The standard document preparation system used by this group was the LaTeX markup language. LaTeX is a great system for preparing mathematical documents but the ascii documents quickly get unreadable if you use a lot of expressions. In order to be able to edit existing LaTeX documents as well, the editor should produce LaTeX and the plain text must allow LaTeX macros. This resulted in an hybrid editor where the expressions were very readable (almost WYSIWYG) and the other elements were still plain text. By adding more power to the template utility, the editor has become increasingly WYSIWYG.
The editor will convert a document to LaTeX by default. However, if you redefine your templates, you can also create documents in other markup languages. A small collection of HTML templates is available and was used to create this document.
Some of the available features:
MathSpad is freely available. To install MathSpad, you need a UNIX operating system, the X window environment, an (ANSI) C compiler and a C++ compiler. If you don't have them all, you should not try to install it. The program is very portable and does not contain system specific code, so you should be able to install it without any problems. An installation script tries to solve most of the problems and you can send me a message if something doesn't work.
The README file is here and if you want to download the system, click here. (If you experience problems with the download set the options to "load to local disk" or equivalent and click again.)