TeX viewers

[George Porter]

I reviewed/searched the web4lib archive, in vain, trying to locate the
crucial information that will make it possible to seamlessly support the
reading/viewing/printing of TeX (and Tex-related; AMSTeX, LaTeX, dvi,
etc.) documents on library workstations.  The workstations are running
NT 4.0 with both Netscape Communicator 4.01 and MSIE 3.02.  

I saw in the archives that this has been raised as an issue previously,
but the primary recommendation was for publishers to generate pdf and ps
files.  This is all well and good, if you control the original content,
somewhat less than helpful if you are a consumer of mathematics and
physics ejournals, eprints, or electronic conference proceedings.

I've reviewed all of the materials at the BrowserWatch Plug-In Plaza
<http://browserwatch.internet.com/plug-in.html>.  Only two entries offer
much promise, one is a plug-in for UNIX boxes (the platform of choice
for TeX creation), the other is TechExplorer from IBM
<http://www.ics.raleigh.ibm.com/ics/techexp.htm>.  TechExplorer looks
quite promising, although repeated installation attempts on different
machines (and multiple downloads) has failed to yield a single instance
where the plug-in is visible to Netscape.  Exploring the file structure,
using Find File or navigating the directory structure shows that
installation did deposit some files in the plugin folder, but they are
impervious to discovery by Netscape.

I know about the TOM Conversion Server
<http://wheel.compose.cs.cmu.edu:8001/cgi-bin/browse/objweb> which will
convert files (from your local computer) or URLs betwixt and between a
wide variety of document formats.  Again, this is not a practical
solution for allowing library workstation users to read/print real
scientific content, especially from sites that do not offer a link from
their content to this service.

Any light that can be shed on this issue would be greatly appreciated.

George S. Porter
Technical Reference Librarian
Sherman Fairchild Library of Engineering & Applied Science

California Institute of Technology
Mail Code 1-43, Pasadena, CA  91125
Telephone (626) 395-3409 Fax (626) 431-2681
george at library.caltech.edu