by Agus Purwanto

Created on: May 29, 2008

Scientific communities rely the communication mostly based on the written communication. They need to present, review and publish they work effectively. Their present works often come from earlier works, not necessarily done by the same scientific group. Likewise, they need to report their result to other groups of the same interest, not necessarily come from the part of the world. They need effective publications, with word processing of their choice.

Various word processing available either commercially or freely can basically be categorized
as WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") and not WYSIWYG. The latter is basically a hyper text markup language, in which the command to typeset is embedded within the text itself. For example, you need to type \emph{word} either in your simple or fancy text editor in order to get "word" italicized. In fact, this mark-up feature is similar to those in the Hyper-Text Markup Language (HTML) commonly used in the web. Unless you utilize the fancy text editor, the visualization will not readily be seen before you compile the text appropriately into a PDF format.

To some people accustomed to use WYSIWYG word processor, the compilation raises the level of difficulty in using Text editor. This is especially true if they do not use the fancy text editor which is usually platform dependent. As in most programming procedures, compilation can produce errors, which can frustrate the novice. They often stop their effort if they have to start from the installation of the software. Why then, Tex word processor gains popularity especially in the scientific community throughout the world ? The main reason is that the publishing quality PDF file with relatively small file size can be automatically produced from Tex as has benefited various scientific publisher such as the Elsevier, IOP, etc. The WYSIWYG word processor does not share this quality. Some publishers will even impose charges if the authors send articles written using the WYSIWYG word processor, as the publishers need to convert them into the PDF file through Tex. Furthermore, viruses can reside in the binary files resulted from the WYSIWYG word processor and distributed to other computers through the network. As an aside, it is always nice to be able to hard code the Tex document using any simple editor and not solely dependent on fancy text editors. This way will ensure that the usefulness of the platform independent feature of Tex.

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