8 May
2018
8 May
'18
6:29 a.m.
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(a)buric.co> wrote:
On Sat, 5 May 2018, Doug McIlroy wrote:
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.