Re: [9fans] off topic: troff book

[saroj@bear.com]

In article <200101082007.PAA15794@augusta.math.psu.edu>,
  9fans@cse.psu.edu wrote:
> Rob Pike wrote:
[snipped]

>
> btw- I kind of like the CM fonts; I think they're rather
> nice looking.  I like troff's output also, though.
>

I believe Knuth used some best printing-industry people,
and finest font designers around at that time.

> Doug Gwyn writes:
>
> >I have never seen any evidence that he is familiar
> >with troff or even with Unix.
>
> ...except for the fact that he sits in front of a Sun
> workstation?  :-)
>
> Come, surely Knuth knows about troff.  I don't know that
> he was familiar with it at the time he embarked on the
> TeX project, though.
>

No, that is not true. Knuth felt that troff was burdened with
couple of generations' legacy at Bell Labs, and he wanted to
start with a clean slate without fear of hurting any Bell Labs
colleague's feeling (about troff).

> >I will agree that TeX is capable of producing nicer
> >mathematical copy than eqn|troff with a reasonable amount of
> >effort.  I personally don't think that repays the loss of
> >Knuth's time that could have been spent working on additional
> >volumes of TAOCP.
>
> I don't know, he considered it important enough to spend
> 10 years on it.  Remember: There Is No Royal Road to Programs,
> and he seems to have done a pretty good job on ellipses
> using that diamond shaped pen, eh?  :-)
>

He was very dissatisfied with the quality of scientific journals --
bad spacing, paragraph layout etc.
Adobe todays uses TeX paragraph layout algorithm.
And finally, he demonstrated that even large programs can be
explained in full detail (unlike most programs written by early
Bell Labs guys), though Pascal is not a great language on which
WEB (the implementation language of TeX) is based.


- Saroj Mahapatra


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