Concordia vs TEX for book formatting jobs

[Chris Lindblad <cjl@WHEATIES.AI.MIT.EDU>]

    Date: Tue, 6 Dec 88 14:35 EST
    From: pan@athena.pangaro.dialnet.symbolics.com (Paul Pangaro)

    I am trying to understand the relative merits of using Concordia versus
    TEX for writing, editing and printing a large manuscript of some 200
    pages on the Symbolics.  I want to preview the results on my machine
    directly, because I may not get a laser printer right away and will want
    to take a tape to some other machine for output. It might also be nice
    to be able to print on a higher-res machine than the LGP-2, if possible.

    Does anyone have any thoughts/comparative experience? Thanks.

Both document preparation systems meet these minimal specifications.

In general, TeX is better if you want to have a lot of control over the form
of the document, and is better if you have equations in your document.  Your
TeX source and output DVI files will be portable.  If you ever decide to work
on your manuscript on a PC, MAC or UNIX box, then you will be able to directly
use the TeX products available for those machines.  

LaTeX gives you less control over the form of your document, but is easier to
use, and provides man neat document preparation features like table of
contents, and index.

Concordia is better integrated into the Lispm, and gives you the capability of
having an online interactive version of your document if it is desired.  It is
really neat for documents for which you want hardcopy form and you want other
people to interactively view online via the document examiner.  Concordia
also does a respectable good job of document formatting.  It works fine as
long as you are not overly concerned with the precise layout of your
manuscript.

The way you would get high resolution output from the two systems would be
different.  With TeX, to get higher resolution, you will have to find a
printer or publisher that will take DVI files and has his own high-resolution
CM fonts.  Some publishers even want just the TeX source, upon which they run
TeX themselves.

With Concordia, the interface to the printer or publisher will probably be
postscript files.  I am not sure whether concordia solely uses postscript
outline fonts or whether it uses some bitmap fonts.  If it does use bitmap
fonts, then the postscript file will still work on a high resolution printer,
but the bitmap fonts will come out at 300dpi, instead of the resolution of the
device.  It probably looks crummy to see high resolution postscript outline
fonts alongside low resolution bitmap fonts.  This could probably be fixed
with some hacking, but it is not clear that it can be done without sources.

TeX comes with sources.  I suspect Concordia does not.