Re: Wanting to learn plain TeX

["Robert F. Beeger" <5beeger@informatik.uni-hamburg.de>]

Hello!

At 22:45 04.09.00 +0200, Hans Hagen wrote:
>There is a russian version of the texbook, maybe even japanese, but chinese
>... i don't know. There are some chinese names in his books however. The
>good old tex book has no chinese, so that simplies it a bit -)

Good joke!

>Context does chinese and will do it better some day soon. Looking at the
>glyphs will convince you that chinese is worth looking at, but I admit that
>I cannot read it. But, Wang Lei is working on a tutorial.

Just because of being curious about this one: How can this work? I remember 
of having heard once that the writen Chinese language consists of 2000000 
or even more symbols, of which each one stands for a word. Are Unicode 
characters used here or a special mapping from ASCII to Chinese. I also ask 
myself what sort of keyboard the chinese guys use when they want to type 
some text in Chinese.

>The nice thing about the tex book is that you can read it many times and
>the more you know about tex, the more new things you will discover. Unless
>you want to write your own macro package, you can safely skip half of it,
>unless you want to get a feeling about what is involved.

I think I'll try to get a look behind the scenery and maybe read the 
texbook from cover to cover.
You and some of the other guys on this list convinced me to give it a try.

So: thanks again to all of you.

Robert