Sebastian writes: > i am by nature suspicious, and cannot offhand think of much that a > `professional body' has done, unless you refer to the AMS? are they > a professional body? in this capacity i classify them simply as a > publisher. The AMS has done one important thing that seems counter to the interests of its publishing arm: bringing the postscript type 1 CM and AMS fonts into the public domain. They have also done a very nice service in their amslatex work. Admittedly, this dovetails with their publishing work in that they encourage submissions in TeX, but it also works to the benefit of others who publish from author-written TeX source (or indeed, who publish using an in-house TeX system). > who makes TeX accessible? `professional bodies'? like h@ll they do. The AMS has certainly helped, both in the items above, and by helping to make TeX popular among mathematicians (the political angle Bill mentioned). But the most important accessibility feature of TeX is books like Lamport's. Unless someone writes an analogous book for *ML (whenever a viable authoring/presentation system actually appears) or gellmu, they will not be really accessible to the authoring community. Economic issues are important here. Unless you have the kind of budget Elsevier has (and charge analogous prices), it is important to use a system easily compatible with that used by the authors. In mathematics today, that means TeX. (It's actually reasonably easy to port author-produced plain or AMS TeX to latex - much easier than conversions from TeX to *ML and back would appear to be.) Changing that would require new authoring/presenting tools, new books, and political influence similar to that used by the AMS to promote TeX. --Mark -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mark Steinberger | http://math.albany.edu:8800/~mark Dept. of Math. & Stat | University at Albany | Albany, NY 12222 | Editor in Chief, New York Journal of Mathematics [log in to unmask] | http://nyjm.albany.edu:8000/nyjm.html --------------------------------------------------------------------------