Re: [TUHS] roff(7)

It's probable that I'm influenced by being an autodidact for the roff family and suffered "You're doing it wrong" disease from literate TeX users. Roff may be that kind of arcane evil we probably should eschew but it's morally closer to the typesetting machine. You tell it to select a reel of monotype font, move exactly (for this pointsize) some number of units and expose the mask to light at that point. It's a machine. TeX targeted a theoretically pure model of the world, and grudgingly admits the practicality of having to approximate the perfect line by some bezier curve, but why requires a phd in theoretical maths and there's a queue of art historians out the door who are holding golden proportions curves shouting "you're doing it wrong". TeX is a machine too but it's bytecode, not machinecode. I think I hurled "when are you implementing OSI" abuse at your talks in AUUG meetings Chris, if you'd replied "never" it would have been wiser than your more temperate "later" response as I recall it.