On Mar 18, 2004, at 2:33 AM, Richard wrote:
When you say he "doesn't have a good equation editor" is he including
the
freebie version of mathtype that comes with Microsoft Office? It
generally
isn't installed by default; you have to explicitly select it during
installation, and so a lot of people do not even realize it is there.
I
like it very much myself and I imagine the pro version Marcello
mentions is
even better. It may be that he just doesn't or won't like mathtype;
but he
should definitely check it out first if he doesn't already know that
he has it.
Zillions of equations created with mathtype can be found in my
handouts at
http://www.nd.edu/~rwilliam/xsoc593/index.html
There are **serious** problems with exchanging documents created by
different versions of MathType / Eqn Editor, even on the same platform,
all the more across platforms. Furthermore M$ Word and PowerPoint do
not run on Linux/Unix. (Star*Office is a workalike, but M$ has probably
put significant effort into getting them to break with the latest
versions of M$ Office). Many of my Windows-using colleagues have been
seriously bitten by this problem: they exchange a file created with one
version of M$ Office for Windows with a coauthor using a different
version of M$ Office for Windows, and when they get it back, the file
is not recognized as containing equations--just un-editable embedded
graphics. Solution: type all the flaming equations over again. Great
for the grad students who get paid to do it; a huge waste of time.
Totally avoided by using LaTeX in the first place: 20-year-old LaTeX
code will compile today just fine. Try reading your M$ Word 1.05 file
in Word XP.
Scientific Word/Workplace also has its down side: when it reads a LaTeX
file, it translates it into an internal format, and does the reverse
when saving it. The former step can choke, leaving you with a file that
cannot be read. Of course the file can be attacked with a good old text
editor and TeX'd; the TeX generated by SciWord includes a lot of
extraneous junk, and occasionally it trips over itself.
Consider the Stata Journal article on IV and GMM by Baum, Schaffer,
Stillman. We use different computing platforms, different OS, etc. but
had no trouble collaborating through multiple revisions of a
30-journal-page paper with a pile of embedded math. And when we were
done, it was camera-ready for the Stata Journal. Most sensible journal
and book publishers these days are happy to receive LaTeX manuscripts.
Indeed, some recent econometrics texts have been typeset by the authors
in LaTeX (no proofreading of the galleys!)
Kit
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