From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] off topic: troff book From: "rob pike" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <20010107151801.CD357199F7@mail.cse.psu.edu> Date: Sun, 7 Jan 2001 10:17:53 -0500 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 47086e5c-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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