Re: [9fans] off topic: troff book

["rob pike" <rob@plan9.bell-labs.com>]

I didn't switch to tex when it came out because it just seemed like
the same thing packaged differently.  It didn't seem like an
improvement.  As time has passed, I have come to understand that it
does equations better, which many people care about, and is free,
which many people care about.  Those are its advantages.  It also has
many disadvantages, including a screwy chatty user interface and a
serious misjudgement about how fonts should work, which saddles it
with very few fonts - until recently, only one - which is, in turn,
certainly the ugliest book font that ever got widespread use.  Latex
extended this mistake into the same story about layout, so that today
90% of the technical books and papers in the world look exactly the
same: grey, unbalanced, and drab, like an oil painting done by a rank
amateur.

Because this at one level so unimportant, but at another is the entire
point of the exercise - why create a layout language that produces
only one layout; why create a font language if only one person
in the world can use it to make a font - it rankles.

-rob