From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: ggm@algebras.org (George Michaelson) Date: Tue, 8 May 2018 10:29:47 +1000 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: 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.