Warning to all: Long with lots of babbling and techno talk.
Leigh,
Ah, you use a Mac. They are nice but have very little software or
the PC version works better. My experience in particle physics and high
energy nuclear physics (big detector physics) is that physicists are
moving away from Unix machines and Mac's to PC's. In fact, there is now
an NT farm at Fermilab. Brookhaven is setting up a Linux farm for the
RHIC collider and its experiments running on Pentium II chips. Also, the
analysis tools for large sets of data is the CERN Library's PAW (fortran
based) and will be moving to ROOT or LHC++ (C++ oriented programs) due to
the increasing size of the data structure. In fact, CDF for Run II and
three of the RHIC experiments will be using ROOT, plus Cern experiment
NA49 (test bed for ROOT) and possibly ATLAS (LHC). The reason I mention
these three analysis platforms is that they are so widely used and they
only output postscript files. So if you want to view anything, it will be
in postscript. If you look at plots in papers in Physical Review D,
Physical Review Letters, and some in Physical Review C almost all of them
are generated by PAW and are easy to spot if you use as much as I do. I
find that smaller experiments like in condensed matter and low evergy
nuclear physics use different analysis software - mostly things that are
advertised in Phyiscs Today, etc. and they may use Mac's.
I agree that pdf format is nice and I perosnally use it but only
for my scanned material. I do this for solutions to homework problems for
the recitation and lab I teach. I wirte up the solutions at home and scan
them at school and post them on my web page in PDF format. I also visit
LANL's xxx preprint server but I download the postscript version of a file
and in Netscape you can tell it what program to use to view what file
type, so for all .ps files I use Ghostview and for all .pdf files I use
Acrobat Reader or Exchnage now (I forget).
I use pine and emacs RMAIL right now, because my main
workstation is still an SGI running irix 6.4. However, soon I am
switching to Netscape Mail and it seems to work the same as Eudora Light
plus it's also free (EL will not run on unix). The reason for my choice
being that my collaborators use Netscape Mail so there are no
compatability questions that even have to be raised (I think EL and NM
would be compatible but I am unsure). So having a laptop, an SGI, and any
PC all with Netscape Mail will enable me to check my mail from anywhere.
See my mail re: IMAP servers for how to do this that I will send soon.