There are a number of ways one can proceed in creating mathematical documents. There are

1. Typesetting programs
   1. TeX/LaTeX (Don Knuth's program)
   2. nroff/troff (early unix)
   3. QuarkXPress (commercial system)
   4. commercial SGML based systems
2. WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors
   1. Microsoft Word
   2. Corel WordPerfect
   3. StarOffice
3. Hybrid approaches:
   1. Lyx (GUI front end to LaTeX)

Typesetting allows one to position items anywhere on a page with incredible accuracy. Since the markup is so structured (TeX is essentially a programming language!) it can be converted from one structure to another (SGML, XML).

WYSIWYG approaches encourage the creator to place items on a page in a visually pleasing way, and then create a document which approximates the layout.

To be fair, one has difficulties in maintainability and portability in both approaches. The prevailing view point is that for simple documents such as a letter or memo, a WYSIWYG editor is fine. For more complex scientific documents including extensive equations, one can benefit from more sophisticated typesetting approaches. For creating web documents, both approaches have their advantages.

There are lots of viewpoints: here is one which generated much discussion...

• Lyx under linux (on the calclab systems) and
• Microsoft Word (on a Windows 2000 sytem).