A way to ensure the future of T E X: make its use easier on low-cost machines
Michel Lavaud · 1993
The PC is the cheapest computer and the most widespread one in the scientific community. Faced with commercial scientific word-processors that are improving steadily in wrong directions, it is urgent to make the use of TEX easier on the PC, to ensure its future and avoid costly dead-ends to researchers. We have designed a program, AsT E X, that allows to create easily multi-author scientific documents in TE Xo r L A T EX on PCs. It provides an on-line hypertext help and a multi-level assistance in typing L ATEX code. It allows to display and modify very easily the structure of a document, to archive and retrieve files related to it, to perform numerical and formal computations from the document and include automatically the results, to create LATEX tables from worksheets or databases of formulas. It processes electronic mail and files sent by list servers for a better use of information and eases considerably the use of anonymous ftp and archie servers by local archiving of selected informations.