12 Jan
2022
12 Jan
'22
8:10 a.m.
Don Knuth talks at length about how TeX & MetaFont came about etc. in his Web of
Stories interview in parts 50 through 70. In Part 56 he does say he looked at "the
system developed at Bell Labs", presumably troff. In part 68 he talks about the
importance of stability fot TeX and later talks about LaTeX and ConTeXt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzqhuWBClcM&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzeNLngr1Jq…
I must say I am a fan of TeX/LaTeX and not a fan of nroff/troff -- I don't like the
troff look and I don't like the markup. The nice thing is we can choose whatever
typesetting tools we want! I played with other alternatives such as lout and Sile but
didn't like them all that much. I immediately liked the TeX's model of boxes and
glue. I like the fact that I can typeset Indic language text beautifully. But like any
complex tool, you have to take time to learn it and practice to get proficient at it.
At the same time I am not a fan of the way Knuth does literate programming. What I'd
like is a two view editor where I can jump from code to related documentation and vice
versa. And when you're working on one, the related part in the other view
highlighted. In this world I don't want to deal with files and directories -- just
one virtual document, however it is stored put under version control!
On Jan 11, 2022, at 5:19 PM, Mary Ann Horton
<mah(a)mhorton.net> wrote:
I recall attending a TeX lecture by Knuth around 1981. He said he wasn't satisfied
with the character layout from other formatting programs, which drove him to write TeX. He
illustrated in great detail the kerning and exact placement of the font characters next to
each other. I couldn't tell the difference, but clearly it was very important to him.
He wanted his documents to look perfect.
On 1/10/22 12:33 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 10, 2022 at 01:00:15PM -0600, Blake McBride wrote:
>> 2. Looking at the output, it is my opinion that TeX produces
>> better-looking documents.
> It's a double edged sword. TeX looks better but you instantly know it is
> TeX, it has a particular look. Troff looks just fine to me, and you don't
> know it is Troff, Word, or what.