From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: jon@fourwinds.com (Jon Steinhart) Date: Mon, 07 May 2018 17:39:58 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] [groff] Brian Kernighan on the evoution of eqn, pic, grap into troff In-Reply-To: References: <201805060229.w462T9Ee018534@coolidge.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: <201805080039.w480dwfd005761@darkstar.fourwinds.com> George Michaelson writes: > I always envied people who had invested the time to understand > tex/latex. It felt like sitting next to senior wranglers in the maths > department, or the students heading to the civil service exams. What a > luxury: to learn how to apply cubic splines and bezier curves to > design ligatures, in the least possible instructions using a special > stack machine you designed to represent the ideal code, if you had a > computer to run it, bearing in mind that because *aesthetically* you > wanted your "o" to be slightly wider at the bottom than the top, you > had to wrangle a function in, to decide how to do that adjustment in a > non-linear manner given the scaling effects of applying the golden > mean to the design. > > wait.. what were we doing again? Typesetting our theses? I can use -ms > for that. If I want the left margin in one inch, I say 1in. Who really > cares if the printer doesn't know whan an EM is? > > T/roff might have been disgusting, but so was RUNOFF which I was > familiar with. So this is the classic "you can have it perfect, or > have it next tuesday" moment, which I believe was J Pierpoint Morgan, > who was in Zork, on the zorkmid, so I know it was a "thing". > > Mind you, slitex was pretty good. I kind of wish I'd learned that. > > Now, desperately trying to get papers into ACM and IEEE, I find myself > leaning on my elders, betters, and wisers, to understand which > \relax{} to do, and why. Its all greek to me. > > On Sun, May 6, 2018 at 1:36 PM, Steve Nickolas wrote: > > On Sat, 5 May 2018, Doug McIlroy wrote: > > > >>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX#Pronunciation_and_spelling > >> > >> > >> Yes, TeX is supposed to be pronounced as Germans do Bach. And > >> Knuth further recommends that the name be typeset as a logo with > >> one letter off the base line. Damned if an awful lot of people, > >> especially LaTeX users, don't follow his advice. I've known > >> and admired Knuth for over 50 years, but part ways with him > >> on this. If you use the ready-made LaTeX logo in running text, > >> so should you also use flourished cursive for Coca-Cola and > >> Ford; and back in the day, discordantly slanted letters for > >> Holiday Inn. It's mad and it's a pox on the page. > >> > >> Doug > >> > > > > TeX drives me up a damn wall sometimes. It certainly is better suited than, > > say, LibreOffice or M$ Word for what I do with it, but I still frequently > > find myself butting heads with it. > > > > -uso. IMHO, the tex language is too ugly. I much prefer troff. But, and maybe this will be a retirement project, giving troff tex's two-dimensional layout smarts so that widows and orphans don't have to be handled manually would be nice. Remember, we're lucky that Don didn't work on X Windows because he would have called it Ech. Jon