Re: What should I learn?

[Frans Goddijn <frans@goddijn.com>]

[new subject line: "dwarfs astride the shoulders of giants"]

Hi Maurício,

I understand your ambition to do it all your own way and do it at  
least as well as the masters, preferably skipping the tedious process  
of following their lead first ;-)

Read this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants

Years ago I was at a meeting of local TeX users and the guest speaker  
was a legendary typographer who had written a landmark book about  
making books. In the audience was a young man who had a question, or  
rather an opinion. "In typography, left/right justified text is  
supposed to be the standard, but that's nonsense. I find it better and  
more readable to have text flush left. What do you think?" The  
typographer answered "well maybe you are right, but all the leading  
typographers of centuries before us have disagreed with you."

Others will have different suggestions but you could start out reading  
the TeXbook by Knuth

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/abcde.html

and any basic book about typography.

Enjoy the trip!

Frans


On 21 okt 2008, at 04:39, Maurí cio wrote:

Hi,

I would like to ask you some advice on what
should I learn.

Context was the first typography program I
used. Then I tried Tex and a little bit of
latex.

Context is where I get the best results, but
what I really would like is something that
allows me to do things in my own way, not
something that's always great for reasons I
don't understand. (Of course, the first
documents I would type would not be that good,
but I'll learn with time.)

I thought Tex could be that, but it's not. I
can't use it to create something to fit my
(worst) taste instead of Knuth's (better)
taste without doing a lot more work than I'm
able to do.

I also like to write programs (I use a really
nice language named Haskell). Do you thing I
could get what I want if I write or translate
typography functions to that language, and then
write programs to generate documents? Where
could I find or where could I learn about such
functions?

Thanks,
Maurício

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maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
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___________________________________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________________________
If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!

maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
webpage  : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net
archive  : https://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/
wiki     : http://contextgarden.net
___________________________________________________________________________________