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MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

mackichan.com

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Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#91

Post by keid »

analog31 wrote: post #89
keid wrote: post #87

Way back when, just after the IBM PC came out in the early 1980s, a company named Triad Computing was formed by J. Mack Adams, Roger Hunter, and Barry MacKichan, with the goal of creating a WYSIWYG technical text editing system. I was their first employee. Roger, Barry, and I did all the programming. Venture capital for this sort of thing wasn't common then; we raised operating capital by contract work (e.g. I wrote…

I wrote my physics dissertation using t3. For what it did at the time, it was fantastic.

When I went to Oxford University in 1985 I learned that, at the time, theses in the mathematics department were required to be written with T^3. I did not advertise my background--I did not want to be tech support. I actually went back to TCI for a while after finishing my degrees there.

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#92

Post by ChrisLomont »

GiovanniP wrote: post #32
quietbritishjim wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a pity it's called "TeXmacs" when, as you say, it really has no connection to TeX (except the ability to typeset mathematics). Another alternative is LyX, which actually does use LaTeX. Even that is not really a "LaTeX editor" though: it produces/exports excellent LaTeX, and uses that for typesetting, but does pretty poorly at importing LaTeX (as the developers freely admit). Depending on your situation that may…

> does pretty poorly at importing LaTeX As far as I know, an importer that interprets arbitrary LaTeX cannot exist (i.e. you have to run LaTeX on the file) because the grammar of LaTeX documents is Turing-complete. There is a StackExchange Q&A where this is explained, but I do not understand the arguments ;-)

LaTeX imports and interprets arbitrary LaTeX, so other programs can theoretically do just as well. Importers running up against Halting Problems occur in many document formats, but this is not an issue in practice since most documents are not nefarious, and any importer can (and should) have sensible timeouts for parsing.

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#93

Post by wolverine876 »

bachmeier wrote: post #49
zerop wrote: post #45

I feel terrible when I come across great products while they shutdown.. why I didn't know it?

In 2021 there's honestly not any good reason to know about Scientific Word. It was a good product 20 years ago, but it doesn't bring much to the table today that you'd have a reason to pay for.

What was it good at 20 years ago? What is it missing now?

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#94

Post by bachmeier »

liketochill wrote: post #82
bachmeier wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2021 there's honestly not any good reason to know about Scientific Word. It was a good product 20 years ago, but it doesn't bring much to the table today that you'd have a reason to pay for.

What is a replacement? I’ve been thinking about buying it as an easy way to write nice latex looking pdf files

LyX is very popular. TeXmacs is not exactly latex, but it does a good job. Things built on markdown like RStudio/R markdown. Many like Overleaf, though I haven't used it much. Even MS Word isn't terrible these days.

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#95

Post by mgubi »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #92
GiovanniP wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> does pretty poorly at importing LaTeX As far as I know, an importer that interprets arbitrary LaTeX cannot exist (i.e. you have to run LaTeX on the file) because the grammar of LaTeX documents is Turing-complete. There is a StackExchange Q&A where this is explained, but I do not understand the arguments ;-)

LaTeX imports and interprets arbitrary LaTeX, so other programs can theoretically do just as well. Importers running up against Halting Problems occur in many document formats, but this is not an issue in practice since most documents are not nefarious, and any importer can (and should) have sensible timeouts for parsing.

No, document formats are not turing complete. HTML for example can be parsed without any problem. However take this TeX snippet "\foo [bar]" and tell me if "bar" is an argument of "foo" or not, without running the macro (which maybe you do not have. This is the basic problem any TeX conversion program encounters. TeX is not a document format but a programming language. The only thing you can do with a TeX program is to run it. On the other hand an HTML document can be parsed without knowing anything about its content.

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#97

Post by mgubi »

pvaldes wrote: post #63
amichail wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The editing experience is horrendous compared to TeXmacs.

But the powerhorse difference, oh. It plays in a really different league. I enjoy emacs a lot also, so is a two lose moves in one step

You do not know what are you talking about clearly. What is "this powerhosrse difference"? What in your opinion is possible with one tool but not with the other?

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#98

Post by azalemeth »

pjmlp wrote: post #33
amichail wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TeXmacs is better than Word for documents containing math.

Given that Word does LaTeX math, why would that be?

Word does a subset of LaTeX, badly. For anything after high school, the limitations of it are painfully, painfully apparent.

Re: MacKichan Software, maker of Scientific Word, has gone out of business

#99

Post by tobmlt »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #79
syntaxfree wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: lyx as a hard to get into GUI. Overleaf has decent tab completion and dozens of templates, as well as limited support for markdown. Let tabnine and copilot get to LaTeX; I think we’ll find the discoverability of “text language on Adderall” outguns GUIs.

> I think we’ll find the discoverability of “text language on Adderall” outguns GUIs No way. Nothing can outgun typing a parameter into a box rather than the visual clutter of braces (or some other delimiter). What's more, maths notation often involves objects of different sizes, which isn't reflected in any fixed-width text language. Equations in my PhD were often 80% about the subscripts/superscripts if you read th…

When I was getting to know LaTeX I would use LyX as a quick reference guide. Nice to have so much LaTeX info offline.

Basically the reverse of your usage as the learning went on, and then finally going to pure LaTeX sometime in the foggy past.

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