% Hi Malcolm,
%   this is the paper about Amiga\TeX{} I promised you in Karlsruhe. If
% there are any problems with the gateway, these are the used chars.
% ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ (uppercase letters)
% abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz (lowercase letters)
% \ -- backslash
% { } curly braces
% ( ) - . , :   parentheses, dash, dot, comma, semicolon
% My address is
% Konrad Neuwirth
% Fernkorngasse 44-2-4
% A-1100 Wien, Austria
% !!!PLEASE!!!! do not send any mail to the address given in the
% participants list handed out at the conference. It will reach me, but I am
% not in official contact with the Institute.
%
% so long,
% Konrad (a4422dae at awiuni11.bitnet)
\def\\{\hfil\break}
\centerline{\bf Amiga and \TeX{}}
\centerline{\bf a very special relationship}
\smallskip
\noindent
We all know that \TeX{} is special stuff, but why the Amiga--\TeX{}
relationship? That's an easy one: the Amiga and the Amiga\TeX{}
implementation make a very good pair. The Amiga itself has some very nice
resources which make Amiga\TeX{} a very good \TeX{}-workstation for a
very nice price.

The Amiga was the first computer to introduce a truly multitasking system
on a PC priced machine. The operating system also is rather user friendly
but still quite fast. AmigaDOS with the user interface Intuition is
actually everything OS/2 wants to be. The Amiga also has a coprocessor for
speedy graphics, good support over Networks (both academic and commercial),
a big Public Domain software collection (over 2000 disks). What is also
nice for a \TeX{}-Station is that it can read quite a variety of disk
formats. You can read disks written by Macintosh, PCompatibles, C64s, Atari
STs and even Acorn BBC Computers. It is also very easy to upgrade the
processor from the standard 7.54\,Mhz 68000 up to a 25\,MHz 68030 and 68882
combination.

The niceties of Amiga\TeX{} are that it uses all the Amiga's resources to
their full extent, especially the multitasking system. With the addition of
ARexx, an implementation of the IBM Mainframe batch language REXX, that
also is a tool to link together tasks, it is very easy to have preview,
\TeX{} and an editor in the memory simultaneously and each program knows
about the others. So you just press a key in the editor, it tells \TeX{} to
process the current editor file, and \TeX{} sends off the pages to the
previewer as soon as it finishes them. This improves the speed of the
debugging cycle enormously, as you don't have to wait for \TeX{} to go into
memory, finish processing etc. If \TeX{} encounters an error, it tells the
editor the exact location and the editor jumps to the point. You can also
have the editor window directly below the previewer window and so see the
real code while looking at the finished document.

Amiga\TeX{} doesn't require a hard disk. I used to run it with 2 or 3
drives for some time and it really works. It is not as fast as with a
hard disk, but it still works fully. It does that with quite a trick: it
has an intelligent font cache. The minimum hardware configurations for
Amiga\TeX{} are either 1.5\,Mbyte of memory and 1 drive or 1\,Mbyte and 2 drives.
You can also run \TeX{} in a 512\,kbyte system, but you can run just a
very small version of plain \TeX{},
and \LaTeX{} not all.

The printer drivers are something special, too. They all know about
\MF\ and so can generate all the missing fonts. This can be done with 2
ways. You can either tell them to start \MF\ as a background task and
wait for \MF\ to finish, or you can tell the \DVI\ program to generate a
font queue which can be worked of any time you want. This is also true for
the preview program.

The printer drivers, with the exceptions of those for the QMS Kiss and the
SmartWriter, allow the inclusion of graphic files. But this is much easier
than on other PCs, as the Amiga has a standard graphic format called {\tt ILBM
IFF}. So you can include any raster graphic file, created by any of the
great graphic packages available for the Amiga, within your documents. You
can also see what the graphic will look like with the previewer, although
the calculation of a picture takes some time (around half a minute). The
pictures also will be dithered automagically. You can even specify the
method you want them dithered, which can be done with the Floyd-Steinberg
algorithm, a standard ordered dither or with the classic method used, for
instance, by all the newspapers. The graphics features also will be
improved in the future, colour support and support for structured
graphics within the \DVI\ programs is planned.

Amiga\TeX{} is a real workhorse. It offers some very unique features and
still is able to communicate with the world. It is fast even on the slow
standard processor and it will blow anything away on a fast processor. It
offers all the features you see on the big \Unix\ workstations, but for a
fraction of the price. It is simply irresistible.

For more information contact:
{\parindent30pt\obeylines
Radical Eye Software 
Tomas Rokicki
Box 2081
Stanford, CA 94309
}

This may look like a commercial. It is not intended to be. It
is just shows that I like the project. I don't get any money for this. I am
just a satisfied user.

\rightline{\sl Konrad Neuwirth}


