All software of the distribution are freely usable and can be installed on an unlimited number of machines, for a non commercial use and in the setting of establishments of teaching and public researchl.
The scientific word processor part is based on TeX, the language of description of mathematical documents of D. Knuth. It permits to incorporate directly in the working document the elements created by the other software of the distribution (tables of numbers, mathematical formulas, scientific curves, bitmap or PostScript pictures, etc.), as well as portions of documents created on other machines (Mac, workstations).
The assistant and navigator AsTEX ease creating and putting right voluminous documents, that contain numerous formulas and images. The navigator permits hypertext browsing of the final document in different formats (dvi, ps or pdf) from an unique interface.
The distribution is available on Plug & Play CD-ROM and is accompanied with about 2000 pages of documentation in French. The latter includes the manuals Installation, configuration and starter guide of AsTEX, and User's Guide of AsTEX (AsTEX assistant and navigator, writing documents in French, writing documents in French, English and Arabic, programming in Fortran), several fascicles (FAQ, History of the various versions, etc.) and the set of reference manuals, that gathers the main software documentation, translated into French.
In summary, the AsTEX distribution gathers in a same setting the main software necessary to researchers and teachers in all phases of their work, since the calculations until the publication of the results in printed form or on the web, and permits to create from A to Z documents as complex as multi-author scientific books, with the quality and the portability that TeX provides.
The major part of the distribution is usable with all available operating systems on PC (Windows 95, 98 and ME, Windows NT 4.0 and 2000, DOS, DOS+Windows 3.x, OS/2 and Linux). Some programs with advanced graphic interface require Windows 9x/NTx.