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Despite its well-known advantages for producing fine documents, TeX has five areas with significant usability challenges: document creation, formatting specification, document preview, software installation, and integration with the host system resources. Through improved performance at these interfaces, TeX can become more useful to the average computer user and, ultimately, more popular. After discussing these challenges and needed improvements, I mention certain activities we may undertake right away to prepare for the development of a more user-friendly TeX, and I encourage and welcome further dialog on these issues.

Arthur Ogawa, Ph.D., is the owner of TeX Consultants, offering consulting, training, and prepress services to the commercial publishing industry for over 20 years. Active in the TeX Users Group as a member, conference attendee, speaker, and trainer since 1984, Dr. Ogawa organized the TUG 1997 (San Francisco) Conference and has served on the TUG Board of Directors and Executive Committee since 1997. He lives in Three Rivers, California, US with his family of mountain bikers and from time to time performs with Wadaba Kourouma and the Traditional West African Drum Ensemble.

Arthur may be contacted at

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