Re: ANN: New Math on the Web Products Announced

At 11:52 AM -0700 10/16/00, Bruce Virga wrote:

>  "Since 75% of the
>world's scientific and technical documents are Microsoft Word documents with
>Equation Editor and MathType equations, it's very important that our users
>have a way to present those documents on the Web.

Now how do you know that? It sounds to me like a figure plucked out 
of thin air. Certainly it's decidedly untrue for all the scientific 
and technical documents I deal with. I guess it depends on your 
definition of "technical" but I'd say that by far the most common 
format I run across in science is the TeX document or PostScript or 
PDF documents generated from a TeX document. HTML is a distant 
second. Word doesn't even merit a mention.

The only way to move Word up in the rankings would be to include the 
vast quantities of computer documentation that don't use equations 
like software manuals and computer books. A lot of this is written in 
Word, but since almost none of it uses equations, that hardly matters 
here.
-- 

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Received on Monday, 16 October 2000 21:44:47 UTC