equation editors and TeX (long) (was "Equation Editor")

[Paul Topping <PaulT mathtype com>]

Martin,

I had know way of knowing that your comments were made in ignorance of the
fact that my comany makes the Equation Editor that comes with MS Word, as
well as MathType, its parent product. Actually, a lot of your comments seem
to indicate that you didn't read my original post where, among other things,
I stated that directly.

You still seem to miss my point. Your response keeps telling me how bad MS
Word and its equation editor are and how your word processor and equation
editor are going to do better. My original post started with the premise
that MS Word and Equation Editor could be improved upon. My intention was to
get give my two cents worth on how that might be done. Can we not steer the
discussion back to this?

To that end, I'd like to address the TeX issue a little further. Not to
continue our bickering, but I feel that your TeX opinion is shared by a lot
of people, some of which are involved with your projects. It seems to me
that if the group working on Abiword all feel TeX is the "real" way to go
but are willing to work on a WYSIWYG word processor due to market
expectations or other such reason, there might be some soul searching
needed.

First, let me state up front that I definitely appreciate the power of TeX
and the quality of its output. When designing our equation editors, we often
look at TeX output to see how it does it.

I have been talking to TeX users for many years and I think I've heard all
the arguments, both pro and con. Here are my observations on the subject:

- Very often, but not always, TeX users that say they tried our
point-and-click equation editors spent 15 minutes working with them. Whereas
we claim that our equation editors are easier to use than TeX, we never
claim there is no learning curve. All software takes some effort to learn.

- The "baby duck" syndrome often comes into play here. (Whatever the baby
duck sees first is its mother, by definition.) After spending a few months
to become reasonably proficient at TeX (please lets not argue over how long
it takes), the TeX user finds it hard to imagine making equations any other
way.

- Some people often mention the quality of TeX's output. This is mostly
acheived by the use of a very consistent set of fonts (Computer Modern and
its derivatives). Publishers often feel that the restricted choice of fonts
is actually a detriment. Our equation editors allow the user free reign over
the choice of fonts. However, this often comes at the expense of quality. An
example of this is the x-height (the level of the tops of lower case letters
for those not into typography) mismatch of Symbol (a standard source of
Greek letters) and Times (a standard source of Roman letters). Some of our
customers that produce journals and books pay more attention to their font
choices and get far better results.

- Direct manipulation equation editors eliminate syntax errors. They don't
just reduce them, they eliminate them. This alone is a tremendous boost in
productivity. Some syntax errors are easy to fix, but others can be pretty
hard, such as unbalanced or misplaced braces, as the problems aren't local.

- The edit-print(or display)-correct cycle is also largely eliminated with
equation editors. Even if you balance your TeX braces, one often has to go
back and correct things.

Of course, equation editors aren't perfect either. I could tell you my
thoughts on that, but I think I've already hit most of them in the earlier
postings. However, there's one that I haven't mentioned before and perhaps
it is the worst problem of all. It's fixable though.

When a user is typing along in MS Word and wants to type an equation, they
have to invoke the equation editor. The first time this is done by going to
the Insert menu, choosing "Microsoft Equation Editor", then clicking OK to
insert an empty equation and enter equation editing mode. At this point, the
typical TeX person throws up his or her hands and exclaims disgustingly, "I
can't do all this every time I want to enter an equation. This is
ridiculous."

Although the persistent first-time equation editor will discover that they
can assign a keyboard shortcut to the insert equation command, there is
still a problem here. I believe a big part of the problem is that, when
entering the equation editor, the document and Word's toolbar and menus
dance around. What should happen is simply an equation editing toolbar
should come to the front and a set of keystroke shortcuts get enabled for
fast equation editing. Perhaps the I-bar insertion point should change shape
to indicate equation editing mode. This would be analogous to entering $ (or
whatever) to enter math mode in TeX.

The reason MS Word works the way it does (I believe) is that the Insert
Object feature (and OLE in general) is designed around inserting big things.
Excel spreadsheets, to be more precise. If you are going into edit mode on a
big thing, the document jumping around, and toolbars disappearing and others
appearing is no big deal. For entering math, it is totally bonkers.

Like my earlier posting, this is offered in the hope that you guys can do
better. If you all think the input of someone that has spent quite a few
years thinking about this subject isn't useful, I can live with that.

Good luck,

Paul

----------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Topping                          http://www.mathtype.com
President                             email: pault@mathtype.com
Design Science, Inc.                  phone: 562-433-0685
----------------------------------------------------------------

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Martin Sevior [mailto:msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au]
> Sent: Sunday, September 03, 2000 3:08 AM
> To: Paul Topping
> Cc: 'gnome-components-list@gnome.org'
> Subject: RE: Equation Editor.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Sat, 2 Sep 2000, Paul Topping wrote:
> 
> > Martin,
> > 
> > So, let me recap. I wrote a long email saying how I hoped 
> Gnome could do
> > better than MSWord and I included my views on how it could 
> be made better.
> > Now, you take the opportunity to slam my product and say 
> that you can do it
> > better than my company. What did I do to deserve this? If 
> my attempt at a
> > marketplace reality check is too much for you, I think 
> you'll have a real
> > hard time when you have to go up against Microsoft.
> > 
> > If you think TeX is so great, why bother implementing a 
> word processor at
> > all? TeX creates beautiful documents. Just a thought.
> > 
> 
> Hi Paul,
> 	First off I did not realize I was having a go at your company.
> Word 97 is 4 years old now and I thought you sold an enhanced equation
> editor that was considerabally better than what was available 
> for word 97.
> 
> I was emphasizing we would not aim as low as MS Word 97. My 
> aim is Latex
> quality. It will be hard work I know to get that good.
> 
> I would PERFECTLY happy to live in a latex world but 
> unfortunately this is
> not possible. Even though I and my collegues can produce beautiful tex
> documents I now realize that the learning curve to produce 
> such documents
> is beyond most secretaries, University administrators and funding
> agencies. They constantly send me *.doc files that I cannot read on my
> workstation of choice, more over MS does not produce MS Office for my
> platform of choice. I have used the equation editor for MS Word 97. It
> took me 20 minues to do what would take me 5 minutes to do in 
> Latex.  The
> output was much inferior to what latex can do. More over 
> there are these
> extremely annoying pop-up boxes urging me to buy an enhanced equation
> editor. Not a good marketing move. Having just spent $500 for 
> MS Word that
> takes longer to use and produces poorer results I was not the 
> least bit
> happy about this.
> 
> You tell me to get a reality check. I tell you to get one. I 
> know it is
> possible to do better than what is in MS Word 97. It 
> certainly does not
> please me or my colleagues. I have used a better equation 
> editor in the
> Lyx latex pre-processor. It is free GPL code. I can use that 
> and enhance
> it too. I know of 4 other GPL'd math projects in Mozilla, 
> Amaya, kword and
> a new academic project from Italy. I can study all that code 
> and choose
> the best for us.
> 
> I don't care about MS. They will not produce what I need. I 
> know we can do
> better than them. I'm an MS user I know we've already done 
> our features
> better than they have. Abiword already has an installed base of over
> 100,000 users on Unix and Windows and we're way short of even being
> feature complete. We now have BeOS and QNX front ends par 
> with Windows and
> Unix. MS will never make ports to those platforms.  Once these are
> released we will have an extra million or so users. We will 
> be included in
> redhat 7.0. Strike up another few million users. Once we 
> reach version 1.0
> we should be included in PC magazines covers everywhere. 
> We'll make our WP
> available for download anywhere and everywhere. At around 5 
> megabytes it's
> not such a big deal for people. We encourage poeple give 
> copies to their
> friends and send documents in *.abw format. Not every windows user can
> afford MS Word but everyone needs to read Word format. I've 
> found that out
> myself. Strike up another 10 million users.  
> 
> With bonobo embedding people can use Abi on servers from 
> within their own
> browers. I don't know how this will pan out, I'm not such a big fan of
> thin clients but it certainly lowers the barriers of entry 
> for people who
> may decide to copy native version of Abi to their platforms. 
> More users
> means more developers. We have Mac front end waiting the wings. We can
> import MS Word documents reasonablly well already. I can 
> export abiword
> documents to latex too. Over the next few months I know we 
> will add many
> more features to Abi. I could these things myself but I won't 
> have to do
> them all because we a great team in place. We have over 20 active
> developers working on Abi already and about 115 people who 
> have made some
> contribution to the code. Some of these guys can produce 
> 10,000 lines of
> great code in 3 weeks. I've seen it. Sun's GPL'd Star Office is a wild
> card. I don't the quality of the code but it could be useful.
> 
> Now all this may not matter you're right. MS will continue to sell 10
> million copies of Office every year. I can't see this changing quickly
> although I don't see much growth there. You'll get your 1% of 
> those. It
> doesn't matter to me. I'll have a great word processor that 
> could do math
> the way it should be done and I can read and write documents 
> anybody sends
> to me.
> 
> Good Luck to you too. I truely didn't mean to offend but I think you
> should do better than Word 97.
> 
> Best wishes,
> 
> Martin Sevior
> 
> 
>