[TUHS] TeX/troff/typesetting markups - Re: SunOS 4 documentation

[steffen@sdaoden.eu (Steffen Nurpmeso)]

Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
 |On Friday, 14 April 2017 at  1:22:59 +0200, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
 |> Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
 |>> Indeed, as a typographer, I believe details matter, no matter what the
 |>> audience. I think Knuth feels the same way. :)
 |>
 |> It is really perfectly looking.  Maybe too perfect, in the
 |> sense of, maybe even aseptic.
 |
 |My issue with TeX output using standard parameters is that it reaches
 |out, grabs you by the throat and says "I was formatted with Tex".
 |That would be mainly the Computer Modern fonts, but I haven't seen
 |that with any other text formatting software.

Maybe it really was a stupid comment of mine.  The thing is, not
too long ago i, somewhere, i watched something like
a documentation on old manuscripts, which we had hundreds of years
ago.  It was Art, it was devotion, these beautifully painted and
written manuscripts.  It is thus just the feeling of having lost
something: controlling a missile exactly or being able to create
a satellite that is capable to analyze a moon is a very amazing
and fantastic achievement, but it seems hollow and nil if not
based on the capability to be able to survive without supermarket
and have a notion of holism.  I.e., stand upon solid ground.
Then again i also favour multiplexer commands which hide the
complexity under the hood, rather than using a nice hand-written
Unix pipeline specification to create a letter myself.  Pfff.

--steffen