From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu, john@cs.york.ac.uk Subject: Re: [9fans] off topic: troff book From: "John A. Murdie" Message-Id: Date: Mon, 8 Jan 2001 10:29:42 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 47e8a382-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 Rob Pike writes: >I didn't switch to tex when it came out because it just seemed like >the same thing packaged differently. ... It also has >many disadvantages, including a screwy chatty user interface I find this the most immediate unpleasantness of TeX. >As time has passed, I have come to understand that it >does equations better, The LaTeX format (layout) has (macro) packages for a wider range of equations, but I still find troff's eqn much easier to read and write. In fact, I think the best part of the troff approach is the use of little languages by preprocessor, and the worst thing about troff is its use of interrupt-like traps. If you've written a troff macro package, I think you'll know that more than expected care is necessary to get trap use right. Some kind of (procedural markup?) programming language is necessary in a typesetting system. I often wonder whether something like pic with better text primitives, and galleying (pagination) functionality, would be a better approach. Yes, I know, I should make time to experiment. >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. Yes, though there are other TeX formats (layouts), such as CONTeXT, LaTeX is almost universally used. Most effort seems to be put into writing extra packages for use with the LaTeX format. There is some use of MetaFont for specification of special symbols, but the TeX world seems to be moving away from the use of bitmap fonts generated from MetaFonts and towards the use of commercially-provided PostScript or TrueType typefaces. John A. Murdie Department of Computer Science University of York England