From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: Andy Newman Message-ID: References: <20010108171937.8549919A1C@mail.cse.psu.edu>, <005501c079a8$257e3a70$62356887@HWTPC> Subject: Re: [9fans] off topic: troff book Date: Tue, 9 Jan 2001 09:38:51 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 497fe2fa-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 (To those of us somewhat interesting in typesetting systems this has been an interesting thread - thanks). I have a reprint of an article written for the AMS in 1978 entitled "Mathematical Typography" (Bulletin (New Series) of the AMS, vol 1, no. 2, pp. 337-372), it says "This article is the Josiah Willam Gibbs Lecture given by Mr.Knuth in February, 1978." The first sentence is, "Mathematics books and journals do not look as beautiful as they used to." The lecture discusses some of the problems he and the AMS faced in publishing, shows some different layout styles and launches into an overview of the math problems in layout systems, line filling, font and curve representations and anti-aliasing in raster systems. At one point he states "...I know that TeX provides only small refinements over what is available in other systems. Yet several dozen small refinements add up to something that is important to me..." The article has an extensive bibliography that includes references to eqn and papers on "....some experiments in typesetting physics journals with the Bell Labs system...". I.e, he knew.