This discussion on document formats appears over and over again on the
newsgroups I read with the predictable consequence that nothing is ever
decided. As someone with a foot in both the computer science and computational
biology camps, I have the following observations: the vast majority of papers
in CS are written in (La)TeX and are therefore easily distributed over the
network to a wide community as raw (La)TeX files, dvi files or postscript
files; on the other hand, the vast majority of papers in biology are in a vast
number of formats and can't be electronically distributed to any sizable group
except by FAX.
Other technical disciplines which rely heavily on mathematical formalizations
strongly tend towards the use of (La)TeX (as Knuth intended when he developed
TeX). These include physics, chemistry and mathematics. At Los Alamos
National Laboratory for example, the Center for Non Linear Studies has set up a
preprint database server for several disciplines (originally just complex
systems but now greatly expanded). All articles are in (La)TeX, the database
can be searched over the network and articles can be read over the network
using a TeX previewer. This effort was recently the subject of a news article
in Science and it seems that the database is extensively used by the
communities it serves.
Another advantage of using (La)TeX is that it is relatively painless to do
collaborative writing on papers, grants etc over the network -- something I
find nearly impossible to do with people using word processing programs. A
further advantage is the large number of macros and journal specific templates
that are readily available by FTP. And by the way, I use LaTeX at home on my
PC -- both LaTeX itself and several previewers are available by FTP -- so it is
certainly not Unix specific.
Enough proselytizing (La)TeX. I support adopting (La)TeX as the standard for
this group, but I think it should be put to a vote. The current options appear
to be (La)TeX, RTF, and ASCII. Simply majority becomes the standard -- one
vote per person.
Chris
