Software Packages, Languages & Writing Tools

Writing, Editing and References

Most people use either emacs or vi as a full-screen editor to develop documents. The LaTeX system is widely used in the mathematical sciences for document preparation. Unfortunately, it is not WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) – you have to prepare your document in the LaTeX language. This is actually easy to learn, and there are some nice tools for previewing pages, as indicated below.

emacs

Richard M. Stallman (1986) GNU Emacs Manual. Free Software Foundation.

Visual Editor

ghostview, xdvi, dvipr, dvips, psnup

Utilities for viewing and printing DVI (*.dvi) and postscript (*.ps) files.

latex, bibtex

document prepartion language

latex2html

See man latex2html and the longer document by Nikos Drakos, U Leeds, UK, which is available from Bates or Yandell. Online documentation is available at the U Leeds WWW. Note: Filenames to latex2html must end in .tex and have an absolute address without symbolic links, such as

      % latex2html /u/y/a/yandell/doc/mydoc.tex

This creates a directory mydoc with the main HTML file being mydoc/mydoc.html.

ASADIR

American Statistical Association Directory of People. Not real user friendly yet. Give it a list of names to get their information. No manual or online help.

CIS

Current Index in Statistics online reference database. See man CIS. CIS returns only those citations that match all of the keys you type. It gives you the initial counts of the number of matches so you can decide what keys help to narrow the search and what keys are not worthwhile. If you do find that something like

CIS ratio estimate

is returning a citation that does not match both of those keys, contact Bates. The database contains abbreviations for publishers and journal names. If you want to modify these for your own purposes, see the CIS manual page and the file /usr/stat/lib/CIS/ab.v92. Click here to use CIS on the World Wide Web.

Created: sat 3 jul 2004 by Brian Yandell