If you're familiar with Scientific WorkPlace 2.5, you can think of Scientific Notebook as Scientific WorkPlace without TeX. All of our products save files in LaTeX format. Scientific Notebook saves all of its files as standard LaTeX articles, although it can read Scientific WorkPlace files that are written using other styles.
The document production capabilities in Scientific Notebook are somewhat reduced. Cross-references, BiBTeX bibliographies, and other items that are resolved through multiple LaTeX passes are not included as features in Scientific Notebook.
Although both products use LaTeX as their standard file format, Scientific Notebook prints its documents directly, while Scientific WorkPlace uses TeX to typeset documents. This means that Scientific Notebook does not include the Scientific WorkPlace TeX system, which includes the TrueTeX formatter, TrueTeX Previewer, the Style Editor, the original Exam Builder, all of the TrueType TeX fonts, and the collection of TeX styles. This is a reduction of several hundred files and more than 50% of the required disk space.
The interface to features that affect only the operation of TeX has been suppressed in Scientific Notebook, although the program can read and preserve documents that include those features. These features include the front matter, selection of LaTeX styles, the floating option for pictures and plots, index entries, and bibliography items.