In order to make this as simple as possible for the first time user, we will say a few words about what TEX is, before going on to talk about what PHYZZX does.
TEX is the baby of Donald E. Knuth of Stanford University and it is our choice for the best available text processor for use at SLAC. Clear as mud! you say. What the hell is a text processor ?, you say. How is it different from Xedit and Wylbur ?, you say. Tell you what I'm gonna do, I'm going to tell you the answers to these questions even if you weren't perceptive enough to ask. A text processor is to Xedit and Wylbur what a publishing company (as embodied by editors and printers) is to a technical typist; namely, it is a thingamajig which takes a crudely typed manuscript and turns it into a book. Physicists and engineers all know that the nicer your paper looks before it goes out, the more your colleagues believe what is in it. Therefore we all want to use TEX to prepare our papers for journals, summer schools and conference proceedings. Some of us (hopefully that means some of you reading this introduction) will use TEX to type our own papers, and some of us will rely on others for this task. In any event somewhere in that chain someone has to know how to use the thingamajig or beautiful manuscripts just won't come out the other end. In that case our colleagues won't know all of the wonderful things we have to say. To facilitate this process to some degree we wrote the macro package PHYZZX. In order to make PHYZZX and TEX more accessible to people at the lab, we have generated this writeup.
As I said, to all intents and purposes you and Xedit (or you and Wylbur, if you insist on living in prehistoric times) make a typist. Actually, you make a pretty good typist for text, but you don't do too well as a technical typist because neither Xedit nor Wylbur does a very good job at typing equations. You plus Xedit plus TEX make a stupendous technical typist and a remarkably good printing company. Pursuing this analogy the process for producing a beautiful book quality manuscript starts with somebody typing the first draft. This somebody is presumably you, the reader, and the tools you use are your trusty computer terminal and an editor like Xedit. Obviously I have no intention of explaining how to use Xedit since this is probably unnecessary and anyhow, everything you have to know for the purpose of typing a text file can be easily learned by reading the IBM Virtual Machine/ System product: CMS Primer. Hence, this writeup assumes that you know how to log on to the computer and use the editor.
To use the editor to start collecting a file which TEX will turn into a beautiful paper, memo, or letter, you have to follow a simple procedure. First, in your incarnation as typist, you have log on and enter an editor (e.g., Xedit) by telling it you want to create a file whose name is CRAP and whose filetype is TEX. You accomplish this feat by typing something difficult like X (or XEDIT) CRAP TEX A whereupon the powers that be will throw you into the editor. At this point, since you are a person of discerning tastes, the very next line you enter is % phyzzx . This command will make sure that when you tell the computer to print a version of the paper it will become an editor and instruct the typesetter to lay out the copy according to the criteria established by the macro package PHYZZX. The very next thing you do is skip a line (i.e., enter a blank line) in order to make your copy easy to read, and then start to enter your copy. So much for you as a typist.