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>Someone coming from a WYSIWYG environment probably won't be very >happy with TeX or LaTeX. Well, I moved *to* TeX *from* a WYSIWYG technical word processor (T3), and I personally know dozens of mathematicians who have done the same (which means there must be legions of them!). The reason is simply that TeX gives much more control over what's on the page than normal word processors, and produces more beautiful output. (For mathematics, there is really no substitute.) The extra typing (for formatting commands) is really no more than the fiddling you have to do in a program like Word, especially if one is using LaTex2e, a good text editor, and a good wrapper (EmTeXGI, TeTeX, etc.) so that the compile/view/print/edit operations are all pushbutton. With modern computers the compile/preview cycle is so fast that it is *almost* WYSIWYG. For pedestrian tasks like letter-writing, I sometimes use Word and sometimes use LaTeX, and neither takes noticeably more time than the other. There are also WYSIWYG front ends for TeX (e.g., Scientific Word) for people who prefer such, but they won't run on Linux (which is where I think this discussion began). David A. Ross ross@math.hawaii.edu www.math.hawaii.edu/~ross