful primitive commands of Plain TeX, but has high level functions such as automatic section numbering, citation databases, instant footnotes and index generation. It's what most people use first, because it is straightforward to use. A common criticism of TeX documents is that they all look the same. With LaTeX, this is intentional; a standard document such as a PhD thesis should be uniformly laid out, since it is the content and not the presentation which is to be considered. Many TeX documents look the same because many users never bother to learn the more complex structures required to create new layouts; the power is there, if only people looked for it. TeX treats words as boxes, which are stuck together with glue that is free to stretch or shrink by a set amount. The lines of text, which can be independent of the lines on the input file, are also in boxes which can move about very slightly according to the current glue settings. Words cannot stretch or shrink, but they can be hyphenated across two lines. TeX has some very clever rules about this, and manages to hyphenate most instances correctly. A hyphenation dictionary is used for those difficult words. Fonts TeX uses a very elegant set of vector fonts, all designed for maximum readability at their design scale. These fonts are defined in units smaller than the wavelength of visible light, so no advance in phototypesetting will ever render TeX fonts obsolete. The Computer Modern series of fonts created by Donald Knuth are designed to be pleasing to the eye, without being simply derivatives of the existing classics. Since TeX is for serious publications, they are only available in sizes ranging from 5 to 17 points, all fully hinted, with an inch-high font for headlines. Scaling to any size is possible, but gross font scaling is not recommended, since the character stroke widths look correct at sizes close to the design scale. TeX does not use the vector fonts directly, since it must print to some sort of raster device. Compressed bitmap versions of the vector fonts are used, since there is approximately ten minutes calculation (on a standard A500) involved in generating one font at a given resolution. These fonts are what make up the bulk of the AmigaTeX distribution. There's around six megabytes of fonts with the basic package alone, more with each printer driver. Each font disk is colour coded, and AmigaTeX asks for them by name as it requires a certain font. A cache of these font bitmaps is built up on the hard disk, speeding up print times if the font is needed again. If you wish to use a strange sized font, AmigaTeX will ask you if you wish it generated in the Previewer. If you really need the font, the Metafont font generator is launched, and the font will appear in the fullness of time. Metafont isn't required too often once a mature cache has been established, so the time delay can be lived with. Metafont can also be used to design your own fonts. It uses a straightforward ASCII language to do this, the intricacies of which are explained in another book by Prof. Knuth. Like TeX, it is powerful, and easy to use once you understand its way of doing things. The latest version of AmigaTeX is compliant with TeX 3.1, which implements virtual fonts. A virtual font can be made up of parts from any other font - you could have upper case taken from a 10 point serif font, and lower case using the upper case characters from an 8 point set, giving a neat small caps font. One of the neater uses for virtual fonts is to allow the use of PostScript fonts in AmigaTeX documents. Both Type 1 and Type 3 fonts are supported, the former having anti-aliasing `hints' to give better output quality. Fonts produced by Adobe Systems are very well defined, but do not have the extreme precision of TeX's own. They do have the distinct advantage of being rendered very quickly (two minutes per font) and can be used totally transparently by AmigaTeX. Virtual font bitmaps are cached like any other TeX font, so rendering is a once-only delay. Graphics Plain TeX (and LaTeX) have only very simple line drawing commands. To counter this, TeX has an extremely powerful command called \special, which is so powerful that TeX ignores it completely. It is passed intact to the DVI file, and it is up to the printer driver to do something with it. It is in this way that AmigaTeX can render IFF and Encapsulated PostScript graphics into a predefined box. Adrian Aylward's `Post' PostScript interpreter is used to render EPS graphics into bitmaps of the correct density. It does this quickly; most screen graphics are drawn in under a minute, and even very large graphics at 360dpi took no more than four on my ageing A500. EPS clips are scaled to the correct box size, an operation which requires the clip's %%BoundingBox comment to be read. Therefore the clip must conform to Adobe's structuring convention; most graphics I created in PDraw 2 did not, for some reason. But then, Gold Disk software has an unexplained aversion to running on my machine. Thankfully I have two disks full of clips produced on the Mac, and these worked well. Using IFF graphics is much quicker than EPS, but the quality does not begin to compare. Low-contrast bitmaps can appear rather muddy, but the same bitmap printed from PageSetter II appears as a solid pane of grey. The mechanism for including IFF graphics is provided by an external library. This filters the picture via standard algorithms (Ordered, Classic Halftone, Floyd-Steinberg and Thresholding) and allows various noise and smoothing corrections to be made. The end result is a black and white bitmap, reasonably free of low-resolution jaggies, but still no match for proper photographic halftones. Printer Support AmigaTeX printer drivers aren't simple routines. For the most part, they eschew Preferences, and send printer-specific data to PAR: or SER:. This might seem a very un-Amiga way of doing things, but there are extremely good reasons for this approach. The first is speed. Intuition is not known for its rapidity, and even the fine printer drivers from Wolf Faust can't help the overhead involved in going through several layers of operating system, rather than rendering and printing direct. I managed to get a whole page printed at 180dpi in a mere 22 seconds on my NEC P20 [that's the UK name; they're something different in other places - SCR]. Going up to 360dpi took around a minute for the same page, but was really too dark since the print-head sometimes made four passes. The second reason for avoiding PRT: is memory usage. AmigaTeX is quite conservative with memory, but even so, rendering large bitmaps with the Post interpreter takes up space. The printer.device steals quite a load of memory just to exist, and that memory might be needed by AmigaTeX. The drivers have to marshal fonts (including firing up Metafont where necessary), initiate PostScript rendering processes, call up the IFF picture filtering routines and decode the rest of the DVI file before a single dot hits paper. Considering most drivers are only around 42 KB long, it's a wonder that they can fit all of this functionality in such a small space. Drivers exist for most popular printers; see the list at the end. If, however, your machine is not listed you can use the Preferences driver, which although slower, should work with just about anything. One driver program renders pages to IFF ILBM graphics files. The resultant files tend to be very big, but are a good source for well-formed text banners for graphics and DTP work. The Manual The manual is a huge ring-bound affair, as befits a system as complex as TeX. The first half deals with the specifics of AmigaTeX, since it is considerably more smart than a plain vanilla TeX. Tom writes in an easy, informative style which is certainly very readable over coffee. My one criticism of this fine manual is that it's too easy to miss valuable gems of information; points are rarely reiterated, and are never printed in larger type. I only read manuals if I have to, so check lists and summaries are appreciated. The other half of the manual is a very brief reference for any TeX system. It includes a good tutorial on TeX, but it can be no substitute for Prof. Knuth's TeXbook. Indeed, every piece of literature pertaining to TeX makes references to The TeXbook. This peeved me until I bought the book, then I realised why; it's probably the best-written manual you could wish for. You will need it. Support [I haven't dealt with Radical Eye direct, but only with the UK distributors. - SCR] AmigaTeX is now supplied and supported in the UK and Eire by Industrial Might & Logic Limited of Brighton. They forward the Radical Eye newsletter about twice a year. IML also keep a large collection of AmigaTeX-related public domain including fonts, EPS clip art and utilities, and there is a useful support conference on the wonderful CIX. I've been extremely happy with the quality of the support I received from IML while writing this review. But then, it would be foolish to offer anything less for a product as complex as AmigaTeX. Conclusion I do not have a terribly large Amiga setup; an 1 MB A500 with half a megabyte of Chip RAM and an old 20 MB A590 with 2 MB RAM. After reading dire warnings of memory usage when printing PostScript graphics, I was very pleasantly surprised that my system proved adequate for everything I could throw at AmigaTeX. I reckon I used AmigaTeX every day for a month before writing this review, and it never misbehaved once. [That "one month" is now three months - and AmigaTeX still hasn't done anything stupid.] My first AmigaTeX installation was fraught with problems - I was still using ARP's bugged Execute at the time, and the script failed badly. Replacing this file with the CBM original removes the problem. [I had to reinstall the package after a hard disk failure.] Should you buy AmigaTeX, then? If you are wanting striking presentation, with WOBs and tints and other fripperies, go for PPage or Pagestream. If you want to produce highly readable documents quickly and beautifully, go for AmigaTeX. It is what the Amiga is made for. -- AmigaTeX 3.1h - published by Radical Eye Software Box 2081 Stanford CA 94309 USA Phone (415) 32-AMIGA BBS (415) 32-RADIO [Supplier in UK and Eire - Industrial Might & Logic Ltd 58 Cobden Road Brighton East Sussex BN2 2TJ Tel - (0273) 621393 ] An AmigaTeX demo disk is available free, on written request. -------- Pricing (All UK prices in Pounds Sterling; ASCII doesn't support pound signs, so we'll have to make do with hashes.) AmigaTeX main package (14 disks) US$200 #111.63 (#95+VAT) Printer Drivers and fonts US$100 #52.88 (#45+VAT) (All include Preferences and IFF drivers) Drivers available for - Laser (HP LaserJet, PostScript and DeskJet) Epson 9-pin NEC/Epson 24-pin ImageWriter II -- |Stewart C. Russell | University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, UK| |clcp16@vaxa.strath.ac.uk | (opinions my own, not theirs) | | Also known as scruss@cix.compulink.co.uk | | "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" - Keats | | "You lying get!" - The Living Carpets, Vic Reeves Big Night Out |