[TUHS] [groff] Brian Kernighan on the evoution of eqn, pic, grap into troff

[TUHS] [groff] Brian Kernighan on the evoution of eqn, pic, grap into troff

[Doug McIlroy]

> 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

[TUHS] [groff] Brian Kernighan on the evoution of eqn, pic, grap into troff

[Steve Nickolas]

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.

[TUHS] [groff] Brian Kernighan on the evoution of eqn, pic, grap into troff

[George Michaelson]

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 <usotsuki at buric.co> 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.

[TUHS] [groff] Brian Kernighan on the evoution of eqn, pic, grap into troff

[Jon Steinhart]

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 <usotsuki at buric.co> 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

[TUHS] [groff] Brian Kernighan on the evoution of eqn, pic, grap into troff

[Dave Horsfall]

On Mon, 7 May 2018, Jon Steinhart wrote:

> Remember, we're lucky that Don didn't work on X Windows because he would 
> have called it Ech.

Signature material!  May I?

-- Dave

[TUHS] [groff] Brian Kernighan on the evoution of eqn, pic, grap into troff

[Jon Steinhart]

Dave Horsfall writes:
> On Mon, 7 May 2018, Jon Steinhart wrote:
>
> > Remember, we're lucky that Don didn't work on X Windows because he would 
> > have called it Ech.
>
> Signature material!  May I?
>
> -- Dave

Well, it's not original with me but sure, go ahead.

[TUHS] [groff] Brian Kernighan on the evoution of eqn, pic, grap into troff

[Bakul Shah]

On Mon, 07 May 2018 17:39:58 -0700 Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
> 
> 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.

You can pronounce TeX as if it is written in Cyrillic: Tiyekh!
And then of course, LyaTiyekh!

Though I vastly prefer TeX/LaTeX/XeLaTeX over troff (unlike
most folks on this list) and find even the source code more
legible than ugly control lines starting with a "." -- In *TeX
I can reformat most parahraphs to balance lines, without
things falling aport.

Now one can avoid most of the hassles for simple documentation
by using markdown or asciidoc & tools that generate .tex,
which can be rendered beautifully. Even here you can typically
use LaTeX formatting for equations.

[TUHS] [groff] Brian Kernighan on the evoution of eqn, pic, grap into troff

[Nemo]

On 8 May 2018 at 00:11, Bakul Shah <bakul at bitblocks.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 07 May 2018 17:39:58 -0700 Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
>>
>> IMHO, the tex language is too ugly.  I much prefer troff.
[...]
> Though I vastly prefer TeX/LaTeX/XeLaTeX over troff (unlike
> most folks on this list)
[...]

Oh, this has the makings of another Mygol vs Yourtran flame war.

As an inflamatory datum point, I was a grad student when TeX was
installed and the secretaries all learnt TeX.  When LaTeX came in, we
all dumped *roff.

N.

[TUHS] [groff] Brian Kernighan on the evoution of eqn, pic, grap into troff

[Paul Winalski]

On 5/7/18, George Michaelson <ggm at algebras.org> wrote:
>
> 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".

The character in Zork was banker J. Pierpoint Flathead.  The zorkmid
coins and bills bore the likenesses of various kings of the Flathead
dynasty, such as Belwit the Flat and Dimwit Flathead.

-Paul W.