Knuth made an excellent point, maybe in _Coders At Work_ about literate programming and why it didn't catch on: in general, about 1 out of 20 people can be a really good programmer. In general, one of 20 people can be a really good writer. These talents are largely uncorrelated.

Sure, being competent at either is a teachable skill. But no one wants to read either a program or a narrative written by someone who's merely OK at it.

Adam

On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 7:20 PM David Arnold <davida@pobox.com> wrote:

<…>

> 2. Drop DVI? Are you kidding me? Although PDF may be popular now,
> that may not be the case 20 years from now. A device-independent
> format is what is needed, and that's what DVI is. TeX is guaranteed
> to produce the exact same output 100 years from now.

And .PDF isn't?

No. It isn't. It is an Adobe product.

Check out ISO 32000-2:2020.

I think it’s ok in 2022 to say that PDF has escaped Adobe and is an open standard, suitable for long-life documents, etc.

d