Quoting David Wilson <davidwwilson@comcast.net>:
Someone suggested to me ArXiv.org as a source of TeX documents.
I go there and, wow, right away I find:
A proof the ZF is inconsistent (math.GM/0502503), and a formula for twin primes (math.GM/0502384), and a 7-page proof of FLT (math.GM/0309005).
Why is this site not better publicized? I feel like the good stuff is being held back...
Presumably, you mean a source where lots of TeX documents are deposited, not a source of lots of documents describing TeX. The ArXiv was set up to hold preprints, no doubt because putting them there saved building large mailing lists, and possibly to promote more rapid access. It should be borne in mind that their material has not been refereed; indeed one motive for circulating preprints is to collect commentary regarding omissions and errors which would possibly be reflected in a final published copy. Still, their acceptance policy is rather conservative, and not just anything can be deposited there. But for persons just looking for recent results, the preprints do have the benefit of being available sooner --- months to years. Google searches regularly report ArXiv items, if they match the search string that one is using. I've picked up quite a few items that way. --- an earlier remark: ---
I am not exactly sure what TeX is all about. I used to think it was pretty much a markup language, a format as it were. But now it appears that there are associated fonts and other baggage. I'll have to educate myself better on TeX. I'll check out MikTeX when I can.
TeX (and especially LaTeX) represents a valiant effort to permit the creation of mathematical documents, and is certainly far better than ChiWriter (for example). It may not be so good for chemists who want to display structural formulas, but it certainly works well for subscripts, superscripts, display formulas, tables, and the traditional mathematical symbols such as sigmas for sums, integrals, boolean algebra, and the like. It even handles linguistic artifacts, such as the multitude of accents, umlauts, tildes and so on which adorn writings using the roman alphabet. There is enough greek to do math (even digamma, I think) but it balks at cyrillic, sanskrit, yangul, ... . It gets awkward when one wants to construct diagrams, although fairly elaborate tables of moderately varied structure are possible. However, the inclusion of figures prepared with PostScript seems to be a pretty good alternative. Unfortunately, Adobe seems to be changing the rules pertaining to .eps and .pdf and that can cause problems. Trying to use the huge assortment of fonts which are available can lead to problems, as not all readers have the same font collection. Better to stick to conservative fonts like Helvetica or Times, and sometimes using monotype is advantageous --- preparing columns in tables, for example. And of course, for every font style, there is a spectrum of sizes, boldness, italicization, and so on. Pretty much contrary to the spirit of writing mathematics, but quite pleasant in other contexts. Working blind can be a nuisance, but compiling and running Tex is so fast and easy that it is only a minor inconvenience to keep checking what has been written, which is only necessary when some very elaborate construction is underway. - hvm ------------------------------------------------- www.correo.unam.mx UNAMonos Comunicándonos