======================================================================== Date: Wed, 13 May 92 22:56:21 -0700 Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Arthur Ogawa Subject: Wither TeX I am glad to see the commencement of this list. I intend to contribute ideas based on the needs of people preparing books for publication. Art Ogawa ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 15 May 92 10:07:13 -0600 Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: "Jonathan M. Gilligan" Subject: Re: font technology In-Reply-To: Anthony Shipman's message of Fri, 15 May 92 22:56:18 EST <9205151336.AA10938@lilac.csd.bldrdoc.gov> Anthony Shipman writes How difficult would it be to generate fonts dynamically a la TrueType? This would mean that TFM files are derived while TeX was running. MetaFont need not be the source of the fonts as it seems to be quite slow. TrueType outline fonts could be used directly or several different rasterizers could be made available depending on the font. I don't get why you'd want this. Since you only need one .tfm for all mags of a font, why not have a separate .tfm generator that you run once when you install the non-metafont font? Does anyone really lose lots of time having to stop TeX runs for missing tfms? Also, I personally oppose any proposals that would require OS services like forks that are not available on most existing OS's. NTS, like TeX, should aim to run on as wide a hardware/OS base as possible. (Please, no flame wars!) ---Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jonathan M. Gilligan Time and Frequency Division National Institute of Standards and Technology Boulder, Colorado, USA Disclaimer --- The government probably disagrees with my opinions. ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 15 May 92 12:16:00 EST Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: LMLARS01%ULKYVX@vm.urz.uni-heidelberg.de Subject: Re: font technology Anthony Shipman asks: <> Isn't this more or less what the vector based TeX's are doing already? For example, I use Textures on a Macintosh with PostScript versions of the CM fonts. I can type in one window and a couple of seconds later I see the preview in another window. I can specify any scaling of any PostScript (or Truetype) font and the operating system makes sure it's there for me to use at the right resolution almost instantly. However, I do notice you are asking for TFM files and not the bitmaps of the fonts. It seems to me that the metric files in some form are intrinsic to the font definition and probably don't have to be generated on the fly like bitmaps. After all, they don't change with scaling; they're just scaled. Of course, Adobe's new Multiple Masters font format changes all the rules here... Lee Larson lmlars01@ulkyvx.louisville.edu Department of Mathematics, University of Louisville ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 15 May 92 17:31:42 BST Reply-To: RHBNC Philip Taylor From: CHAA006%VAX.RHBNC.AC.UK@vm.urz.uni-heidelberg.de Subject: Re: font technology >>> Also, I personally oppose any proposals that would require OS services like >>> forks that are not available on most existing OS's. NTS, like TeX, should >>> aim to run on as wide a hardware/OS base as possible. (Please, no flame wars!) Not a flame, just a 100% supporting statement. NTS _must_ run on all platforms that currently support TeX, and be capable of being ported to new OS's w/out major effort. Whether this implies that NTS must be written in WEB is a much deeper question, and one that I hope we could discuss separately and at length (i.e. not in the context of an unrelated question). Philip Taylor, RHBNC. ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 15 May 92 10:44:24 -0700 Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Ed Sznyter Subject: Re: font technology In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 15 May 92 10:07:13 CST." <9205151614.AA22646@netcomsv.netcom.com> you write: > > > Anthony Shipman writes > How difficult would it be to generate fonts dynamically a la > TrueType? This would mean that TFM files are derived while TeX > was running. MetaFont need not be the source of the fonts as it > seems to be quite slow. TrueType outline fonts could be used > directly or several different rasterizers could be made available > depending on the font. > > Jonathan M. Gilligan writes: > I don't get why you'd want this. Since you only need one .tfm for > all mags of a font, why not have a separate .tfm generator that you > run once when you install the non-metafont font? Does anyone really > lose lots of time having to stop TeX runs for missing tfms? If you're using, e.g., the Sauter fonts, you can have separate .mf and .tfm files for each size. > Also, I personally oppose any proposals that would require OS services like > forks that are not available on most existing OS's. NTS, like TeX, should > aim to run on as wide a hardware/OS base as possible. (Please, no flame wars! .tfm, .pk, .gf files, etc., are just a primitive caching mechanism; since they are idempotently recreatable, it seems unreasonable to restrict when they are created. Leave that to the implementor of the machine-dependent code. ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 15 May 92 18:03:41 CET Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: bbeeton Subject: Re: font technology In-Reply-To: <01GK1ATQSGK0DSYDFT@MATH.AMS.COM> anthony shipman (als@bohra.cpg.oz.au, 15 may 92) asks "How difficult would it be to generate fonts dynamically a la TrueType? This would mean that TFM files are derived while TeX was running." does anyone know whether any font-generator other than metafont will provide the tfm values needed to get proper results in tex math mode? that, as far as i am aware, is the *real* problem with using non-mf fonts in tex. -- bb ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 15 May 92 18:12:27 CET Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Anselm Lingnau Subject: Re: font technology In-Reply-To: <9205151341.AA23796@mcsun.EU.net*> > How difficult would it be to generate fonts dynamically a la TrueType? > This would mean that TFM files are derived while TeX was running. MetaFont > need not be the source of the fonts as it seems to be quite slow. TrueType > outline fonts could be used directly or several different rasterizers could b e > made available depending on the font. I don't know anything about TrueType, but I suppose that there has to be some sort of font data analogous to what is in the TFM files. Anyhow, what happens nowadays is that TFM files are scaled according to the magnification that is wanted in the TeX file. So there is only one TFM file for cmr10, cmr10 scaled\magstep1, or even cmr10 at 314.1592pt. So, to me it seems that the point is moot, as long as you can get yourself a TFM file for whatever TrueType font you want to use. Sort of what you do with afm2tfm now. The actual rendering of the glyphs can be left to the drivers. A mechanism similar to today's virtual fonts should be adequate, IMHO. Anselm. -- Anselm Lingnau, Buchenweg 1, 6239 Eppstein| You see things, and you say `Why?' lingnau@math.uni-frankfurt.de Germany| But I dream things that never were, University of Frankfurt, CompSci and Maths| and say `Why not?' --- G. B. Shaw ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 15 May 92 22:56:18 EST Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Anthony Shipman Subject: font technology How difficult would it be to generate fonts dynamically a la TrueType? This would mean that TFM files are derived while TeX was running. MetaFont need not be the source of the fonts as it seems to be quite slow. TrueType outline fonts could be used directly or several different rasterizers could be made available depending on the font. This would be made easier if there was a cache. Under UNIX, the algorithm could be: open tfm file (in font cache) if not there fork a process to generate a tfm file in the cache retry the open fi The cache could be expired periodically to stop it growing forever. Drivers can do something similar to generate bitmaps when needed. Including the rasterizer in TeX itself would be rather difficult I suppose. -- Anthony Shipman "You've got to be taught before it's too late, CP Software Export Pty Ltd, Before you are six or seven or eight, 19 Cato St., East Hawthorn, To hate all the people your relatives hate, Melbourne, Australia, 3121 You've got to be carefully taught." R&H E-mail: als@bohra.cpg.oz.au ======================================================================== Date: Sat, 16 May 92 03:10:22 EST Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Anthony Shipman Subject: Re: font technology In-Reply-To: <199205151616.AA21433@yarra.pyramid.com.au>; from "Jonathan M. Gilligan" at May 15, 92 10:07 am > > Anthony Shipman writes > How difficult would it be to generate fonts dynamically a la TrueType? > This would mean that TFM files are derived while TeX was running. MetaFont > need not be the source of the fonts as it seems to be quite slow. TrueType > outline fonts could be used directly or several different rasterizers could > be > made available depending on the font. > > I don't get why you'd want this. Since you only need one .tfm for all mags > of a font, why not have a separate .tfm generator that you run once when you > install the non-metafont font? Does anyone really lose lots of time having to > stop TeX runs for missing tfms? > This is something that has puzzled me. What is the difference between a 10pt font with a magnification of 2 and a 20pt font with a magnification of 1. I have assumed that MetaFont produces a slightly different result and that you would really want different tfm files for different font (design) sizes. (cf the cmr5.tfm, cmr6.tfm etc). > Also, I personally oppose any proposals that would require OS services like > forks that are not available on most existing OS's. NTS, like TeX, should > aim to run on as wide a hardware/OS base as possible. (Please, no flame wars!) There already are OS dependencies introduced in the web->native conversion. At least on UNIX all the UNIX dependences like directory searching are taken care of by web2c. A non-fork solution is to send a message to a font service that adds to the font cache. I believe X11R5 does this now. Each X terminal can request a font at any size from the server and it will be generated if not already available. This is the sort of thing I would like to see TeX/drivers do. Then you can have one central font service on your network. The font server can create fonts using any method it likes eg from Postscript fonts, TrueType etc., as long as can export a tfm file to TeX. -- Anthony Shipman "You've got to be taught before it's too late, CP Software Export Pty Ltd, Before you are six or seven or eight, 19 Cato St., East Hawthorn, To hate all the people your relatives hate, Melbourne, Australia, 3121 You've got to be carefully taught." R&H E-mail: als@bohra.cpg.oz.au ======================================================================== Date: Sat, 16 May 92 03:14:07 EST Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Anthony Shipman Subject: Re: font technology In-Reply-To: <199205151644.AA22389@yarra.pyramid.com.au>; from"CHAA006@VAX.RHBNC.AC.UK" at May 15, 92 5:31 pm > > >>> Also, I personally oppose any proposals that would require OS services like > >>> forks that are not available on most existing OS's. NTS, like TeX, should > >>> aim to run on as wide a hardware/OS base as possible. (Please, no flame > wars!) > > Not a flame, just a 100% supporting statement. NTS _must_ run on all platforms > that currently support TeX, and be capable of being ported to new OS's w/out > major effort. Whether this implies that NTS must be written in WEB is a much > deeper question, and one that I hope we could discuss separately and at length > (i.e. not in the context of an unrelated question). > > Philip Taylor, RHBNC. > In all cases there is the fallback of loading pre-built fonts from a directory somewhere for ports on really primitive OSes. -- Anthony Shipman "You've got to be taught before it's too late, CP Software Export Pty Ltd, Before you are six or seven or eight, 19 Cato St., East Hawthorn, To hate all the people your relatives hate, Melbourne, Australia, 3121 You've got to be carefully taught." R&H E-mail: als@bohra.cpg.oz.au ======================================================================== Date: Sat, 16 May 92 03:20:42 EST Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Anthony Shipman Subject: Re: font technology In-Reply-To: <199205151615.AA21383@yarra.pyramid.com.au>; from "Anselm Lingnau"at May 15, 92 6:12 pm ............... > So, to me it seems that the point is moot, as long as you can get yourself a > TFM file for whatever TrueType font you want to use. Sort of what you do > with afm2tfm now. The actual rendering of the glyphs can be left to the > drivers. A mechanism similar to today's virtual fonts should be adequate, IMHO. > > Anselm. > -- > Anselm Lingnau, Buchenweg 1, 6239 Eppstein| You see things, and you say `Why?' > lingnau@math.uni-frankfurt.de Germany| But I dream things that never were, > University of Frankfurt, CompSci and Maths| and say `Why not?' --- G. B. Shaw > So I can conclude that what people do when importing fonts eg Postscript is to keep the design size constant and vary the magnification? -- Anthony Shipman "You've got to be taught before it's too late, CP Software Export Pty Ltd, Before you are six or seven or eight, 19 Cato St., East Hawthorn, To hate all the people your relatives hate, Melbourne, Australia, 3121 You've got to be carefully taught." R&H E-mail: als@bohra.cpg.oz.au ======================================================================== Date: Sat, 16 May 92 07:03:48 EDT Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Karl Berry Subject: NTS name (I just heard about this list, so forgive me if I'm rehashing old subjects or whatever breach of etiquette.) The name ``NTS'' is ok, but it doesn't explicitly acknowledge the debt it will owe to TeX. (If it's written from scratch this is obviously irrelevant, but I doubt it will be.) Does anyone share this concern? The best name I've been able to think of is `ExT' (TeX shifted by one, also fortuitiously reminiscient of `extension'), but probably there are others. karl@cs.umb.edu ======================================================================== Date: Sat, 16 May 92 07:09:19 EDT Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Karl Berry Subject: NTS source I was under the impression that NTS would be an extension to TeX. OK, it doesn't necessarily have to be that, but let's be realistic here. Any program that is not as close to upward-compatible as possible won't be adopted (unless it is truly a major advance, I suppose), because the millions of documents already written will break. The only upward incompatibilities I was thinking of would be new primitive control sequences. I don't think it's likely that NTS will be a ``major advance'', in the same way that TeX was a major advance over, say, troff. DEK already did 90% of what's needed in a good typesetting system, I think. (For the vast majority of documents, anyway.) If this is the base, then I think it would be crazy to rewrite tex.web in C web or anything else. Think of how many years it took DEK to debug TeX; any rewritten new program will take a similar amount of time. If we don't build on what we've got, then where are we? karl@cs.umb.edu ======================================================================== Date: Sat, 16 May 92 17:20:06 BST Reply-To: RHBNC Philip Taylor From: CHAA006%VAX.RHBNC.AC.UK@vm.urz.uni-heidelberg.de Subject: RE: NTS name Karl --- >>> The name ``NTS'' is ok, but it doesn't explicitly acknowledge >>> the debt it will owe to TeX. (If it's written from scratch >>> this is obviously irrelevant, but I doubt it will be.) At the DANTE meeting at which NTS was founded, the original proposal, from Joachim, was that the group/project be called `pi'; the idea was that as Knuth had declared that TeX would converge asymptotically towards \pi (and could therefore only reach \pi at \infinity), the name `pi' would imply that the group/project was to carry on where Don left off. However, there were many of us present who felt that the name was singularly inappropriate, for two main reasons: (1) TeX will become version \pi at Don's death; none of us wish to contemplate that unpleasant but unavoidable eventuality, and we felt that to suggest that we were already anticipating that event was in the worst taste; (2) Don has made it quite plain that (my stress) `TeX IS FINISHED; there will be no further changes other than necessary bug fixes; the responsibility for TeX is solely his [Don's], and no group or individual will ever be authorised to modify TeX'. That being the case, it would be singularly offensive to suggest that we were going against Don's express wishes and considering extending TeX. What we _are_ doing is starting again, and looking at all possible options; whilst it is by no means impossible that the `New Typesetting System' (when and if it comes to pass) will be _based on_ TeX, it would be a great mistake to _assume_ that this will be the case; it would close too many doors. The project/group has therefore been given the totally non-contentious name of `NTS' (New Typesetting System). Philip Taylor, RHBNC. ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 18 May 92 09:15:39 +0100 Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Peter Abbott Subject: Re: NTS name In-Reply-To: Your message of Sat, 16 May 92 07:03:48 -0400. > >(I just heard about this list, so forgive me if I'm >rehashing old subjects or whatever breach of etiquette.) > >The name ``NTS'' is ok, but it doesn't explicitly acknowledge >the debt it will owe to TeX. (If it's written from scratch >this is obviously irrelevant, but I doubt it will be.) > >Does anyone share this concern? > >The best name I've been able to think of is `ExT' (TeX shifted >by one, also fortuitiously reminiscient of `extension'), but >probably there are others. > >karl@cs.umb.edu Karl The name of the distribution list was chosen at the Hamburg meeting of DANTE. It was agreed that it should deliberately be different from TeX (or similar variants). It is not connected with the eventual name of any product which may be produced. Peter ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 18 May 92 23:33:33 EST Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Anthony Shipman Subject: front-end, back-end If you are going for a radical break with TeX then what I would like to see is a split of the type-setting system into a front-end and back-end. A lot of the ugliness of TeX stems from mixing text and commands together. Then you have all those quoting problems trying to keep the two apart. The "type-setting engine" of TeX could be separated out into a back-end section. The front-end could take care of whatever user-interface you want either the traditional TeX, for compatibility, SGML, or even something WYSIWYG if the back-end design were sufficiently clever. Since the back-end would not be intended for users to talk to directly it could have a stronger split between the text and the command language, rather like PostScript. -- Anthony Shipman "You've got to be taught before it's too late, CP Software Export Pty Ltd, Before you are six or seven or eight, 19 Cato St., East Hawthorn, To hate all the people your relatives hate, Melbourne, Australia, 3121 You've got to be carefully taught." R&H E-mail: als@bohra.cpg.oz.au ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 19 May 92 03:26:41 -0600 Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: "Jonathan M. Gilligan" Subject: font technology In-Reply-To: Anthony Shipman's message of Sat, 16 May 92 03:10:22 EST <9205151728.AA11820@lilac.csd.bldrdoc.gov> This is something that has puzzled me. What is the difference between a 10pt font with a magnification of 2 and a 20pt font with a magnification of 1. I have assumed that MetaFont produces a slightly different result and that you would really want different tfm files for different font (design) sizes. (cf the cmr5.tfm, cmr6.tfm etc). For the difference between cmr10 and cmr5 at 10pt, read the TeXbook (page 16). The .tfm files for each design size are generated by metafont. The .tfm files for a given design size are independent of the magnification. > Also, I personally oppose any proposals that would require OS services like > forks that are not available on most existing OS's. NTS, like TeX, should > aim to run on as wide a hardware/OS base as possible. (Please, no flame wars!) There already are OS dependencies introduced in the web->native conversion. At least on UNIX all the UNIX dependences like directory searching are taken care of by web2c. A non-fork solution is to send a message to a font service that adds to the font cache. I believe X11R5 does this now. Each X terminal can request a font at any size from the server and it will be generated if not already available. This is the sort of thing I would like to see TeX/drivers do. Then you can have one central font service on your network. The font server can create fonts using any method it likes eg from Postscript fonts, TrueType etc., as long as can export a tfm file to TeX. You are already assuming a lot. 1) There's a difference between system dependencies such as file-handling and terminal I/O that can be assumed to be present on all reasonable OS's. Multitasking is not such an assumption. 2) How do you send a message to a font service on a non-networked non-multitasking OS? What _is_ a font service on such a machine? Am I missing something? 3) You can't automatically generate .tfm's for families 2 and 3 from non-mf fonts. They need hand-tuned parameters that Postscript and TrueType fonts don't specify. (See Karl Berry's work on generating tfms for Lucida New Math fonts, for example). ---Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jonathan M. Gilligan Time and Frequency Division National Institute of Standards and Technology Boulder, Colorado, USA Disclaimer --- The government probably disagrees with my opinions. ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 19 May 92 12:07:00 +0100 Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Peter Abbott Subject: NTS and Graphics Any new system should be able to handle graphics files. 1. It should be capable of accepting most of the common formats around and 2. If it treated each graphic as a box for placement purposes, then baselines and space would be automatically catered for. The display driver should be able to either display the graphic or if the output device cannot accept graphics then a box to indicate the limits of the graphic is almost mandatory. Reliance on EPSF is not acceptable (particularly as this generates files of unacceptable size) which have attendant storage problems. Peter ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 19 May 92 11:47:38 MEZ Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Mike Dowling Subject: dynacamic memory allocation for TeX derivatives One aspect that I have often been confronted with that has been quite frustrating is TeX's inability to allocate memory dynamically. It would have saved me a number of headaches if TeX could only load as many fonts, hyphenation patterns and so on that can physically fit into the computer's memory. With the current version of emTeX these parameters have now been set at levels that few people are likely to want to exceed, but this is implementation dependent. For example, I have files that will not run on our main-frame for reasons of memory although our main-frame has 256 Mbytes of main memory. If I understand things correctly, the main problem in implementing dynamic memory allocation lies in Knuth's idea of having WEB expand into Pascal, and Pascal does not support dynamic memory allocation. Mike Dowling ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 19 May 92 12:14:58 BST Reply-To: RHBNC Philip Taylor From: CHAA006%VAX.RHBNC.AC.UK@vm.urz.uni-heidelberg.de Subject: Re: dynamic memory allocation >>> If I understand things correctly, the main problem in implementing >>> dynamic memory allocation lies in Knuth's idea of having WEB expand into >>> Pascal, and Pascal does not support dynamic memory allocation. I think this is true only for the `trivial subset' of Pascal that Don chose to use (for machine independence); pointer types simply could not work without the existence of `new' (see Jensen and Wirth , page 142). ** Phil. ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 19 May 92 12:43:00 LCL Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: UKI6%DKAUNI2@vm.urz.uni-heidelberg.de Subject: Re: font technology > This is something that has puzzled me. What is the difference > between a 10pt font with a magnification of 2 and a 20pt font with > a magnification of 1. I have assumed that MetaFont produces a > slightly different result and that you would really want different > tfm files for different font (design) sizes. (cf the cmr5.tfm, > cmr6.tfm etc). > > For the difference between cmr10 and cmr5 at 10pt, read the TeXbook > (page 16). The .tfm files for each design size are generated by > metafont. The .tfm files for a given design size are independent of > the magnification. > One solution for this problem would be to scale the fonts in a non- linear way. So, for example, the width w of a character in size s can be specified by w = s*w0+a (let w0 be the width in the design size, which is '1' in this case). The other parameters can be calculated in a similar way. This would give similar results to MetaFont: wider characters in small sizes, without having to give parameter sets for each size. NTS should also be able to import common outline font formats, like PostScript, MetaFont, TrueType or BitStream. One other thing TeX can't do and NTS should do: write in other direc- tions than left to right. How about up -> down (like in many eastern languages) or left <- right (like in hebrew/arabic) or diagonal over the page -- for special effects? tobias b k"ohler (uki6@dkauni2.bitnet) ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 19 May 92 15:09:25 +0200 Reply-To: Schoepf@sc.ZIB-Berlin.DE From: Rainer Schoepf Subject: This list Please, this list has been newly created, not even announced everywhere yet. I'd prefer postponing the discussions until all have had their chance to join. Rainer ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 19 May 92 14:37:04 BST Reply-To: RHBNC Philip Taylor From: CHAA006@VAX.RHBNC.AC.UK Subject: A New Typesetting System: Beyond TeX To all NTS correspondents: It would seem that the creation of the NTS-L list has somewhat let the cat out of the bag: we are already besieged by messages urging that this feature or that feature _must_ be included in `The New Typesetting System'. But, with the greatest respect to all who have contributed such suggestions, these do seem somewhat premature (although entirely understandable) to me. I am very concerned that attempts to define a successor to TeX should neither violate Knuth's axiom: `TeX and MetaFont are complete; there will be no further changes', nor should they simply provide an opportunity for `creeping featurism' --- i.e. any new system, proposed as a successor to TeX, shall be as carefully designed and considered as TeX was in the first place. It most certainly should NOT be TeX-3 plus everything that anybody could possibly want. Instead, we must start by considering exactly what it is about TeX that we are seeking to perpetuate. Is it, for example, TeX's descriptive and character-oriented nature --- the fact that, in direct opposition to current trends, TeX requires the user to _think_ about what he or she wants to achieve, and then express that thought in as a series of words and symbols in a file, rather than as a series of ephemeral mouse movements on a screen? Is it, perhaps, its portability --- the fact that implementations (almost entirely p.d.) exist for every major operating system in the world? Is it the deterministic nature of TeX --- the fact that a given sequence of TeX commands and text-to-be-typeset will _always_ produce exactly the same results, regardless of the machine on which it is processed? Is it the `boxes and glue' paradigm, that provides a simple but somewhat naive model of black and white space on a printed page? The ease with which form and content can be separated? The implementation as a macro, rather than procedural, language? (would a procedural TeX still be recognisably TeX?) Is it, perhaps, the incredible contortions one occasionally has to go through to achieve a desired result? Or the incredible elation when such contortions finally achieve their desired effect? How many of these elements could be eliminated and still leave something that is recognisably TeX? Could, for example, TeX have a two-file representation, with commands and pointers-to-text in one, while the second contains purely the text to be typeset? (this might eliminate the need for an escape character on TeX commands, allowing a `non-stropped' representation, while at the same time eliminating at a stroke all the problems regarding the treatment of blank space(s)). Until we can identify exactly what it is about TeX that is so inherently desirable, what hope have we of designing a typesetting system which can both perpetuate the TeX philosophy _and_ provide the functionality which will be needed for the start of the twenty-first century? When we have identified what it is we seek to perpetuate, we can then consider what it is we _need_ to add: what is it about TeX-3 that renders it inadequate for our needs? A perfectly valid answer to this question may well be `nothing' --- it may simply be that we still do not know how to exploit TeX to the full. If it can be _proved_ that there are fundamental deficiencies in TeX, then at least we have a start --- we know what _must_ be added to TeX. We can then consider what additional facilities (`luxuries') we may allow ourselves to add. To what extent will we allow ourselves the luxury of dependence on today's (and tomorrow's) technology? Are powerful processors and graphics displays now sufficiently ubiquitous that a successor to TeX could have built in, right from the start, simultaneous display of source file(s) and simulated finished text, as a fundamental design desideratum. What is the implementation language to be? Is the universal availability of the WEB family sufficient justification for insisting that a successor to TeX be also written in WEB, or is the current obsession with C, and object-oriented programming, and/or both, sufficient justification for dumping WEB and conforming with the current received wisdom. If we adopt the latter course, how will we perpetuate Knuth's brilliant example of `literate programming'? These, I suggest, are just _some_ of the questions which must be answered before we even _start_ to consider a successor to TeX. I would urge you all to consider these and other related questions before plunging prematurely into a never-ending list of `NTS must ...' requirements. Philip Taylor, RHBNC. ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 19 May 92 14:42:08 CET Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Hubert.Palme@cyber.urz.uni-wuppertal.dbp.de Subject: Typesetting directions, was Re: font technology In-Reply-To: > One other thing TeX can't do and NTS should do: write in other direc- > tions than left to right. How about up -> down (like in many eastern > languages) or left <- right (like in hebrew/arabic) or diagonal over > the page -- for special effects? I agree very much, this makes "special" implementations like TeXXeT obsolete. May be it is not realistic to have "NTS" typset in ANY direction, but it would be helpful to add "landscape" as a direction. This would finish the dependancy of such poor guys (like me) having a cheap, narrow prtrait printer from special capabilities of the drivers. Greetings, Hubert Palme ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 19 May 92 15:08:40 GMT Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: spqr@MINSTER.YORK.AC.UK Subject: Re: font technology, and: Directions Anselm Lingnau writes: > that done by whatever-to-XFM (NTS extended font metric) format converters, > just like we have afm2tfm today. Otherwise it'd bloat the main program > unnecessarily. We should take care that XFM is general enough to support all > these formats. As before, rendering the glyphs belongs to the > output driver' yes yes, 100% yes! > Rotated text seems to be most useful for (short) labels on plots, and > `special effects' as above, anyhow. So rotated paragraphs don't appear too > important, but who knows? labels or captions can easily be paragraphs. anyway, if you keep the boxes model, you rotate boxes so who cares what the punter puts in it? Phil (rightly) said `lets get back to basics' and `what is provably wrong with TeX 3'. answer (and what I really spend every day having trouble with): facilities for analyzing more than one page. If there's one thing that would make me ditch TeX and go and buy a copy of Pagemaker (I tell you, i am near to it!), its the impossibilty of pleasing floats. Maybe the thing is insoluble, maybe algorithmic page makeup can never work? Somone tell me what to say to clients who say `why cant you make that figure go *there*'. sebastian ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 19 May 92 18:01:41 +0200 Reply-To: Dag Asheim From: Dag Asheim Subject: Re: font technology, and: Directions In-Reply-To: spqr@MINSTER.YORK.AC.UK's message of Tue, 19 May 92 15:08:40 GMT >Somone tell me what to say to clients who say >`why cant you make that figure go *there*'. Tell them: Oh, but I can. :-) At least if I understand your problem correctly. What you want, is something which isn't a float after all. But with the caption and the all. If you are using LaTeX's figure-environment, and struggeling with \begin{figure}[htb] ^^^ \end{figure} With the style option here.sty (from all good TeX-archives), you can instead write [H] to get the figure at that exact point in the text. There is a possibillity that you know this, and that you hint at a more fundamental problem with figure placement. In that case, you could just ignore this letter. Dag ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 19 May 92 16:31:53 CET Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Anselm Lingnau Subject: Re: font technology, and: Directions In-Reply-To: <9205191048.AA22130@mcsun.EU.net*> > One solution for this problem would be to scale the fonts in a non- > linear way. So, for example, the width w of a character in size s > can be specified by w = s*w0+a (let w0 be the width in the design size, > which is '1' in this case). The other parameters can be calculated in > a similar way. This would give similar results to MetaFont: wider > characters in small sizes, without having to give parameter sets for > each size. This seems to call for extended TFM files that include coefficients for `scaling polynomials' for the parameters. Do we need to support this on a per-character basis, or would it be sufficient to have one set of polynomials for the whole file? Apparently the Thing To Do would be both --- have a global set and allow per-character polynomials to override it. > NTS should also be able to import common outline font > formats, like PostScript, MetaFont, TrueType or BitStream. Of course NTS should be able to support these font formats. But I'd rather see that done by whatever-to-XFM (NTS extended font metric) format converters, just like we have afm2tfm today. Otherwise it'd bloat the main program unnecessarily. We should take care that XFM is general enough to support all these formats. As before, rendering the glyphs belongs to the output driver's domain. > One other thing TeX can't do and NTS should do: write in other direc- > tions than left to right. How about up -> down (like in many eastern > languages) or left <- right (like in hebrew/arabic) or diagonal over > the page -- for special effects? There's a paper by Knuth in TUGboat on up/down and left/right. Apparently these can be done without major hassle. Diagonal should be more difficult, since it doesn't fit nicely into TeX's boxes-and-glue model. (Do we want to keep that? I suppose so!) I haven't actually thought this through, but suppose one would be able to include a `slope' with boxes like so: a b + c +-++ a: \hbox slope 0{foo} +---+ + \ | || b: \hbox slope 30{foo} | | \ \ | || c: \hbox slope 90{foo} o---+ o + +-o+ +---+ + There might be a \boundinghbox command for finding a `bounding' hbox of such a sloped box (\boundingvbox too, of course). Paragraphs might be difficult, but then running text isn't usually set diagonally. Maybe one could have sloped vboxes also, inside which hboxes automatically inherit the slope. Rotated text seems to be most useful for (short) labels on plots, and `special effects' as above, anyhow. So rotated paragraphs don't appear too important, but who knows? Anselm. -- Anselm Lingnau, Buchenweg 1, 6239 Eppstein| You see things, and you say `Why?' lingnau@math.uni-frankfurt.de Germany| But I dream things that never were, University of Frankfurt, CompSci and Maths| and say `Why not?' --- G. B. Shaw ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 19 May 92 16:48:47 CET Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: bbeeton Subject: Re: Typesetting directions, was Re: font technology In-Reply-To: <01GK6UNL73AQE2XJXE@MATH.AMS.COM> hubert palme states that adding "landscape" to the basic capabilities of nts would "finish the dependancy of such poor guys (like me) having a cheap, narrow prtrait printer from special capabilities of the drivers." there are a couple of considerations here that seem nontrivial. at present, everything in the dvi file essentially goes from left-to-right, top-to-bottom. for contiguous text on the same baseline, one absolute starting location is required, followed by incremental movements. if rotated text is added, this either - puts the requirement to resolve the motion along another axis right back on the device driver, or - requires nts to output many more instances of absolute location, and use a second set of (rotated) fonts. i believe that for languages that are set horizontally (and this includes math for any natural language with which i am familiar), it is most effective to do the initial setting in the "natural" direction and then have the rotation applied when the bitmap is constructed; this is equivalent to the first scenario above. this has the virtue that only one set of metrics is required, relative to the "natural" baseline. i don't feel qualified to comment on top-to-bottom languages. i would like to hear from someone who writes, or is very familiar with the innards of, device drivers what the implications are in at least the following instances: - devices with non-square rasters - devices (some typesetters) that are not based on raster technology, in particular non-postscript typesetters i suspect that at the very least a second complete set of fonts may be needed, though if the rotation is put off to the device driver this should not affect the nts program itself. would a requirement for rotation serve to exclude any classes of output devices that are now in reasonably wide use, or which cannot be replaced without great expense (e.g. typesetters)? -- bb ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 19 May 92 11:54:00 EST Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: LMLARS01%ULKYVX@vm.urz.uni-heidelberg.de Subject: Re: Typesetting directions, was Re: font technology > One solution for this problem would be to scale the fonts in a non- > linear way. So, for example, the width w of a character in size s > can be specified by w = s*w0+a (let w0 be the width in the design size, > which is '1' in this case). The other parameters can be calculated in > a similar way. This would give similar results to MetaFont: wider > characters in small sizes, without having to give parameter sets for > each size. This capability is already available in PostScript and TrueType. In fact, Adobe has gone even beyond this with the new "Multiple Masters" PostScript format. Take four fonts at the four corners of a square. An essentially infinite number of different typefaces can be generated by scaling between the four corners. A different typeface for each point in the square is generated. (For the mathematicians reading this, they are defining a two parameter homotopy between the corners.) It is possible to gradually transform Times into Helvetica this way. A more practical application is to go from a normal Times into heavy bold gradually to get just the weight you want. I think the Minion Multiple Master set is already out and others will be released soon. ============================================================================= Lee Larson lmlars01@ulkyvx.louisville.edu Department of Mathematics (502)588-6826 University of Louisville Louisville, Kentucky 40292 USA ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 19 May 92 17:20:00 LCL Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: UKI6%DKAUNI2@vm.urz.uni-heidelberg.de Subject: Re: NTS and Graphics > > Any new system should be able to handle graphics files. > > 1. It should be capable of accepting most of the common formats around > > and > > 2. If it treated each graphic as a box for placement purposes, then > baselines and space would be automatically catered for. > And it would be great if the text could "flow around" the picture, like in many DTP programs .... ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 19 May 92 19:24:17 CET Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Dean Guenther Subject: RE: A New Typesetting System: Beyond TeX >These, I suggest, are just _some_ of the questions which must be answered >before we even _start_ to consider a successor to TeX. I would urge you all >to consider these and other related questions before plunging prematurely >into a never-ending list of `NTS must ...' requirements. > > Philip Taylor, RHBNC. Well put Phil, I should think Rainer's list of >1. stage: What should be changed? >2. stage: How can this be realised? >3. stage: Realisation. should easily have step .5 added which would ask the questions Phil asked, and more. I should think that setting up committees to review what it is we want to do would be wise, i.e., NTS.1001 graphics NTS.1002 fonts NTS.1002 implementation language . . . I can't deny the committee efforts end up with strange products from time to time, but I know of no other way to organize such a large project. Rainer suggested we wait on discussions. During this (hopefully short) interim, a structure could be built upon will aid in birthing NTS. -- Dean ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 19 May 92 23:16:26 EST Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Anthony Shipman Subject: Re: font technology In-Reply-To: <199205190945.AA05124@yarra.pyramid.com.au>; from "Jonathan M. Gilligan" at May 19, 92 3:26 am > > 1) There's a difference between system dependencies such as > file-handling and terminal I/O that can be assumed to be present on > all reasonable OS's. Multitasking is not such an assumption. > > 2) How do you send a message to a font service on a non-networked > non-multitasking OS? What _is_ a font service on such a machine? > On such a machine it is a precomputed library like we have now. > 3) You can't automatically generate .tfm's for families 2 and 3 from > non-mf fonts. They need hand-tuned parameters that Postscript and > TrueType fonts don't specify. (See Karl Berry's work on generating > tfms for Lucida New Math fonts, for example). Sure. TeX math fonts will have to continue to come from Metafont sources until a more general solution is found. But there are many uses for TeX other than maths and a wide variety of sources for fonts. People have used a variety of Postscript fonts before without waiting for maths versions. I am just looking for ways of grouping together all of these font sources to: a) save disk space by generating whatever is possible dynamically thereby b) increasing the range of fonts and sizes available and to b) reduce administrative headaches for fonts on networks by centralising them. -- Anthony Shipman "You've got to be taught before it's too late, CP Software Export Pty Ltd, Before you are six or seven or eight, 19 Cato St., East Hawthorn, To hate all the people your relatives hate, Melbourne, Australia, 3121 You've got to be carefully taught." R&H E-mail: als@bohra.cpg.oz.au ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 19 May 92 23:25:13 EST Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Anthony Shipman Subject: Re: font technology In-Reply-To: <199205191047.AA07142@yarra.pyramid.com.au>; from"UKI6@DKAUNI2.BITNET" at May 19, 92 12:43 pm > One other thing TeX can't do and NTS should do: write in other direc- > tions than left to right. How about up -> down (like in many eastern > languages) or left <- right (like in hebrew/arabic) or diagonal over > the page -- for special effects? Which reminds me, ditroff format has commands for drawing lines at any angle and even spline curve commands. Some more useful graphics primitives could be defined for the dvi files to avoid resorting to non-standard specials. Opcode 255 could be defined as an extension byte, followed by an extension opcode. Some things that could be added: more line and curve primitives colour manipulating well known graphics files(?) -- Anthony Shipman "You've got to be taught before it's too late, CP Software Export Pty Ltd, Before you are six or seven or eight, 19 Cato St., East Hawthorn, To hate all the people your relatives hate, Melbourne, Australia, 3121 You've got to be carefully taught." R&H E-mail: als@bohra.cpg.oz.au ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 20 May 92 08:51:00 N Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: FLEINERC%CFRUNI52@vm.urz.uni-heidelberg.de Subject: Features to keep from TeX One thing I love about TeX is the possibility to change and understand the format. You do not need a sophisticated program to understand all the commands. ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 20 May 92 08:55:00 N Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: FLEINERC%CFRUNI52@vm.urz.uni-heidelberg.de Subject: Format Codes Sorry about the previous message, there is something missing: One thing I love about TeX is the possibility to read and change any format without the need of a sophisticated programm. So it is very easy to have any program output text, tables, ... in TeX-format. NTS should have the same possibilities, even when there is a WYSIWYG-Editor or the printfile is splitted between format-codes and text. Claudio Fleiner fleinerc@cfruni52.bitnet ======================================================================== Date: Thu, 21 May 92 11:27:00 +0200 Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: N.POPPELIER%ELSEVIER.NL@vm.urz.uni-heidelberg.de Subject: RE: Typesetting directions, was Re: font technology In-Reply-To: <0E003C7FC005532B@HEARNVAX.nic.SURFnet.nl> NTS should be accompanied by standards for the output format and the device drivers, in which landscape is specified as a MUST. For the current TeX, there is a DVI standard, but I don't know whether that specifies landscape as a must, and TUG nor any other organization in the world has the means to enforce this standard. Nico Poppelier Elsevier Science Publishers (and TUG Board of Directors) ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 22 May 92 20:18:27 MESZ Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Joachim Schrod Subject: ftp archive site for NTS-L Please note: The NTS-L discussion is archived on ftp.th-darmstadt.de [129.69.1.12] directory pub/tex/documentation/nts-l Each file in this directory is named yymm, where (guess :-) yy is the year and mm is the month when the mail arrived. (I.e., all postings of one month are bundled in one file.) Access this archive via anonymous ftp. You will like to use off bureau hours since our bandwidth is low (but 2 MBits are coming Real Soon Now :-). If the connection is slow, this has nothing to do with the machine. Access via mail-server will be made available later this year. Enjoy. -- Joachim =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Joachim Schrod Email: schrod@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de Computer Science Department Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany ``How do we persuade new users that spreading fonts across the page like peanut butter across hot toast is not necessarily the route to typographic excellence?'' -- Peter Flynn ======================================================================== Date: Sun, 24 May 92 20:16:36 +0200 Reply-To: Schoepf%sc.ZIB-Berlin.DE@vm.urz.uni-heidelberg.de From: Rainer Schoepf Subject: Welcome message Welcome to NTS-L, the discussion list about what is to come after TeX. I'd like to open the discussion with some remarks about what happened at the originating meeting. There was a short (about one hour) discussion led by myself. I took as a starting point a mail message that I had received somewhat earlier from Philip Taylor of The University of London at Windsor. Since I still think that this gives us a very nice base to put our feet on, I will quote its main part below. Rainer Schoepf ---- Originally-From: Philip Taylor (RHBNC) Does it make sense to invest major resources (and I suspect the time involved is considerable) in simply perpetuating and improving the TeX paradigm ? Might we not do better to do what I am sure Don would do if he were to find himself in the position today in which he found himself in 1977: not ask `What is the best typesetting system available to me? How can I improve it to the point where there are no apparent deficiencies in the design?' but `Given the current state of the art of Computer Science, what is the best possible typesetting system that I can design and implement?' Do not misunderstand me --- I am not saying that TeX is so dated in its design that we cannot possibly incorporate it in the typesetting system of tomorrow; it may well be that TeX _still_ represents the state of the art. But we should not take that as an a priori fact; it must be as open to question as any other postulate. It seems, then, that we have at least five options: 1) To leave TeX as it is now. This is clearly a valid option. If Don is sufficiently happy with TeX that he is prepared to leave it for posterity in its present form, then I think we should certainly consider that as an option for the TeX world as a whole. 2) To extend TeX by just enough that those who really understand its deficiencies agree that the extensions are not only justified but _essential_: i.e. there are some `simple' typesetting tasks with which TeX \pi cannot deal with correctly, but with which an Extended TeX could. 3) To extend TeX to incorporate the combined wish-lists of the major TeX practitioners, while retaining TeX's present `look-and-feel'. 4) To extend TeX to incorporate the combined wish-lists of the major TeX practitioners, taking the opportunity to reconsider TeX's `look-and-feel' and to implement major changes in that area if it is felt beneficial. 5) To design a typesetting system for the twenty-first century, using whatever elements of TeX are felt to continue to represent the state of the typesetting art. Of these, I feel that (3) is the least desirable. It represents the worst combination of `creeping-featurism' and unoriginal thought. I prefer to regard this as a non-option. The other four, I all consider to be viable, albeit with considerably different implications for the resources required. I find it very hard to place them in rank order; all have pros and cons. I think, at the moment, I would prefer to offer them simply as options, and to invite informed comment. ======================================================================== Date: Sun, 24 May 92 16:23:29 EDT Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Mark Steinberger Subject: Re: Welcome message With regard to Philip Taylor's list of options, I would hesitate to make concrete recommendations to the experts. But I do hope that people keep in mind the number of megabytes of people's disk space that are currently devoted to tex, together with the fact that very few systems will have enough space for two such systems. For this reason, option 5 (starting essentially from scratch) would be hard to implement. Many users would stay with tex, rather than try to mount both systems during an interim period. So I hope that the changes can be made gradually, upgrading a step at a time in such a way that old source files can be ported without too much pain. Remeber: some people have lengthy documents they have been preparing over long periods of time. Presumably, with proper care, this could even be done in the spirit of option 4: >4) To extend TeX to incorporate the combined wish-lists of the major > TeX practitioners, taking the opportunity to reconsider TeX's > `look-and-feel' and to implement major changes in that area if it > is felt beneficial. --Mark -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mark Steinberger | mark@sarah.albany.edu Dept. of Math. & Stat | SUNY at Albany | Nonlinear similarity begins in dimension six. Albany, NY 12222 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 25 May 92 14:37:06 CET Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: "Janusz S. Bie/n" Subject: list archives If I am not mistaken, this list is not archived. If it is not possible to maintain its archives at DHDURZ1, perhaps somobody can do it elsewhere? JSB ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 25 May 92 14:37:06 CET Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: "Janusz S. Bie/n" Subject: list archives If I am not mistaken, this list is not archived. If it is not possible to maintain its archives at DHDURZ1, perhaps somobody can do it elsewhere? JSB ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 25 May 92 16:14:40 MESZ Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Joachim Schrod Subject: Re: ftp archive site for NTS-L In-Reply-To: <199205221826.AA20882@rs3.hrz.th-darmstadt.de>; from "Joachim Schrod" at May 22, 92 8:18 pm Hmmpf, I wrote > > Please note: > > The NTS-L discussion is archived on > > ftp.th-darmstadt.de [129.69.1.12] ^^^^^^^^^^^ This is the IP address of Stuttgart... :-( The IP address of Darmstadt is 130.83.55.75. -- Joachim =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Joachim Schrod Email: schrod@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de Computer Science Department Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany ``How do we persuade new users that spreading fonts across the page like peanut butter across hot toast is not necessarily the route to typographic excellence? -- Peter Flynn ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 25 May 92 18:01:09 BST Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Timothy Murphy Subject: Re: Welcome message In-Reply-To: Rainer Schoepf's message of Sun, 24 May 92 20:16:36 +0200 > 1) To leave TeX as it is now. This is clearly a valid option. If Don is > sufficiently happy with TeX that he is prepared to leave it for posterity > in its present form, then I think we should certainly consider that as > an option for the TeX world as a whole. The contributions to nts-l that I've read to date have confirmed in my mind the wisdom of DEK in freezing TeX at 3.141. Do any of the contributors to nts-l ever meet people out there, in the non-TeX otherworld? TeX needs simplification, not complication. The LaTeX manual was the best thing that ever happened to TeX. Is there going to be a LaTeX3 manual? It doesn't matter how good a program is if only a small elite know how to use it. Timothy Murphy e-mail: tim@maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-1-2842366 (home/office) +353-1-7021507 (university) fax: +353-1-2842295 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 25 May 92 14:18:22 EDT Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Michael Barr Subject: Complication vs Simplification I mostly agree with Timothy Murphy, but added functionality does not mean complication and may well mean substantial simplification. To mention just one (not terribly important) point, the ability to give expressions (e.g. \hsize - 5pt) as a specification would lead to great simplification. BASIC ( :>) ) is very simple---to the user. I still use it for all sorts of simple things. Latex is good, but not good enough and many of its deficiencies are due to deficiencies in the ground language. I would also go for Philip Taylor's option 4. I think a lot of TeX' problems are caused by obscure and non-orthogonal syntax and I am all for changing them. Of all the insoluble problems (as opposed to merely difficult) in TeX, I think a very high proportion are caused by the inability to back up to where you were in the text at the time of a page break. The rest of the last paragraph is already set and you cannot unset it. Oh and the last point made by Murphy about the number of users is really not significant. At least 90% of the world will not accept anything but WYSIWYG (= WYSIAYG) and I don't think that TeX can be that for a long time to come. The resolution of printers is likely to remain above that of displays for the forseeable future. Michael Barr ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 25 May 92 13:11:12 -0600 Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: "Jonathan M. Gilligan" Subject: Backward compatibility (was Welcome message) In-Reply-To: Mark Steinberger's message of Sun, 24 May 92 16:23:29 EDT <9205242034.AA07561@lilac.csd.bldrdoc.gov> Mark Steinberger writes, With regard to Philip Taylor's list of options, I would hesitate to make concrete recommendations to the experts. But I do hope that people keep in mind the number of megabytes of people's disk space that are currently devoted to tex, together with the fact that very few systems will have enough space for two such systems. For this reason, option 5 (starting essentially from scratch) would be hard to implement. Many users would stay with tex, rather than try to mount both systems during an interim period. I'm no expert either, but I strongly disagree. Moderately fast hard disks can be had for about three (US) dollars per megabyte. A full TeX implementation with device drivers and CM fonts (300 dpi) can be had in less than ten Megs. After spending thousands to tens of thousands of dollars on a computer, I'd prefer to have sysops lay out thirty dollars or so to install a truly state-of-the-art typesetting system than to have an inferior product only because it's compatible with TeX! So I hope that the changes can be made gradually, upgrading a step at a time in such a way that old source files can be ported without too much pain. Remeber: some people have lengthy documents they have been preparing over long periods of time. A system should be designed coherently, not piecemeal. A gradual implementation would promote regrets late in the process that certain things had not been put in at the beginning. As I understand history, after designing and building the first TeX and mf ('78), Knuth found so much lacking that he rewrote the whole system ('82) rather than paste features on top of a flawed design. The new system was then incompatible with the old and not handicapped with mistakes in the old design. If I'm wrong about the history, I'd appreciate being corrected. People should be able to keep TeX on board while they get used to NTS (see above). Also, conversion tools should not be too hard to write. Finally, you'd be rather foolish to get rid of a thoroughly debugged system (TeX) in favor of a new, relatively untried one. Even if NTS claims to be TeX compatible, I'd hate to find a crucial incompatibility when I'm writing against a deadline. I have had enough trouble with updates to TeX and LaTeX (the infamous failure to set \lefthyphenmin, \righthyphenmin when upgrading to TeX 3; conference abstracts due tomorrow and a macro that works with Mar-92 LaTeX breaks on a colleague's machine that has Jan-90 ILaTeX) that I know whereof I speak. ---Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jonathan M. Gilligan Time and Frequency Division National Institute of Standards and Technology Boulder, Colorado, USA Disclaimer --- The government probably disagrees with my opinions. ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 25 May 92 21:57:02 CET Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: bbeeton Subject: Re: Backward compatibility (was Welcome message) In-Reply-To: <01GKFLJDZAZ6E2Y04P@MATH.AMS.COM> jonathan gilligan (25 may 92) says ... As I understand history, after designing and building the first TeX and mf ('78), Knuth found so much lacking that he rewrote the whole system ('82) rather than paste features on top of a flawed design. The new system was then incompatible with the old and not handicapped with mistakes in the old design. If I'm wrong about the history, I'd appreciate being corrected. partly true; certainly tex82 was not backward compatible in many ways with tex78 once everything was settled. however, one of the underlying reasons for the redesign was the fact that knuth wrote tex78 for himself, to typeset the 2nd edition of "the art of computer programming", vol 2, and future volumes. it was written in sail, which ran only on dec-10's and -20's. once he found that so many other people were interested in being able to use it, it became imperative to rewrite it in a portable language. that in turn opened up the opportunity to make the changes that had been shown by experience to be valuable. during this recreation of tex, knuth changed his mind about some things, but held tight on others -- in particular, not making tex a "real programming language". i believe his reasons have been recorded somewhere, and i think it would be instructive to examine those reasons to see if serious users think they're still valid. one reason i do remember for knuth's decision not to support certain features (e.g. graphics) is that these were already handled well enough by other existing software, and were also largely device dependent. portability and device independence are two of the major guiding principles behind the present tex system, and i doubt that tex would have spread as widely as it has (and we wouldn't now be discussing whether to change the ground rules) otherwise. as one who had to make the switch from tex78 to tex82 *in support of a production environment*, i caution people not to take too lightly the dislocations that such a change can foster. -- bb ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 25 May 92 23:39:39 +0200 Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Thorsten Ohl Subject: Re: Backward compatibility (was Welcome message) >>>>> On Mon, 25 May 92 21:57:02 CET, bbeeton said: bb> during this recreation of tex, knuth changed his mind about some things, bb> but held tight on others -- in particular, not making tex a "real bb> programming language". i believe his reasons have been recorded bb> somewhere, and i think it would be instructive to examine those reasons bb> to see if serious users think they're still valid. This should be _very_ instructive! Could someone please post this a text or a reference? bb> one reason i do remember for knuth's decision not to support certain bb> features (e.g. graphics) is that these were already handled well bb> enough by other existing software, and were also largely device bb> dependent. portability and device independence are two of the major bb> guiding principles behind the present tex system, and i doubt that bb> tex would have spread as widely as it has (and we wouldn't now be bb> discussing whether to change the ground rules) otherwise. I fully agree with the latter point, however from the user's side, the missing graphics support is _the_ weak spot of the present TeX system. It's a pity how much ingenuity is sometimes wasted on LaTeX pictures, which will anyway look very poor compared to TeX's typesetting. And for technical/scientific publishing graphics are indispensable. Of course, we can always use encapsulated PostScript (iff my co-author has a PostScript printer) or METAFONT (iff my co-author has a working mf installation) to create our pictures. Unfortunately these are conditions are not everywhere met. (Ever tried to use your own METAfonts on a IBM 3820 printer? Or PostScript on such a device?) I know that this has been said before many times, but if ``NTS'' ever wants to be viewed by Joe User as an improvement compared to (La)?TeX, it will have to include DEVICE INDEPENDENT GRAPHICS! Computing power has certainly increased in the last decade, hasn't it become feasible to incorporate some or all of METAFONT's capabilities into TeX? It should not be too hard to create some user-friendly METAFONT macro packages for the creation of simple, but visually appealing graphics. Note that this still fits nicely into the boxes'n'glue picture, the only extension is the ability to fill some of these boxes differently ... I know that such a things can easily been done under some operating systems. Given a dvi driver which is not broken (there are still too many broken dvi drivers in use, but that's another story), it is trivial to set up a quite comfortable environment for mixing TeX and METAFONT under UNIX. But what if my co-author works on a crufty IBM with MVS? Or isn't UNIX-literate and his system administrator has not installed mf? In the high energy physics community, (La)?TeX has by now an overwhelming ``marketshare''. Given the very conservative attitude towards computing in this community, ``NTS'' will have to provide _considerable_ improvements if it wants to take over some this ``marketshare'' -- populating a small niche won't do. Greetings, Thorsten =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Thorsten Ohl, DESY (-T-), Notkestr. 85, W-2000 Hamburg 52, FRG phone: +49-40-8998-3699, fax: +49-40-8998-3282 e-mail: , , ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 25 May 92 15:00:39 -0700 Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: "Paul Barton-Davis" Subject: typographic things about TeX that need fixing 1) Boxes and glue - this is not how "real" (i.e. human) typographers work, and on occasion, its not even how "real" (i.e. human) typesetters work. Knuth did a reasonable job of picking this as an underlying model for a first pass at a real typesetting system for general purpose computing engines; I think that hindsight, as well as Quark Express, Interleaf and Pagemaker, show that a different underlying model would be better. - one such model (which also has its problems) is a list of objects, not unlike a lisp list. Each object has attributes; boxes and glue would merely be two examples of objects (and perhaps the most prevalent still). Other attributes needed to provide a typographer with what she wants include various geometric relations not easily reduced to rectangular approximation (say, diameter), and color. - such a model would make all the good stuff that TeX does with paragraph and line breaking just as easy, but would also allow fun and games like text "flowing" around non-rectangular shapes easily. - I'd be interested in seeing other ideas that people have for replacing the boxes-and-glue model. 2) no cross-page optimization for floats, pagebreaks etc. - lots has already been written on this. Type&Set is perhaps the best compromise solution; NTS could do better. I make no suggestions on this - many others have thought about this a lot. 3) mixing markup and procedural text - "TeX" is fine as a markup langauge, and in fact closely parallels the workings of at least some typesetters. - "TeX" is lousy as a programming language, but experience demonstrates the need for using it as one. - NTS should separate the markup language from the macro/programming language. If possible, TeX should remain the markup language, which would enable back compatibility with both TeX itself and some other 3rd party tools. - perhaps NTS should not allow macro/function definitions within documents. This would make many people cringe, I know. 4) impossibility of visual design for document styles - after the horrors of the VorTeX project, can anyone seriously doubt that coupling TeX to a visual front end is a nightmare ? - I would never advocate a WYSIWYG front end for people writing documents, but it is absolutely necessary for people who design document styles. Some efforts on this have appeared in Tugboat, but the horror of the internals is just visible. - NTS needs to support fast, optional partial compilation, in order to make a visual front end a viable tool. -- paul ps. I still prefer TinT - "TinT Is Not TeX" oder "Tint Ist Nicht TeX" ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 25 May 92 19:45:05 EDT Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" Comments: Hyperbole mail buttons accepted, v3.02P. From: Peter C Olsen Subject: Goals for a successor to TeX Here are a few things that I think are important for a successor to TeX. 1. Portability. I can (and do) run TeX on mainframes, workstations, and MS-DOS PCs. The same source runs everywhere. 2. Device independence. I usually write my TeX source using Emacs and AUC-TeX. I use TeX without regard to the type of monitor or printer. 3. Ability to put ink *precisely* where I want it, making full use of all the resolution available from my output device. In fact, I want to get better resolution on my output device that my eye allows as an input device. I believe that these will require the retention of the "mark-up language" approach in ascii, but I *don't* think that this prevents graphics, or even WYSIW(A)YG front ends. I use XFIG to construct graphics in PiCTeX macros which are incorporated right into my TeX source code; the same approach could probably be extended to a full front end. Peter Peter Olsen, PE, n2ell, 410-997-8584, PO Box 410, Simpsonville, MD 21150-0410 pcolsen@super.super.org ...!uunet!super!pcolsen (Home: ...!n2ell!pcolsen) "Imagination is more important than knowledge" --- Albert Einstein ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 25 May 92 20:43:55 EDT Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: eijkhout%CS.UTK.EDU@vm.urz.uni-heidelberg.de Subject: Re: typographic things about TeX that need fixing >From the keyboard of "Paul Barton-Davis" : hindsight, as well as Quark Express, Interleaf and Pagemaker, show that a different underlying model would be better. And what model do they use? I'm not familiar with these packages. Kindly enlighten me (and probably other readers of this group). - after the horrors of the VorTeX project, can anyone seriously doubt that coupling TeX to a visual front end is a nightmare ? Yes, I can. Take a look at Griff, and see a wysiwyg front-end that gives perfectly structured (La)TeX code as output. The idea that makes Griff tick is that it has two programming languages, one to specify the structure of the document, and one that specifies the looks of it. The mouse/menu-driven interface allows the user only to input those elements that make sense structurally (no subsubsection heading directly after a section heading, no abstract after the first heading ...) If there is any wysiwyg front-end for an sgml package, I'm sure that it would look something like this. ps. I still prefer TinT - "TinT Is Not TeX" oder "Tint Ist Nicht TeX" So how about telling us what the underlying model of TinT is? Victor Eijkhout Department of Computer Science; University of Tennessee at Knoxville 104 Ayres Hall; 1403 Circle Dr.; Knoxville TN 37996-1301 phone: +1 615 974 8298 (secretary 8295; fax 8296); home +1 615 558 3069 Support the League for Programming Freedom! league@prep.ai.mit.edu ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 25 May 92 18:09:53 -0700 Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: "Paul Barton-Davis" Subject: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: eijkhout@CS.UTK.EDU's message of Mon, 25 May 92 20:43:55 EDT <9205260046.AA00279@june.cs.washington.edu> >From the crumb-laden, paper-buried keyboard of Victor Eijkhout: >From the keyboard of "Paul Barton-Davis" : hindsight, as well as Quark Express, Interleaf and Pagemaker, show that a different underlying model would be better. And what model do they use? I'm not familiar with these packages. Kindly enlighten me (and probably other readers of this group). I can't enlighten you as the internals, but I note that all 3 can do things that TeX cannot, or rather, since there is nothing TeX cannot do [:-)], things that TeX cannot do without great effort. Ever tried to get TeX to flow text around non-rectangular shapes ? My point was merely that Knuth went and looked at what typographers and typesetters did 10 or more years ago, particularly those concerned with the publication of books like "The Art of Computer Programming". In the last 10 years, the plethora of software applications, from crummy word processors to stuff like Quark Express (used to set at least 3 large circulation magazines) has, IMHO, added new ideas and new demands to the design criteria for something that is used for typesetting. - after the horrors of the VorTeX project, can anyone seriously doubt that coupling TeX to a visual front end is a nightmare ? Yes, I can. Take a look at Griff, and see a wysiwyg front-end that gives perfectly structured (La)TeX code as output. I'll do it. The idea that makes Griff tick is that it has two programming languages, one to specify the structure of the document, and one that specifies the looks of it. Sounds perfect. Where do I find out more ? ps. I still prefer TinT - "TinT Is Not TeX" oder "Tint Ist Nicht TeX" So how about telling us what the underlying model of TinT is? The closest we ever got was the lisp list+atrributes I mentioned. Basically, the whole page would just be a list of things, and the "DVI driver" would be responsible for producing some "real page description" from the list. TinT's job would have been to have taken some marked-up text+images+filler and come up with a list that provided information about each object and where it should be placed, much like TeX. Since we planned to implement the whole thing as a lisp interpreter anyway, this would have been a snap. We did not, however, get far enough to make a studied analysis of the kind of attributes that typographical (lisp) objects should have available to them, merely a conviction (and a few half-way decent examples) that those possessed by boxes and glue are insufficient. We considered: diameter, bezier boundaries, rotational orientation and local, non-uniform scaling functions. However, TinT is little more than a cute name. Right, Tim ? -- paul ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 25 May 92 21:27:32 EDT Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: eijkhout%CS.UTK.EDU@vm.urz.uni-heidelberg.de Subject: Re: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 25 May 92 18:09:53 PDT." <9205260111.AA19059@CS.UTK.EDU> >From the dancing fingers of Paul Barton-Davis: >From the crumb-laden, paper-buried keyboard of Victor Eijkhout: >From the keyboard of "Paul Barton-Davis" : :-) >My point was merely that Knuth went and looked at what typographers >and typesetters did 10 or more years ago, particularly those concerned >with the publication of books like "The Art of Computer Programming". Not unknowledgeable people have been heard to say that TeX can basically only typeset TAoCP :-) > Ever tried >to get TeX to flow text around non-rectangular shapes ? No, but I guess I could do it if I had to. It would involve \parshape in some horrible way. Let me extend the discussion a bit here. How many people share my impression that some things get programmed too many times in macros in TeX that should be internal? Like generating complicated parshapes? And that some TeX internals really should be more accessible? Such as \halign or the page breaker? For all of its programmableness TeX is every once in a while a black box to a frustrating extent. The problem of flowing around nonrectangular objects is one that has intrigued me for a long time. TeX can generate the parshape (and even carry it over to the next paragraph), but exactly what is the input data. If the figure is in Postscript, does a formatter that can flow around a figure have to have a complete on-board PostScript interpreter to determine the shape? If that is the case, then device independence will be rather hard. Does TeX include an interpreter for every graphics language, or do we stipulate some external miracle program, much like the device drivers now, but at the other end of teX, and rather more complicated? Victor Eijkhout Department of Computer Science; University of Tennessee at Knoxville 104 Ayres Hall; 1403 Circle Dr.; Knoxville TN 37996-1301 phone: +1 615 974 8298 (secretary 8295; fax 8296); home +1 615 558 3069 Support the League for Programming Freedom! league@prep.ai.mit.edu ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 25 May 92 18:41:33 -0700 Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: "Paul Barton-Davis" Subject: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: eijkhout@CS.UTK.EDU's message of Mon, 25 May 92 21:27:32 EDT <9205260130.AA01334@june.cs.washington.edu> The keyboard of Victor Eijkhout writes: >From the dancing fingers of Paul Barton-Davis: >My point was merely that Knuth went and looked at what typographers >and typesetters did 10 or more years ago, particularly those concerned >with the publication of books like "The Art of Computer Programming". Not unknowledgeable people have been heard to say that TeX can basically only typeset TAoCP :-) Not true :-) I myself have been involved with 1 publishing effort using LaTeX - the result, whilst in the CS domain, looks nothing like TAoCP, and is structured quite differently. However, one might want to look at something like Tutfte's "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information", and ask "could TeX have typeset this ?" The answer is a cautious yes, with the followup "but why would anyone want to use it for this". Therein, I think, hangs a tale. The problem of flowing around nonrectangular objects is one that has intrigued me for a long time. TeX can generate the parshape (and even carry it over to the next paragraph), but exactly what is the input data. If the figure is in Postscript, does a formatter that can flow around a figure have to have a complete on-board PostScript interpreter to determine the shape? If that is the case, then device independence will be rather hard. Does TeX include an interpreter for every graphics language, This is what the programs the programs that do this do, I believe. If the picture's in some unknown format, you're SOL. All part of the argument for (1) modularity and (2) standards, I suppose. or do we stipulate some external miracle program, much like the device drivers now, but at the other end of teX, and rather more complicated? Sure. Bezier curves will cover most of the bases for us; have something take arbitrary input, and output a nice bezier curve description. Of course, this type of design goes to the heart of at least one part of what NTS is all about, I hope. -- paul ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 25 May 92 21:34:55 EDT Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: eijkhout%CS.UTK.EDU@vm.urz.uni-heidelberg.de Subject: Re: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 25 May 92 18:09:53 PDT." <9205260111.AA19059@CS.UTK.EDU> A number of typographical books that I've seen mention some illusive things called 'the grid'. I don't find this in TeX, and some of the more interesting problems in page make-up (read: all but impossible in TeX) are easily expressable in terms of grids. Going from two to three columns at the transition from one page to the next; a word 'continued' that is embedded in the last line of a page; this is all impossible in TeX if you use stretchable glue, and rather hard if you don't. Implementing a grid in TeX means that pages don't get cut off an infinite scroll, but are rather poured from this scroll onto a grid, much like a paragraph is now poured in to a shape of indents and line lengths. Of course the increase in computational effort on TeX is enormous. Suddenly the paragraph shapes can be determined by the placing of the paragraphs on the page, so the page breaker will have to redo the paragraphs, and each paragraph may undergo multiple formattings. However, computers have become so much faster since the DEC-20 days that this shouldn't be a problem. Personally, I think that adding this sort of capability to TeX would cover the most sorely wanted features in TeX. Victor Eijkhout Department of Computer Science; University of Tennessee at Knoxville 104 Ayres Hall; 1403 Circle Dr.; Knoxville TN 37996-1301 phone: +1 615 974 8298 (secretary 8295; fax 8296); home +1 615 558 3069 Support the League for Programming Freedom! league@prep.ai.mit.edu ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 26 May 92 08:25:00 GMT Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: malcolm Subject: Re: typographic things about TeX that need fixing from the weary desk etc..... can someone explain to me why i should even contemplate flowing my text around some arbitrary shape? what has this to do with typographic excellence? could it be that magazines and the majority of books have certain different qualities which might make the holy grail of sharing the same typesetter a rather elusive goal? if the main attribute of nts is to allow text to flow, count me out. my text flows from my fingertips quite happily as it is. be real, this is trivia. i agree that as the salesman demonstrates this on your machine, it looks dead cute, but it is of no real value. perhaps we should be examining the marketing strategy first, then we can decide what to include. malcolmc clark ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 26 May 92 08:15:00 GMT Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: malcolm Subject: Re: typographic things about TeX that need fixing interleaf, according to at least one of its author's uses much the same model as TeX. it is of the same period, and certainly uses the same line breaking algorithm (almost). and to add to victor's paean to grif (griff?) i would throw in quill. much more of a reasearch tool, but it supports parallel views of the document: structure views, wysiwyg (there, i said it!), markup views, toc views, index views and so on. i personally think that like vortex, it has lots to offer. one key aspect of vortex was the fact that it was indeed an extension to TeX, and that it was an evolving, structured, project. one of the things which it had working against it was changes to the underlying TeX. even bug fixes imply a lot of work, and TeX3 must have laid it to rest. but before you slag off vortex, remember that it was merely using tex as an engine on which to support work on document structures. i think they done good. but if you are still looking for a name, shouldn't this be ATTAM? (all things to all men/mankind). malcolm clark ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 26 May 92 10:04:45 CET Reply-To: untermarzoner%vnet.ibm.com@vm.urz.uni-heidelberg.de From: Uwe Untermarzoner Subject: Griff Some appends ago there was Griff mentioned; could someone please provide some more info about this? offline also welcome ;-) thanks. Mit freudlichen Gruessen / kind regards Uwe A. Untermarzoner IBM Academic Information System InterNet: untermarzoner@vnet.ibm.com BitNet: UNTERMAR@DHDIBM1.bitnet VoiceNet: ++49-711-7207-4099 FaxNet: 49-711-7207-4111 SnailNet: IBM Deutschland Lehre und Forschung Plieninger Str. 140, W-7000 Stuttgart 80, Germany ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 26 May 92 10:04:45 CET Reply-To: untermarzoner%vnet.ibm.com@vm.urz.uni-heidelberg.de From: Uwe Untermarzoner Subject: Griff Some appends ago there was Griff mentioned; could someone please provide some more info about this? offline also welcome ;-) thanks. Mit freudlichen Gruessen / kind regards Uwe A. Untermarzoner IBM Academic Information System InterNet: untermarzoner@vnet.ibm.com BitNet: UNTERMAR@DHDIBM1.bitnet VoiceNet: ++49-711-7207-4099 FaxNet: 49-711-7207-4111 SnailNet: IBM Deutschland Lehre und Forschung Plieninger Str. 140, W-7000 Stuttgart 80, Germany ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 26 May 92 09:00:47 EDT Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: eijkhout%CS.UTK.EDU@vm.urz.uni-heidelberg.de Subject: Re: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 26 May 92 08:25:00 GMT." <9205260726.AA22771@CS.UTK.EDU> >from the weary desk etc..... That must explain the following: >can someone explain to me why i should even contemplate >flowing my text around some arbitrary shape? what has this >to do with typographic excellence? 1/ Who are you to define excellence? Isn't this a bit of an elitist point of view? 2/ Flowing around an arbitrary shape is only slightly harder than flowing around a regular shape. I think the point is that the shape is usually at some predetermined place on the page, and TeX is almost totally lacking in the capability of interacting with preplaced elements on the page. And this latter capability is, I think, the sole difference between book typography and magazine typography. Take NewsWeek or whatever other weekly and you'll see plenty of places where the text has managed to flow around some fixed object on the page. Victor Eijkhout Department of Computer Science; University of Tennessee at Knoxville 104 Ayres Hall; 1403 Circle Dr.; Knoxville TN 37996-1301 phone: +1 615 974 8298 (secretary 8295; fax 8296); home +1 615 558 3069 Support the League for Programming Freedom! league@prep.ai.mit.edu ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 26 May 92 15:49:12 CET Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: bbeeton Subject: Re: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: <01GKGNFJL0MAE2XZPM@MATH.AMS.COM> i think i understand where malcolm is coming from: ... why i should even contemplate flowing my text around some arbitrary shape? ... i would like to add one more "given" to the list of goals: whatever changes/improvements/whatever may be made should not be done at the expense of making what tex was originally designed for more difficult or impossible. i am pretty sure that no one is intending such an effect, but i think it is worth having the goal stated explicitly. for those of us whose bread and butter is mathematics composition, there is simply *no other tool* that fills our needs. please don't even contemplate anything that might take this away from us. -- bb ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 26 May 92 18:09:21 +0200 Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: N.POPPELIER@ELSEVIER.NL Subject: Re: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: <94E1DC41A008DA59@HEARNVAX.nic.SURFnet.nl> >for those of us whose bread and butter is mathematics composition, >there is simply *no other tool* that fills our needs. please don't >even contemplate anything that might take this away from us. With hesitation ;-) but still, I disagree with Barbara. There are one or two, SGML-based, tools, that we think fulfill/will fulfill in the near future our needs for mathematics composition, which is very important also to us. TeX is rapidly losing its advantage with respect to The Competition. Nico ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Nico A.F.M. Poppelier Elsevier Science Publishers, APD, R&D Department Sara Burgerhartstraat 25, 1055 KV Amsterdam, The Netherlands Phone: +31-20-5862504. Fax: +31-20-5862425. Email: n.poppelier@elsevier.nl ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 26 May 92 10:02:56 -0700 Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: "Paul Barton-Davis" Subject: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: malcolm's message of Tue, 26 May 92 08:25:00 GMT <9205260725.AA08113@june.cs.washington.edu> Malcolm writes: can someone explain to me why i should even contemplate flowing my text around some arbitrary shape? what has this to do with typographic excellence? could it be that magazines and the majority of books have certain different qualities which might make the holy grail of sharing the same typesetter a rather elusive goal? This could be. However, as I outlined in my reply to Joachim, I have seen first hand some empirical evidence that this is not the case. Do you have any strong reasons for believing this to be so ? If so, lets hear them, for this instantly puts a big constraint on what's worth changing in TeX. if the main attribute of nts is to allow text to flow, count me out. my text flows from my fingertips quite happily as it is. be real, this is trivia. Its trivia if you only want to publish technical books, journals or fiction. Its not trivia if NTS is intended to be as powerful as human typesetters, or even as powerful as Quark Express. I have no interest in a tidied-up TeX. I have a huge amount of interest in a TeX-compatible tool that makes Mac tools redundant, and would enable me to typeset both the Journal of Complex Systems and Edward Tufte's next book from my workstation. -- paul ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 26 May 92 18:48:05 MESZ Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Joachim Schrod Subject: Re: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: <9205261418.AA01566@hp5.iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de>; from"N.POPPELIER@ELSEVIER.NL" at May 26, 92 6:09 pm Nico wrote: > > >for those of us whose bread and butter is mathematics composition, > >there is simply *no other tool* that fills our needs. please don't > >even contemplate anything that might take this away from us. > > With hesitation ;-) but still, I disagree with Barbara. There are one or > two, SGML-based, tools, that we think fulfill/will fulfill in the near future > our needs for mathematics composition, which is very important also to us. > > TeX is rapidly losing its advantage with respect to The Competition. Hey, fine! Then we don't have to do any work after all, have we? If the solution is there?! I think we are striving for a good system and are not so ego-boosted that it must be ``our'' system under all circumstances, or? So Nico, please tell me, where I can ftp this system from? I want to give it to my students and my colleagues. I need the system for DOS, Atari ST, Amiga, Macs, some kind of UNIX boxes (only the usual ones: with SunOS, AIX, HP-UX, System V R3, System V R4, ULTRIX, SCO UNIX and Interactive, no exotes), VMS, and MVS. (Well, the latter is not so important. This ol' dinosaur will vanish.) Since we need approximately 5000 licenses we cannot afford to buy one, we don't have enough money. I have always searched for such a system -- as you might know, I have even set up a ftp server for SGML parsers and primitive SGML-to-TeX translators which are freely distributable. But I must have missed this system which makes SGML really usable from the author's point of view. I mean, parsers are joyfull for a programmer, but the author needs a user interface -- and the ASCII input of SGML tags is even worse than the input of TeX text (at least with the DTDs I know). Oh, btw, are DTDs enclosed? I'm still looking for some good ones which I may rely on and which I may share freely with my co-authors (read: which I can redistribute without copyright problems). The TEI DTDs are not really usable for scientific articles (or might be I haven't grokked them!?) Is the HyTime DTD (not the one in the pseudo notation available on many ftp servers -- I mean the Real One!) part of this system? Full of hope ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 26 May 92 18:37:26 +0200 Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Rolf Lindgren Subject: Re: typographic things about TeX that need fixing Joachim Schrod writes: > added ads until now -- then we would build the egg-laying > whool-giving cow-pig.) Malcolm wants only the latter -- and that's Could I have that in German, please? What does it mean? > would be good then: People should grok the difference > between a WYSIWYG system and a direct manipulation system. You might want to check out the new WIMPy WYSIWG professional typesetting system for the Macintosh called Quoin. From what I have gathered, it's as compromise between what typographers have been able to do in the past but what WYSIWYG won't normally give them. It appears to be the cross between structural markup and direct preview that Publisher attempted. All I want this far, is the ability to align lines of text to the same `kegel' across several pages, thus: ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- All lines on all pages match ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- the same kegel. This is not ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- disturbed by illustrations, because ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- white space is used to accomodate this. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 If NTS could accomodate a grid that text could be flown into, then I could specify exactly how many lines I want on each page and how much whitespace to add before and after titles and illustrations so as to keep them on kegel. Now, this is actually requested by some typesetters. It's almost impossible to avoid orphans then, because these guys actually want the height of the text to remain constant as well. As a bonus... (The remaining can be skipped by purists :-) I might want to have added an operator \epahsrap (read it backwards) that could take as arguments where to fill in text on the subsequent n lines. Consider: \epahsrap 0cm-2cm 4cm-7cm 1 % Line 1 0cm-2,5cm 4,3cm-7,6cm % Line 2 % etc. etc. etc. Flowing text around illustrations would then be trivial. Now, you still would have to calculate by hand how long the lines would have to be. But it would not take much work because, since the kegel is fixed (no vertical glue), and since you know how much whitespace will be added to the picture, you'd know excactly where the lines would cover the illustration. Of course, for illustrations in the middle of a paragraph, you'd still have to see a preprint to know where the initial line will break, but a TeX macro might be able to calculate this? Give such an operator, wouldn't it be possible to write a routine that takes a set of line widths and a request for where in the paragraph to start the illustration, then TeX could figure out the rest? Not being much of a programmer, I don't know how difficult this might be to accomplish. If TeX's line-breaking algorithm still could be useful then the _output_ of this system would still look nicer than the output of most WYSIWYG systems. Still, I feel that TeX is and NTS ought to be a system for writing communication of knowledge (science), with minimal heed taken to the writing of presentation of ideas. The latter is the stuff of WYSIWYG systems. But if you could get it as a bonus of already useful implementation, then I'm all for it. > ``How do we persuade new users that spreading fonts across the page > like peanut butter across hot toast is not necessarily the route to > typographic excellence? -- Peter Flynn Gee, I don't _know_, what I usually do is showing the font spreaders the work of another font spreader. Then they sometimes get the point. If you find out, please tell me. Rolf Lindgren | "The opinions expressed above are 616 Bjerke Studentheim | not necessarily those of anyone" N-0589 OSLO 5 | rolfl.lindgren@usit.uio.no ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 26 May 92 09:57:07 -0700 Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: "Paul Barton-Davis" Subject: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: Joachim Schrod's message of Tue, 26 May 92 17:49:24 MESZ <9205261601.AA18757@june.cs.washington.edu> Joachim Schrod writes: Victor wrote: > > Take NewsWeek > or whatever other weekly and you'll see plenty of places where > the text has managed to flow around some fixed object on the > page. Yes -- that's the difference between you and Malcolm. You want something that's able to typeset NewsWeek, i.e. magazines, *and* Books (incl. common types of journals). (I wonder that nobody has added ads until now -- then we would build the egg-laying whool-giving cow-pig.) Malcolm wants only the latter -- and that's clearly the realm of TeX now. I could never understand those people who think that TeX is an appropriate tool for these problems. I'll try hard not bristle, Joachim :-) Some of us are interested in the idea of an "NTS" exactly *because* we don't think that TeX is appropriate. Look, I worked for a small startup called ScenicSoft before I came to the UW CS Lab. ScenicSoft's main product is a tool that is a combination of TeX and troff (literally - both \command and cmd !!). We used this to build turnkey typesetting systems that printed books, real estate listing magazines, for-sale magazines, directories and so on. It had some very sophisticated image processing in its backend, and they have some happy customers using this stuff to print things that would be a nightmare with TeX, as well as things that TeX could do better. So, its not impossible for a command-driven markup system to do books, magazines and advertisements; its just a major pain. Given that TeX can do books with ease, I would have thought that one obvious thing to do is to ask if NTS can do other types of typography just as (or even more) easily. I gave the example of Tufte's books, which I would very much like to be able to produce myself; TeX can't do it; and I don't like the sacrifices of other tools, although Quark Express might be the one. Well, I'm among the third party in this round (Hi, Phil :-). I question these implicite assumptions you both made. I would like to see explicitely mentioned which goals a NTS should adress. This is why I raised the issue of some fundamental typographic issues, which I believed Victor followed up on fairly well. Below, you raise some more issues in a constructive fashion. In addition, I would like to see a discussion about the level we will address: -- Do we talk about a typesetting system? Primarily yes. I thought that NTS was an acronym for "New TYPESETTING System". -- Do we talk about the functionality of an author system? Then the typesetting problem is only a small part of it. What about the other tools, the support modell, etc.? As an ancillary function, of course. I have long advocated something that sounds a bit like what Griff is - visual design for typographers; structured markup ala SGML for authors. This has the benefit of making zillions of tools already out there available for authors, and minimizing the fool-proofness of the visual interface. -- Do we talk about how an author system with the functionality of TeX shall be used? Then we should stop with this WYSIWYG gargabe. See above. First, some reading of a few textbooks or articles would be good then: People should grok the difference between a WYSIWYG system and a direct manipulation system. Some of us have. However, there seems to be a marked reluctance to get down to details. Phil Taylor, or someone else, proposed a specific list of categories to consider as part of a breakdown of the problem. Victor & I asked questions about the fundamentals of the typographic model. Until we have some basic model to congregate around, this is going nowhere. Is this a discussion of professionals, of scientists, or do we just babble? All of the above. Before this is not made clear, everybody will just add his $0.02 -- but we will never get enough money to get the ball rolling. These are not my $0.02 -- this is my opinion as a computer scientist, working for years in the area of software engineering, and doing his Ph.D. thesis now in User Interface research. Lovely. Instead of castigating those of us with similar background and similar interests, how about telling us *specifically* what you'd like NTS to look like ? Tell us if you want to retain the boxes & glue model. Tell us if you want ever going to allow typographers, people who work with visual aspects of a document, to have visual, not structured, controls. Tell us if you want to impose a strict separation between document design and authoring. Tell us if you want to integrate the handling of graphics, and if so, what limitations on such graphics you would make. Tell us if you want to allow NTS to typeset layout dominated books, like art books or Tufte's. Tell us if you think NTS should have a real programming language. If so, tell us if you think it should live in backend. Tell us ... you get the picture. Then, we can start to talk about both generics and specifics. For the record, I support all of the above things. -- paul ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 26 May 92 16:40:00 +0100 Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Frank Poppe Subject: Re: typographic things about TeX that need fixing Victor Eijkhout in response to somebody else (whose name I cannot find anymore....) ]>from the weary desk etc..... ] ]That must explain the following: ] ]>can someone explain to me why i should even contemplate ]>flowing my text around some arbitrary shape? what has this ]>to do with typographic excellence? ] ]1/ Who are you to define excellence? Isn't this a bit of an elitist ]point of view? ] ]2/ Flowing around an arbitrary shape is only slightly harder than ]flowing around a regular shape. I think the point is that the ]shape is usually at some predetermined place on the page, and ]TeX is almost totally lacking in the capability of interacting ]with preplaced elements on the page. ] And this latter capability is, I think, the sole difference ]between book typography and magazine typography. Take NewsWeek ]or whatever other weekly and you'll see plenty of places where ]the text has managed to flow around some fixed object on the ]page. I agree. But I'd like to have the ability to link the place of the shape to the text. I.e., at a certain (to me logical) place in my source the command to place a figure to the right margin (or to reserve some room for that figure) should cause `NTS' to flow around that shape, except if the shape does not fit on the rest of the page (or column..), in which case the shape should move to the next page/column. The next step would be that this shape would stick out into the other column on a page.... Frank Poppe ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 26 May 92 17:49:24 MESZ Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Joachim Schrod Subject: Re: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: <9205261322.AA01434@hp5.iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de>; from"eijkhout%CS.UTK.EDU@vm.urz.uni-heidelberg.de" at May 26, 92 9:00 am Victor wrote: > > Take NewsWeek > or whatever other weekly and you'll see plenty of places where > the text has managed to flow around some fixed object on the > page. Yes -- that's the difference between you and Malcolm. You want something that's able to typeset NewsWeek, i.e. magazines, *and* Books (incl. common types of journals). (I wonder that nobody has added ads until now -- then we would build the egg-laying whool-giving cow-pig.) Malcolm wants only the latter -- and that's clearly the realm of TeX now. I could never understand those people who think that TeX is an appropriate tool for these problems. Well, I'm among the third party in this round (Hi, Phil :-). I question these implicite assumptions you both made. I would like to see explicitely mentioned which goals a NTS should adress. In addition, I would like to see a discussion about the level we will address: -- Do we talk about a typesetting system? -- Do we talk about the functionality of an author system? Then the typesetting problem is only a small part of it. What about the other tools, the support modell, etc.? -- Do we talk about how an author system with the functionality of TeX shall be used? Then we should stop with this WYSIWYG gargabe. First, some reading of a few textbooks or articles would be good then: People should grok the difference between a WYSIWYG system and a direct manipulation system. They should know the concepts behind WIMPs and NERDs. There are years of research in this area. Check out old EP/ODD issues (btw, GRIF is described there, I believe in an '88 issue), or Ben Shneiderman's book _Designing_the_User_Interface_, for a beginning. Is this a discussion of professionals, of scientists, or do we just babble? Before this is not made clear, everybody will just add his $0.02 -- but we will never get enough money to get the ball rolling. These are not my $0.02 -- this is my opinion as a computer scientist, working for years in the area of software engineering, and doing his Ph.D. thesis now in User Interface research. -- Joachim =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Joachim Schrod Email: schrod@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de Computer Science Department Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany ``How do we persuade new users that spreading fonts across the page like peanut butter across hot toast is not necessarily the route to typographic excellence? -- Peter Flynn ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 26 May 92 14:16:15 EDT Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Peter C Olsen Subject: typographic things about TeX that need fixing "Paul Barton-Davis" writes: > > ... I have a huge amount of interest in a > TeX-compatible tool that makes Mac tools redundant, and would enable > me to typeset both the Journal of Complex Systems and Edward Tufte's > next book from my workstation. > > -- paul > I think that this puts the issue precisely. I write mathematics, mostly, and I want to be able to "flow" text, do graphics, and make my papers "look like Newsweek" (or better, Tufte) because I want them to be *read*. Graphics and appealing design will get me more readers, so I want them. I *love* TeX, and prefer it (by far) to all the WYSIW(A)YG alternatives I have seen, but I want it better yet. Peter Peter Olsen, PE, n2ell, 410-997-8584, PO Box 410, Simpsonville, MD 21150-0410 pcolsen@super.super.org ...!uunet!super!pcolsen (Home: ...!n2ell!pcolsen) "Imagination is more important than knowledge" --- Albert Einstein ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 26 May 92 20:21:59 MESZ Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Joachim Schrod Subject: Re: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: <9205261656.AA02095@HP5.ITI.INFORMATIK.TH-DARMSTADT.DE>; from"RolfLindgren" at May 26, 92 6:37 pm You wrote: > > Joachim Schrod writes: > > added ads until now -- then we would build the egg-laying > > whool-giving cow-pig.) Malcolm wants only the latter -- and that's > > Could I have that in German, please? What does it mean? ``Eierlegende Wollmilch-Sau.'' A common German term for a system which tries to do everything. -- Joachim =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Joachim Schrod Email: schrod@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de Computer Science Department Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 26 May 92 21:01:42 MESZ Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Joachim Schrod Subject: Re: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: <9205261659.AA02129@HP5.ITI.INFORMATIK.TH-DARMSTADT.DE>; from"PaulBarton-Davis" at May 26, 92 9:57 am Paul wrote: > > Joachim Schrod writes: > > You want > something that's able to typeset NewsWeek, i.e. magazines, *and* > Books (incl. common types of journals). (I wonder that nobody has > added ads until now -- then we would build the egg-laying > whool-giving cow-pig.) Malcolm wants only the latter -- and that's > clearly the realm of TeX now. I could never understand those people > who think that TeX is an appropriate tool for these problems. > > I'll try hard not bristle, Joachim :-) > > [...] > > So, its not impossible for a command-driven markup system to do books, > magazines and advertisements; its just a major pain. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Exactly. That's what I meant. In another posting you write that you want something better as some Mac tools. I understood it so, that Mac tools are better suited for creating ads and so (after all, that's my opinion, too). Why don't you use them then? (I have learned a bit about ads typesetting from Linotype folks. It was interesting. I cannot imagine (yet?!) a model which enables a formalization of that and of structured markup a la SGML.) > -- Do we talk about a typesetting system? > > Primarily yes. I thought that NTS was an acronym for "New TYPESETTING System". Ah, tr\'es bien. A first vote. [Btw, NTS: -- New Typesetting System -- Next generation TeX System -- NTS is not a TeX System In Hamburg, where we discussed above this name, even more abbrevations came up...] > -- Do we talk about the functionality of an author system? > > As an ancillary function, of course. > Lovely. Instead of castigating those of us with similar background and > similar interests, how about telling us *specifically* what you'd > like NTS to look like ? If you have a similar background and similar interests, and if you were under those who did concentrate on one topic (and if you made clear in which context you addressed it, as you said) -- why do you exaggerate now? `Beaten dogs shout?' I hope, not. Look, eg, this WYSIWYG stuff. I have sent 10 articles to comp.text.tex in the last six months which explained the difference between a WYSIWYG and a DMP system. That a WIMP user interface (for those afraid of asking me: WIMP means Windows, Icon, Menus, Pointer) with direct feedback (the NERD principle: Navigation, Evaluation, Refinement, Demonstration) is not identical with a WYSIWYG system. That _in_the_context_of_scientific_articles_and_books_, a graphical user interface for a general markup system is more of use. > Tell us if you want to retain the boxes & glue model. Ah, you ask me about a `typesetting' issue!? > Tell us if you want ever going to allow typographers, people who > work with visual aspects of a document, to have visual, not > structured, controls. Ah, you ask me about a `user interface' issue!? > Tell us if you want to impose a strict > separation between document design and authoring. Ah, you ask me about an `author system' issue!? Everything at once? You haven't understood what I wrote -- obviously I was not clear enough: I don't want to discuss this alltogether. I don't believe that we will ever get to some result if we discuss this alltogether. > Tell us ... you get the picture. I have told you already -- I would like to know which issue to address first. I have tried to reiterate my categorization for those who were not involved in the foundation of this group (the others knew them already :-) > For the > record, I support all of the above things. To cite you about the `author system' issue: ``As an ancillary function, of course.'' For the record, my vote: Although all points are of interest, this point is IMO of the most interest. I want a system which focuses on authors. I don't need a complete new system. IMO one could start with the SGML work (ie: I favour structured markup and have a bias for focusing on structured documents and ignoring ads) and one could see how the experience can be brought in the TeX community gathered in the last 14-or-so years. (If I read the discussion in comp.text.sgml I thing these experiences are needed.) That's my vote. If more people want to discuss about a typesetting system or about the user interface, I'll be fine with it, too. But, please, not both together; results are needed, not endless discussions going from one corner to the other. -- Joachim =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Joachim Schrod Email: schrod@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de Computer Science Department Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany ``How do we persuade new users that spreading fonts across the page like peanut butter across hot toast is not necessarily the route to typographic excellence? -- Peter Flynn ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 26 May 92 12:38:16 -0700 Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: "Paul Barton-Davis" Subject: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: Joachim Schrod's message of Tue, 26 May 92 21:01:42 MESZ <9205261909.AA06038@june.cs.washington.edu> Last things first: That's my vote. If more people want to discuss about a typesetting system or about the user interface, I'll be fine with it, too. But, please, not both together; results are needed, not endless discussions going from one corner to the other. I absolutely agree. What I'm trying to argue here is that the user interface is *secondary* to the typesetting system; that is, there are assumptions about the capabilities of the typesetting system that the user interface(s) level *must* make; if these assumptions are not addressed first, we end up with a lousy interface. > So, its not impossible for a command-driven markup system to do books, > magazines and advertisements; its just a major pain. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Exactly. That's what I meant. In another posting you write that you want something better as some Mac tools. I understood it so, that Mac tools are better suited for creating ads and so (after all, that's my opinion, too). Why don't you use them then? Because I think that the markup-driven system is vastly superior. This is not the time or place to explain why. I want a system which focuses on authors. I don't need a complete new system. IMO one could start with the SGML work (ie: I favour structured markup and have a bias for focusing on structured documents and ignoring ads) I think you're wrong here. I believe that any sufficiently powerful typesetting system would contain SGML as a subset. SGML offers nothing to those of us who consider "digital or computer-driven typesetting" to cover the entire field of putting ink on paper (or making phosphorus glow, for that matter). SGML also says *nothing* about mechanism. It is fascinating from a user-interface level, but tells us nothing about what any system that can support it must be able to do. (I have learned a bit about ads typesetting from Linotype folks. It was interesting. I cannot imagine (yet?!) a model which enables a formalization of that and of structured markup a la SGML.) That's too bad. I can. I've also tried to make a start at describing it. > -- Do we talk about a typesetting system? > Since there are a number of things that people significantly invovled with TeX have identified as desirable but non-existent or for practical purposes (time, memory, disk space etc) impossible in TeX, I presume that we *must* talk about this. > -- Do we talk about the functionality of an author system? > > As an ancillary function, of course. By which of course I meant: an authoring system presumes the existence of a system to transform a document into something readable (a typesetting system). Whether or not the authoring system is part of the typesetter (Mac tools) , or quite separate from it (TeX), or tighly coupled (???), is, IMHO, quite independent of the existence of the typesetting system itself. Look, eg, this WYSIWYG stuff. I have sent 10 articles to comp.text.tex in the last six months which explained the difference between a WYSIWYG and a DMP system. That a WIMP user interface (for those afraid of asking me: WIMP means Windows, Icon, Menus, Pointer) with direct feedback (the NERD principle: Navigation, Evaluation, Refinement, Demonstration) is not identical with a WYSIWYG system. Fine. I understand all this, and have read your articles. I agree with most, if not all of what you have said there. That _in_the_context_of_scientific_articles_and_books_, a graphical user interface for a general markup system is more of use. If _the_context_of_scientific_articles_and_books_ is all that NTS is going to address, then I'm afraid that I have no interest in NTS. There is absolutely no reason why after more than 20 years of experimenting with computer driven typography, we do not yet have a system with TeX's elegance and power but the generality of a Mac-type tool. However, this is not to disagree that "a graphical user interface for a general markup system is more of use". However, given that such things have been built around TeX (and related tools) already, I don't see this as the core of what NTS (whatever the hell it stands for) should be about. The first questions that Knuth had to answer were of the form: 1) whats the basic computational model for setting type on a page ? 2) what controls over this process are needed ? Then, and ONLY then, does it make sense to ask: 3) what kind of user-interface should the system have ? -- paul ======================================================================== Date: Tue, 26 May 92 21:59:33 MESZ Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Joachim Schrod Subject: Re: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: <9205261941.AA02478@HP5.ITI.INFORMATIK.TH-DARMSTADT.DE>; from"PaulBarton-Davis" at May 26, 92 12:38 pm You wrote: > > The first questions that Knuth had to answer were of the form: > > 1) whats the basic computational model for setting type on a > page ? > 2) what controls over this process are needed ? > > Then, and ONLY then, does it make sense to ask: > > 3) what kind of user-interface should the system have ? I could not agree more. But (taking the risk to reiterate myself): The questions in advance -1) who are the users of such a system ? authors or typesetters? 0) what are the requirements of these users ? are missing in your list. Their answers were easy for DEK: the user? himself. The requirements? `to typeset TAoCP'. (full stop). I do not think that it is so easy now. Therefore: I would like to see these points addressed first, ie., addressing usefulness before adressing a computational model or a user interface. That's my attitude as a professional creating software. Then my personal opinion (or bias if you like) comes into play: Authors are more of interest to me than typesetters. Oh yes, and I know that SGML is not enough for an author system. I mentioned it because I wanted to point out, that there are modells/kernels around which might be used and which should be put into a new environment. I don't want to start on the green grass, that's not my way. I don't agree with you that it's enough that some (expensive) SGML environments exist. DEKs work was not really new either at his time, he just used standard techniques. But he did it right. See my (ironical) answer to Nico's posting on my (sad) feelings about the state of the SGML affair. 'nuff said, 10pm -- back to work... -- Joachim ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 27 May 92 16:33:43 EST Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Anthony Shipman Subject: Re: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: <199205262002.AA20183@yarra.pyramid.com.au>; from "Joachim Schrod"at May 26, 92 9:59 pm > questions in advance > > -1) who are the users of such a system ? > authors or typesetters? > 0) what are the requirements of these users ? > Can we have a definition of these terms. I expect "author" is an end user writing a document. What is a typesetter? In the current TeX would that be someone preparing a macro set or document style for authors to use? Should we differentiate between a user interface for an author and a user interface for a typesetter in our thinking? Maybe they are the same, maybe not. -- Anthony Shipman "You've got to be taught before it's too late, CP Software Export Pty Ltd, Before you are six or seven or eight, 19 Cato St., East Hawthorn, To hate all the people your relatives hate, Melbourne, Australia, 3121 You've got to be carefully taught." R&H E-mail: als@bohra.cpg.oz.au ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 27 May 92 09:06:04 MDT Reply-To: "Erik-Jan Vens" From: "Erik-Jan Vens" Subject: Re: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: <01GKHEE2ESQK8WWC91@RUGR86.RUG.NL>; from "Paul Barton-Davis" at May 26, 92 9:57 am Paul Barton-Davis dixit: [...] > As an ancillary function, of course. I have long advocated something > that sounds a bit like what Griff is - visual design for typographers; > structured markup ala SGML for authors. This has the benefit of making > zillions of tools already out there available for authors, and > minimizing the fool-proofness of the visual interface. Can someone fill me in on "Griff"? Some others have mentioned this (him?/her?/it?) as well. EJee. -- Erik-Jan Vens. E.J.Vens@icce.rug.nl ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 27 May 92 11:10:11 BST Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Timothy Murphy Subject: Re: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: Erik-Jan Vens's message of Wed, 27 May 92 09:06:04 MDT > Can someone fill me in on "Griff"? Some others have mentioned this > (him?/her?/it?) as well. Grif (only 1 'f') is an 'Editor for Structured Documents' developed by a small French company, Gipsi. (They also make or made X terminals.) Grif was commissioned by EuroMath to develop a mathematical version of Grif. This version gives a kind of WYSIWYG LaTeX editor. (EuroMath is a sort of consortium of European Mathematical Societies. They got some money from the EC to pay for the Grif work, which is ongoing.) Most people who have looked at Grif are impressed with it. I'm not; but then I don't believe in NTS either. Anyone wanting further information on Grif could contact my colleague Richard Timoney (richardt@maths.tcd.ie) who is the Irish representative (and perhaps secretary or chairman) of the EuroMath committee overseeing this project. Timothy Murphy e-mail: tim@maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-1-2842366 (home/office) +353-1-7021507 (university) fax: +353-1-2842295 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 27 May 92 13:02:31 MESZ Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Joachim Schrod Subject: Re: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: <9205270936.AA03561@hp5.iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de>; from"Erik-Jan Vens" at May 27, 92 9:06 am Erik-Jan Vens wrote: > > Can someone fill me in on "Griff"? Some others have mentioned this > (him?/her?/it?) as well. It's named Grif. At the moment I have at hand only one article (but the HCI bibliography has perhaps more): @string{ ep = "Electronic Publishing"} @article{ui:furuta:grif, author = {Richard Furuta and Vincent Quint and Jaques Andr\'e}, title = {Interactively Editing Structured Documents}, journal = ep, volume = 1, number = 1, month = apr, year = 1988, pages = {19-44}, annote = { \cd{} grammatical specification of object relationships for the interactive manipulation of tree-oriented document structures. System: GRIF.} } -- Joachim =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Joachim Schrod Email: schrod@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de Computer Science Department Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany ``How do we persuade new users that spreading fonts across the page like peanut butter across hot toast is not necessarily the route to typographic excellence? -- Peter Flynn ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 27 May 92 13:35:54 MESZ Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Joachim Schrod Subject: Re: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: <9205270756.AA03115@hp5.iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de>; from"Anthony Shipman" at May 27, 92 4:33 pm You wrote: > > > questions in advance > > > > -1) who are the users of such a system ? > > authors or typesetters? > > 0) what are the requirements of these users ? > > > > Can we have a definition of these terms. > > I expect "author" is an end user writing a document. Yes. > What is a typesetter? In the current TeX would that be someone preparing > a macro set or document style for authors to use? Hmm, seems that my question was too simple-minded. A little bit more elaborate (but perhaps still incomplete): I think, besides the author we have the tasks of -- creating the markup structure (in SGML-speak: DTD writing) -- creating the layout (usually for more than one book, at least for a DTD, might even be for a category of DTDs. In SGML-speak: DSSL writing -- although I don't like DSSL ;-) Please note that I think that TeX has its serious limits in exactly this area.) I would call the person doing such a task a `book designer'. -- Interpreting the layout decisions: paragraph and page breaking, formula setting, figure placement, rotation, handling of fonts (I would like to distinguish types and fonts here), and all the other stuff Peter mentioned. I would call the person doing such a task a `typesetter'. This task is not fully automatable, but one can support it mechanically on a high abstraction level. > Should we differentiate between a user interface for an author and a user > interface for a typesetter in our thinking? Maybe they are the same, maybe > not. Concerning the user interface I think we need different UIs (at least) for all four kind of people. But here I agree with Peter that this is not the most important point at the moment. My disagreement with him was raised by my impression that he made implicite assumptions about the requirements and started with design questions concerning the typesetting task. I demanded a requirements analysis about the complete problem domain first; I wanted explicite, documented, assumptions. I might ask other questions to show my reasoning behind: Why are authors using TeX today? Why are publishers using TeX today? (And please: anecdotes about single people might be interesting but they are no basis for a discurse. Statistical data is needed.) Is it because it's such a great typesetting system? Is it because it's (together with all the `ancillary tools') an author system which is powerful, resonable cheap, available on many machines, creates (email-)exchangable documents, etc. ? What are their problems with the system nowadays? That its typesetting capabilities are not powerful enough? Missing subtools, ie, missing functionality? Bad introductionary documentation? That nobody agrees what TeX really is? (I warn y'all: a pet peeve of mine :-) Inconsistent behaviour between the subtools? Bad user interface? Difficult adaptibility for novice users? (especially those who have never programmed in Lisp *and* Assembler :-) Please do not expect to receive answers from me, that's my questions where I'm looking for answers by myself -- but these questions guide me in my requirements analysis. I have designed enough software systems to know that the biggest error one can make is to design a system which does not address the needs of their potential users -- and that one (astonishly often) does not know who are the potential users... -- Joachim =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Joachim Schrod Email: schrod@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de Computer Science Department Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany ``How do we persuade new users that spreading fonts across the page like peanut butter across hot toast is not necessarily the route to typographic excellence? -- Peter Flynn ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 27 May 92 08:53:30 MDT Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: "Nelson H. F. Beebe" Subject: Bibliography of Electronic Publishing journal In-Reply-To: Your message of Wed, 27 May 92 13:02:31 MESZ Since some of you may not have access to the journal Electronic Publishing, you may wish to look at a bibliography of its contents. Use anonymous ftp to ftp.math.utah.edu and look in ~ftp/pub/tex/bib for the files index and epodd.*. By e-mail, "send index from ftp/tex/bib" to tuglib@math.utah.edu. ======================================================================== Nelson H.F. Beebe Center for Scientific Computing Department of Mathematics 220 South Physics Building University of Utah Salt Lake City, UT 84112 USA Tel: (801) 581-5254 FAX: (801) 581-4148 Internet: beebe@math.utah.edu ======================================================================== ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 27 May 92 10:34:29 -0700 Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: "Paul Barton-Davis" Subject: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: Joachim Schrod's message of Wed, 27 May 92 13:35:54 MESZ <9205271137.AA19013@june.cs.washington.edu> Joachim Schrod writes: > > questions in advance > > > > -1) who are the users of such a system ? > > authors or typesetters? > > 0) what are the requirements of these users ? > > Hmm, seems that my question was too simple-minded. A little bit more elaborate (but perhaps still incomplete): I think, besides the author we have the tasks of -- creating the markup structure (in SGML-speak: DTD writing) -- creating the layout (usually for more than one book, at least for a DTD, might even be for a category of DTDs. In SGML-speak: DSSL writing -- although I don't like DSSL ;-) Please note that I think that TeX has its serious limits in exactly this area.) I would call the person doing such a task a `book designer'. -- Interpreting the layout decisions: paragraph and page breaking, formula setting, figure placement, rotation, handling of fonts (I would like to distinguish types and fonts here), and all the other stuff Peter mentioned. I would call the person doing such a task a `typesetter'. This task is not fully automatable, but one can support it mechanically on a high abstraction level. A good list. The only points I would add are: - if "typesetting" is not fully automatable, which I don't believe, then what level can it get to ? What exactly are the tasks that you think cannot be automated ? - the job of the "book designer" ("typographer" would be a more generic term, I believe) is made very difficult by systems like LaTeX and SGML, because both are predicated on a categorization and heirarchical breakdown of what is (or should be) a gestalt. Consider someone who is working on two books, one using the Hughes "STOP" format and the other Addison-Wesley or Springer Verlag's internal house style. In both cases, she will find conceptual aspects of the layout that do not exist in the other, nor do they have any counterpart in the other. There will be markup commands in one that simply do not map to the other; does this mean that the markup is following the visual logic of the layout, or vice versa ? This problem tends to lead to a folding of the two tasks you mention (creating the markup structure, and layout design) into one. Separating them, which I suppose one could argue is the goal of those who argue for complete separation of the two, denies those doing each task from having the freedom to implement their design fully. It might be good for NTS to make such a separation possible, but I do not think it desirable for it to *impose* such a separation. Concerning the user interface I think we need different UIs (at least) for all four kind of people. But here I agree with Peter that this is not the most important point at the moment. My disagreement with him was raised by my impression that he made implicite I think that your disagreement was with me, not Peter :-) assumptions about the requirements and started with design questions concerning the typesetting task. I demanded a requirements analysis about the complete problem domain first; I wanted explicite, documented, assumptions. I might ask other questions to show my reasoning behind: Why are authors using TeX today? Why are publishers using TeX today? (And please: anecdotes about single people might be interesting but they are no basis for a discurse. Statistical data is needed.) There are so few publishers doing so that you *cannot* collect meaningful statistical data on this. My contact with those that do suggests that it is driven by personal whim than by any aggregate ideas about TeX, computers and typesetting. [ ... ] Please do not expect to receive answers from me, that's my questions where I'm looking for answers by myself -- but these questions guide me in my requirements analysis. I have designed enough software systems to know that the biggest error one can make is to design a system which does not address the needs of their potential users -- and that one (astonishly often) does not know who are the potential users... I start from a different premise, one that does not assume computers at all. I look at what "conventional" typesetters, typographers, type designers, and illustrators do, and see *their work* as the problem domain. I then make the additional assumption that what I want to see is a system that allows a single person to *potentially* control all of these aspects of document production, in addition to the act of authoring, from a single access point (a computer system). Such a consideration leads me to believe that a system of layered access, with multiple entry points, is needed. That is, the system must offer, ala hypercard, an "authoring only" view of the world. The system must offer a "layout designer" view of the world. The system must offer a "typesetter" view of the world. Each of these needs to accessed independently; in addition, it might be desirable for some aspects of each world to be accessible under some conditions from the others. This breakdown allows me to consider the needs of authors quite independently of what I believe typographers need. It allows me to consider questions about typesetting methodology quite independently of any particular assumptions about visual appearance or document structure. In short, I model my inquiry into these questions on the pre-computer methods of document production. -- paul ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 27 May 92 20:40:11 MESZ Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Joachim Schrod Subject: Re: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: <9205271736.AA05203@hp5.iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de>; from "PaulBarton-Davis" at May 27, 92 10:34 am Paul wrote a long mail where he explained that he did not understood me. He put implications in my points which were never there. I shuffel around his comments now, and that's the last time; I'm tired of writing the same all the time. I wrote that we must distinguish the four _tasks_: authoring, setting up a structure, book design, and typesetting. He replied > This problem tends to lead to a folding of the two tasks > you mention (creating the markup structure, and layout design) > into one. Separating them, which I suppose one could argue is > the goal of those who argue for complete separation of > the two, denies those doing each task from having the > freedom to implement their design fully. Please note: this is not my opinion, neither the folding nor the separation. I never said that these tasks are *separated*, they are to be distinguished. Because they are different abstractions. That they are highly correlated, should be clear. You even forgot to mention the most important connection: BETWEEN THE AUTHOR'S TEXT AND THE LAYOUT!! A really good layout is not only influenced by the structure -- it depends on the content!! If you really have put effort in research about typesetting, you know this. I first learned it more than 10 years ago when I worked with a book for typesetters' apprentices: J.K\"aufer, _Das_Setzerlehrbuch_, Stuttgart: Blersch, 1965. It's a book about metal typesetting where one can read all the quality demands which are not obeyed today. Philip Luidl has also written a very good book on typography and book design. Not to mention the classics cited everywhere: Morris, Tschichold, etc. Where one can also learn alot is the competition about the `Best Books of The Year.' But not only from those which won -- those which were rejected are even better. One can look *why* they were rejected, one can study the guidelines -- and then one discovers that good book design and typesetting is more than putting a structure in a layout. And since nobody has shown me yet an AI who can understand the content of a text and since I know nobody who would mark **ALL** content which is needed for Good Typesetting based on marked structure, I'm still with my sentence: > This task is not fully automatable, but one can support it > mechanically on a high abstraction level. Where you replied: > - if "typesetting" is not fully automatable, which I don't > believe, You really think that an author will mark where his central thesis is, so that the system will know that a page break is not allowed there? You really believe that the question if narrow typesetting or hyphenation is more important _in_the_semantic_context_ of the respective text part can be answered automatically? How many authors did you met which mark the places where they have abbrevations which are followed by a word belonging to that abbrevation differently from abbrevations where no accompanying word follows (the space afterwards must be different!)? Oh, where are the times, when George Bernhard Shaw did not put a book into print because the layout did not support his content? Where an author was still interested how his book will look -- but where he would had never dreamed of typesetting it by himself? (He knew that he's not a professional in this area. He valued human expertise.) In short: There will always be the place for a trained _human_ typesetter who knows what he does -- who knows when to apply rules AND WHEN TO BREAK THEM. That's a decision which I will not see given over to a computer system. That's art, not technic. Of course, there will be the mass production where it obviously does not matter how the layout is done -- but when we talk about `automatation' then it's a principle question. > - the job of the "book designer" ("typographer" would be a > more generic term, I believe) Yes, that's the reason I didn't use it. Here in Germany, a typographer does also create typefaces. > I start from a different premise, one that does not assume computers > at all. I haven't talked of computers yet. I talked about people and there demands. Please stop putting those words in my mouth. > I look at what "conventional" typesetters, typographers, type > designers, and illustrators do, and see *their work* as the problem > domain. I then make the additional assumption that what I want to see > is a system that allows a single person to *potentially* control all of > these aspects of document production, in addition to the act of > authoring, from a single access point (a computer system). See -- that's the difference. You start with typesetters, [...] and then the author comes into play. I ask `where shall we start?'. I ask `is this really the right place?'. I question your start and I still say that you have an implicite assumption: That's it's best to start there. My unanswered question is: `why?'. Btw, wasn't it you, who said that box&glue do not resemble anything in "conventional" typesetting? If no, ok. If yes, have you ever worked with REAL types, I mean, made your fingers dirty with metal? To the person who wrote this whoever he/she is: There you learn about boxes and (horizontal) glue. Only that the `glue' is of metal (these `Spreizklammern,' don't know the English word for them). > Why are publishers using TeX today? > > There are so few publishers doing so that you *cannot* collect > meaningful statistical data on this. My contact with those that do > suggests that it is driven by personal whim than by any aggregate > ideas about TeX, computers and typesetting. My contact with them (ie: I've worked as a TeX consultant for several publisher houses) do suggest that it is driven not by personal whim but by authors' questions like `why can't we send you TeX compuscripts?'. IMO authors pushed TeX into the business. I have yet to meet a publisher house which stands full behind TeX -- and I understand them. The people who think TeX makes the whole process cheaper, are dreamers. TeX might make it faster, that's perhaps a reason for journal production, but cheaper? No, Hongkong and other Asian states are cheaper. (At least cheaper as German publishers...) > In short, I model my inquiry into these questions on the > pre-computer methods of document production. And then you want to get rid of typesetters (``It's fully automatable.'')? I cannot believe it. -- Joachim PS: We have hardware problems at the moment. The NTS-L archive on ftp.th-darmstadt.de is not reachable. Probably it will be Friday 'till it's up again. Sorry for the inconvenience. ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 27 May 92 12:15:20 -0700 Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: "Paul Barton-Davis" Subject: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: Joachim Schrod's message of Wed, 27 May 92 20:40:11 MESZ <9205271842.AA08789@june.cs.washington.edu> [ I really am dismayed about the way that Joachim seems to be taking my mail as as series of personal attacks on him and his ideas. He seems not to realize that (1) I have a great deal of respect for his ideas and his work, and that (2) we come at this topic from different directions, which inevitably leads to disagreements over what's important. I would appreciate it if Joachim would stop assuming that I do not understand him and am putting implications into his words that are not there. I would find it easier to conduct an enquiry into this sort of thing if the participants assumed that honest disagreement, not stupidity and deliberate distortion, were at the root of the debate. If Joachim thinks that my postings show sufficient stupidity as to not merit a reply, then fine. We'll talk more later. ] Joachim writes: Paul writes: > This problem tends to lead to a folding of the two tasks > you mention (creating the markup structure, and layout design) > into one. Separating them, which I suppose one could argue is > the goal of those who argue for complete separation of > the two, denies those doing each task from having the > freedom to implement their design fully. Please note: this is not my opinion, neither the folding nor the separation. I never said that these tasks are *separated*, they are to be distinguished. Because they are different abstractions. That they are highly correlated, should be clear. You even forgot to mention the most important connection: BETWEEN THE AUTHOR'S TEXT AND THE LAYOUT!! A really good layout is not only influenced by the structure -- it depends on the content!! I can show you a dozen books in which your claim is absolutely false, a dozen in which it is absolutely true (I already cited Tufte), and many more in which things are not so obvious. You claim that layout design and markup design are two different abstractions, but highly correlated. I claim that in the general case, the degree of correlation is too high to distinguish the abstractions. I might agree with you in the limited domain of "scientific and mathematical publishing", but as I've stated before, I see this as an unnecessarily restrictive domain. > - if "typesetting" is not fully automatable, which I don't > believe, You really think that an author will mark where his central thesis is, so that the system will know that a page break is not allowed there? Thank you. You have clarified what you mean by automatable. Given this definition, I agree with you. > - the job of the "book designer" ("typographer" would be a > more generic term, I believe) Yes, that's the reason I didn't use it. Here in Germany, a typographer does also create typefaces. In England and the US, I believe this is the job of a type designer, who might also work as a typographer. Thats certainly the distinction made in Carter's "Twentieth Century Type Designers" (Trefoil Design Library, 1986). > I look at what "conventional" typesetters, typographers, type > designers, and illustrators do, and see *their work* as the problem > domain. I then make the additional assumption that what I want to see > is a system that allows a single person to *potentially* control all of > these aspects of document production, in addition to the act of > authoring, from a single access point (a computer system). See -- that's the difference. You start with typesetters, [...] and then the author comes into play. I ask `where shall we start?'. I ask `is this really the right place?'. I question your start and I still say that you have an implicite assumption: That's it's best to start there. My unanswered question is: `why?'. See my closing paragraph. Btw, wasn't it you, who said that box&glue do not resemble anything in "conventional" typesetting? If no, ok. It wasn't me. I *did* argue that a successor to TeX should use them only in the context of a more generic model of typesetting operations. > Why are publishers using TeX today? > > There are so few publishers doing so that you *cannot* collect > meaningful statistical data on this. My contact with those that do > suggests that it is driven by personal whim than by any aggregate > ideas about TeX, computers and typesetting. My contact with them (ie: I've worked as a TeX consultant for several publisher houses) do suggest that it is driven not by personal whim but by authors' questions like `why can't we send you TeX compuscripts?'. IMO authors pushed TeX into the business. Count the authors, Joachim. Count the publishers. I challenge you to find more than 50 authors and more than 20 publishers. Neither of these numbers represent "statistical data", IMHO - in each case, a specific individual with a specific background decided for some reason to use TeX. I don't believe that there are enough people doing this to somehow make statistical inferences from their usage. > In short, I model my inquiry into these questions on the > pre-computer methods of document production. And then you want to get rid of typesetters (``It's fully automatable.'')? I cannot believe it. \begin{core-statement-of-belief} I have the same goal as I believe Knuth did - to sufficiently encapsulate the mechanical, non-concious skills of a typesetter into a computer system, such that a person with sufficent aesthetic skill can use that system to produce outstanding documents of any sort. I do not care that much about authors, because I believe that most authors have perfectly adequate tools for *authoring*. The inadequacies are in the tools available for document production. That is not the job of an author because authors *write*, and *writing* is not the same as producing documents. My interest in authors comes into existence simply because I would *like* authors to use this system to do their writing with. \end{core-statement-of-belief} -- paul ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 27 May 92 21:32:51 BST Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Timothy Murphy Subject: Re: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: Paul Barton-Davis's message of Wed, 27 May 92 12:15:20 -0700 > Count the authors, Joachim. Count the publishers. I challenge you to > find more than 50 authors and more than 20 publishers. Neither of > these numbers represent "statistical data", IMHO - in each case, a > specific individual with a specific background decided for some reason > to use TeX. I don't believe that there are enough people doing this to > somehow make statistical inferences from their usage. On a quick look round our Hamilton Mathematics Research Library I estimate we have over 1000 books printed in TeX. Over half the new mathematics books coming in are printed in TeX. Virtually all mathematical publishers seem to be using TeX. I 'challenge' you to tell me one mathematical publisher who is _not_ using TeX. Timothy Murphy e-mail: tim@maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-1-2842366 (home/office) +353-1-7021507 (university) fax: +353-1-2842295 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 27 May 92 21:32:51 BST Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Timothy Murphy Subject: Re: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: Paul Barton-Davis's message of Wed, 27 May 92 12:15:20 -0700 > Count the authors, Joachim. Count the publishers. I challenge you to > find more than 50 authors and more than 20 publishers. Neither of > these numbers represent "statistical data", IMHO - in each case, a > specific individual with a specific background decided for some reason > to use TeX. I don't believe that there are enough people doing this to > somehow make statistical inferences from their usage. On a quick look round our Hamilton Mathematics Research Library I estimate we have over 1000 books printed in TeX. Over half the new mathematics books coming in are printed in TeX. Virtually all mathematical publishers seem to be using TeX. I 'challenge' you to tell me one mathematical publisher who is _not_ using TeX. Timothy Murphy e-mail: tim@maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-1-2842366 (home/office) +353-1-7021507 (university) fax: +353-1-2842295 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 27 May 92 14:02:18 -0700 Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: "Paul Barton-Davis" Subject: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: Timothy Murphy's message of Wed, 27 May 92 21:32:51 BST <9205272058.AA20401@june.cs.washington.edu> Tim Murphy writes: On a quick look round our Hamilton Mathematics Research Library I estimate we have over 1000 books printed in TeX. Over half the new mathematics books coming in are printed in TeX. Virtually all mathematical publishers seem to be using TeX. I 'challenge' you to tell me one mathematical publisher who is _not_ using TeX. This is where I bow in deference to my obvious mis-location. I did not consider the domain of mathematical publishing to be that large. If there are really that many books published using TeX, then Joachim's question seems reasonable. I'm sorry - I just tried not to look only at math publishing, and other than a few token CS textbooks, TeX is rare, and getting rarer. -- paul ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 27 May 92 21:32:51 BST Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Timothy Murphy Subject: Re: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: Paul Barton-Davis's message of Wed, 27 May 92 12:15:20 -0700 > Count the authors, Joachim. Count the publishers. I challenge you to > find more than 50 authors and more than 20 publishers. Neither of > these numbers represent "statistical data", IMHO - in each case, a > specific individual with a specific background decided for some reason > to use TeX. I don't believe that there are enough people doing this to > somehow make statistical inferences from their usage. On a quick look round our Hamilton Mathematics Research Library I estimate we have over 1000 books printed in TeX. Over half the new mathematics books coming in are printed in TeX. Virtually all mathematical publishers seem to be using TeX. I 'challenge' you to tell me one mathematical publisher who is _not_ using TeX. Timothy Murphy e-mail: tim@maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-1-2842366 (home/office) +353-1-7021507 (university) fax: +353-1-2842295 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland ======================================================================== Date: Thu, 28 May 92 12:15:33 EDT Reply-To: karl@cs.umb.edu From: Karl Berry Subject: this list It seems to me that NTS-L can be discussing one of two things: 1) an extension of TeX; 2) an entirely new typesetting system. In summary, I think we should be talking about #1, and not even thinking about #2. In more detail, although in principle I agree that perhaps an entirely new system would be better, I don't think a large mailing list like this is the place to discuss it, or develop it. I think only an individual or perhaps a small group can profitably develop such a thing; there are too many thousands of details that a physically far-flung mailing list can haggle about for anything ever to get done. Let someone who has a year or more of research time, some kind of funding support, and an interest in the subject come up with the basic system, and then maybe other people can usefully criticize it. (No, I don't think a big list can come up with the basic outlines of such a system.) As things stand now, there is no system, there isn't even an author. We're just batting around ideas -- ``hey maybe this feature would be neat.'' This is not useful, in my (not-so-humble-in-this-case, I guess) opinion. It will go on forever, and nothing will ever get done. What I am interested in, and what perhaps others are interested in, is extending TeX to repair at least some of its flaws. I'm not interested in changing to an SGML-based system, or changing into a total separation of typesetting commands and text, I'm not interested in making the programming language be a ``real'' programming language, I'm not interested in TeX subsuming Metafont or reading TrueType fonts. (Actually, I am interested in all those things, but I'm not interested in discussing them in the context of a successor to TeX.) What I want to discuss are new primitives to add to TeX to fix important problems. This is a very limited goal. Maybe it's not even a useful goal. But it's a hell of a lot more realistic than rewriting the thing from scratch by committee! Concrete plan of action: If there is a consensus that we should be talking about only extending TeX, then let's do it. If there is no consensus, but there are people like me who only want to talk about extending TeX, then we should form our own discussion, limited to that topic. If there is no consensus, and there are no people like me, I'll go away quietly and you can shoot me in the morning :-) (Deep breath.) karl@cs.umb.edu ======================================================================== Date: Thu, 28 May 92 12:43:40 EDT Reply-To: karl@cs.umb.edu From: Karl Berry Subject: this list In-Reply-To: Paul Barton-Davis's message of Thu, 28 May 92 09:29:33 -0700 <9205281629.AA05088@stowe.cs.washington.edu> Some of us think they are sufficiently deep-seated as to require a completely new tool I know, and I don't necessarily disagree, I just don't want to talk about it. This is exactly the discussion I don't want to be involved in -- I want the discussion to *start* from the assumption that adding some new primitives and (maybe) changing others is what we want to do. If you and others want to have the other discussion, about a completely new system, then that's fine, obviously. I don't care if NTS-L itself is your discussion or mine, but I want to decide which it's going to be. ======================================================================== Date: Thu, 28 May 92 18:08:38 BST Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Timothy Murphy Subject: TeX is perfect In-Reply-To: Karl Berry's message of Thu, 28 May 92 12:15:33 EDT Lots of things in this world are perfect: bicycles, fudge, Mozart's clarinet concerto. TeX belongs in this class, IMHO. It is perfect {\em at what it is supposed to do}. It wasn't designed for printing Newsweek. It was designed for printing mathematics. Timothy Murphy e-mail: tim@maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-1-2842366 (home/office) +353-1-7021507 (university) fax: +353-1-2842295 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland ======================================================================== Date: Thu, 28 May 92 13:58:07 EDT Reply-To: karl@cs.umb.edu From: Karl Berry Subject: TeX is perfect In-Reply-To: Timothy Murphy's message of Thu, 28 May 92 18:08:38 BST <199205281750.AA08790@cs.umb.edu> [TeX] is perfect {\em at what it is supposed to do}. It wasn't designed for printing Newsweek. It was designed for printing mathematics. Well, if enough people feel like this, then any changed TeX will not be widely adopted, and will probably wither and die. But this is no reason not to consider improvements (among those of us who want to do so). karl@cs.umb.edu ======================================================================== Date: Thu, 28 May 92 13:49:19 EDT Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Chris Carruthers Subject: What should we discuss? In-Reply-To: Message of Thu, 28 May 92 12:43:40 EDT from I agree with Karl Berry that we should be either discussing extensions to TeX or a completely new system. I further propose that we must only discuss one thing at a time and stop every once and a while to catch our breath and summarize what has been agreed. The recent discussions between pd and js have been exhausting and did not seem to achieve anything (if one of you cares to make a summary of what you did achieve....) It also seems clear that the first thing we should discuss is *whether* to discuss extensions or a new system. I vote for extensions...TeX already does so many things very well I can't imagine wanting to start from scratch. This may be a matter of semantics though: one person's extension is another person's new system... .Chris Carruthers, Informatics Product Support, Univ. of Ottawa, Ottawa, CA ======================================================================== Date: Thu, 28 May 92 11:28:11 -0700 Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: "Paul Barton-Davis" Subject: bye I suspect that any further input from me is only going to offend and/or upset many people. I hope one day to offer you all a system embodies my (and many other people's) ideas, and one that will continue to typeset TeX documents as well as they have always been done. I had hoped that this list might be a good forum for discussing the fundamentals of a computer typesetting system, using the lessons learned from TeX, troff, Scribe, Interleaf, Xpress, and others as examples. It appears instead that more people want to talk about "fixing TeX". In the meantime, I wish those who work on NTS good luck, and happy discussions. -- paul ps. for those who wondered what Joachim & I achieved by consuming all those net cycles: not much, except that I'm more convinced than I was that he's attacking things from the wrong end, and I'll bet he's more convinced than ever that I'm an idiot. ======================================================================== Date: Thu, 28 May 92 14:14:03 EDT Reply-To: karl@cs.umb.edu From: Karl Berry Subject: What should we discuss? In-Reply-To: Chris Carruthers's message of Thu, 28 May 92 13:49:19 EDT <199205281804.AA08956@cs.umb.edu> I vote for extensions...TeX already does so many things very well I can't imagine wanting to start from scratch. I don't suggest a vote for decisions like this; I think they should be made by consensus. So far no one has dissented from my original idea, which was to have the NTS-L list discuss extending TeX (as little as possible, presumably), as it is, and don't even think about entirely new systems. Does anyone, in fact, disagree? There is no need to explicitly agree. ======================================================================== Date: Thu, 28 May 92 20:07:53 EDT Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Michael Barr Subject: TeX is not perfect! Not only is TeX lousy at commutative diagrams, but half the latest tugboat consists of long articles about how to make it do perfectly reasonable things that can only be done with subtle and difficult programming. Actually, they are mostly about how to make a programming language out of Tex. I don't know what DEK's reasons for refusing to make a programming language, but I can't imagine that they are valid today. (I put in the time qualifier because they may have had a lot to do with limited computing power.) One article had a piece of code with fifteen (15) \expandafter's in a row! Something's wrong somewhere. Michael Barr ======================================================================== Date: Thu, 28 May 92 21:15:35 MESZ Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Joachim Schrod Subject: Re: typographic things about TeX that need fixing In-Reply-To: <9205271917.AA05414@hp5.iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de>; from "PaulBarton-Davis" at May 27, 92 12:15 pm Paul wrote: > > [ I really am dismayed about the way that Joachim seems to be taking > my mail as as series of personal attacks on him and his ideas. You have an false impression -- I do not see them as personal attacks. I've the opinion that you don't know how TeX is used and that your implicite assumptions must be questioned. This is clearly shown by your quote: > Count the authors, Joachim. Count the publishers. I challenge you to > find more than 50 authors and more than 20 publishers. Alone at my university about 5000 people are using TeX -- and more than 50 of them are writing books with it... But to cite the authoritives :-): ``The bibliography project [...] [collecting references to publications about or with TeX] continues to grow, with some collections receiving several updates a week. There are now over 51000 lines in the bibliography files. [...] Conversations that I had with representatives of several publishers at the TUG91 and EuroTeX91 meetings this year indicate that there may be another 1000-2000 books typeset by TeX that have not yet been included.'' Nelson H. F. Beebe: ``President's Column.'' TUGboat Vol. 13, No. 1, April 1992. [received today] Your statement shows clearly that you are not in contact with those who use TeX. Go to a TeX conference and talk with the people there. If TeX were used only by 50 authors and 20 publishers we would not discuss here. We're not children who are looking for a personal playground. -- Joachim ======================================================================== Date: Thu, 28 May 92 17:26:08 EDT Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Mark Steinberger Subject: Re: TeX is perfect Timothy Murphy writes >Lots of things in this world are perfect: ... >TeX belongs in this class, IMHO. >It is perfect {\em at what it is supposed to do}. >It wasn't designed for printing Newsweek. >It was designed for printing mathematics. I'm a big fan of tex, or I wouldn't be on this list. But as a practicing mathematician and author, I have to say that tex is not perfect for printing mathematics. One of the big gaps in it is its handling of commutative diagrams. Now there are some very good diagram packages that can be overlaid on tex, but none of them is perfect. In particular, only one of them, at this point, has diagonal arrows that aren't at least somewhat dashy, and that one is impossible to integrate into anyone else's system without extensive modification. Also, some further development of curved arrows would be quite useful. Things like braid diagrams can be set by very few of the available packages. There are other modifications that could be useful, but this is the most important one as far as publishing mathematics is concerned. --Mark -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mark Steinberger | mark@sarah.albany.edu Dept. of Math. & Stat | SUNY at Albany | Nonlinear similarity begins in dimension six. Albany, NY 12222 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 29 May 92 08:35:00 GMT Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: malcolm Subject: RE: TeX is perfect from the discussions i had had with frank mittelbach, chris rowley, phil taylor et al, and the announcement which rainer issued, i had thought that it was a new typesetting system, not a TeX4, or son of TeX that was being discussed. but things evolve (just like TeX did). i'm afraid that almost all the i'm afraid that almost all the enhancements which i have seen suggested, from those early ones in TUGboat through to stephan bechtolsheim's or frank mittelbach's seem, imho, to be examples of creeping featurism. i have grave doubts as to whether they are worth the trouble. they certainly are not to me. in fact, i would class TeX3 as an example of creeping featurism, even though i am most grateful for lefthyphenmin and righthyphenmin. i doubt that even if such tinkering could be achieved successfully, and as an aside i would note that the relatively modular and supposedly straightforward changes to create TeX3 took Knuth rather longer than he expected, would they represent such a major improvement to encourage all users around the world to want to upgrade? remember how long it took to get rid of amr fonts? if it ain't broke.... and then we introduce the spectre of a chain of new TeX's, each supposedly enhancing the previous one. let's have flow round arbitrary shapes, let's have new primitives for commutative diagrams, let's have colour, let's have .... let's be just like a commercial product which depends on its survival by adding new unwanted gimmicks every six months. let's make TeX totally unwieldy and impossible to run on anything with less power than a 486dx and 32Mbyte, and oh, it has to work under windows with hot links. at the cost of again sounding elitist (which was not my intent, although i have nothing against elitism), what has this to do with typesetting, quaility, or excellence? (maybe i a little, but i'm writing an impassioned plea here). on the other hand, i have to admit that tinkering with TeX is probably do-able, while i have grave doubts that creating a new typesetting system by a group of interested anarchists is (again i exagerate, and apolgise to the reasonable men and women of the centre, right and left, in advance). but i'm not yet detecting a consensus. the only agreement i see so far is between me and timothy murphy (the last thing i expected! my enthusiasm for fudge is less: i would susbstitute islay whisky and bowling). i shall be saying something like this in my forthcoming presidential column in tugboat (for those who don't know, tugboat is the publication of the tex users group: read the terms of the groups constitution sometime: it hardly mentions tex, but says bits about typesetting). one thing which needs to be answered at some time is 'who benefits'? nico would have elsevier benefit (i exaggerate again); some would have notions of excellence and quality as the beneficiary (rather culture and time bound concepts); will it benefit the great unwashed? will your average undergraduate/academic/technical writer (or whoever it is who uses this system) be eager for this better mousetrap: will he she or it pay for it? well, good luck. i know that i'm going to do no coding of this, although i might consider writing my memoirs with nts. malcolm clark ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 29 May 92 11:27:57 BST Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Timothy Murphy Subject: Re: bye In-Reply-To: Paul Barton-Davis's message of Thu, 28 May 92 11:28:11 -0700 > I suspect that any further input from me is only going to offend > and/or upset many people. I doubt it. I enjoyed reading your contributions, even though I disagreed with you completely. > ps. for those who wondered what Joachim & I achieved by consuming all > those net cycles: not much, except that I'm more convinced than I > was that he's attacking things from the wrong end, and I'll bet > he's more convinced than ever that I'm an idiot. These are not necessarily incompatible :-) Timothy Murphy e-mail: tim@maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-1-2842366 (home/office) +353-1-7021507 (university) fax: +353-1-2842295 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 29 May 92 12:23:18 BST Reply-To: RHBNC Philip Taylor From: CHAA006@VAX.RHBNC.AC.UK Subject: Re: What should this list discuss? (Karl Berry) Karl wrote: >>> So far no one has dissented from my original idea, which was to have the >>> NTS-L list discuss extending TeX (as little as possible, presumably), as >>> it is, and don't even think about entirely new systems. >>> Does anyone, in fact, disagree? There is no need to explicitly agree. Yes, I disagree. Not because I don't think that a slightly-extended TeX might not be a good idea (it may well be the best idea, but equally well it may not: as Rainer outlined in his `Welcome' message, there are at least five options, all of which are valid topics for this list), but because there are rather too many attempts at the moment to control the discussion on this list. The list was created under the aegis of Rainer Schoepf, and it is for him to decide what are, and what are not, relevant topics for discussion. In the absence of further guidance from Rainer, I think it ill behoves any of us to seek to dominate the list by our own personal preferences. Let us instead listen politely to what others have to say, and contribute according to our own lights. Philip Taylor, RHBNC ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 29 May 92 10:45:00 EST Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: LMLARS01%ULKYVX.bitnet@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de Subject: Re: TeX is perfect As one who has been using TeX seriously for four or five years, I can say that TeX is looking far less perfect as time goes by. I use a Macintosh for all of my writing and I can see that the word processors on the Mac (and presumably now for Windows) solve many of the problems that I have with TeX very elegantly. In fact, unless I need portability, or I am writing a long document, I rarely use TeX for mathematical writing. Here are some reasons why: (1) Graphics are a pain to use with TeX. My word processors of choice on the Mac are FullWrite and MathWriter 2.0. With either one I can take graphics out of nearly any program, paste it in and drag it around the page, make it move with the text or treat it as a character--my choice. Using Textures or OzTeX, I always end up fussing for too long to get exactly what I want. Then I lose portability because somebody else's dvi driver doesn't understand the syntax or format for graphics--even eps, which is fast becoming an international standard. (2) Perhaps it's a matter of taste, but I find the programming language for TeX to be extremely non-transparent. This would be all right if one could do serious writing in TeX without ever brushing up against the guts of the system. But, I know no heavy user of TeX who hasn't had to resort to dirty tricks or wizardry a few times. I can write (in WYSIAWYG) just about anything TeX can do with MathWriter and I rarely ever need the manual. With TeX, I always have Knuth's Old Testament and Lamport's New Testament at my elbow. Right now, TeX has the advantage in portability and for long documents. But, this advantage is shrinking fast. I think both of the above criticisms betray TeX's earliest origins in the computer-expensive mainframe world of the 1970's. Graphics displays were expensive and tty terminals were the norm. So, TeX was saddled with basically no graphics support, ASCII characters for input (I know this can be altered--I do it for \le, \ge, etc. to see the real thing.) and a programming language not amenable to occasional or casual acquaintance. TeX needs to be updated to reflect the changes in the times. Powerful graphic computers are inexpensive now. Much research has gone into user interfaces, portability of graphics and programming languages since TeX was conceived. After all of this, let me finish by saying I like TeX. I have seen no better tool for the preparation of long mathematical manuscripts. But, it is certainly not perfect! ============================================================================= Lee Larson lmlars01@ulkyvx.louisville.edu Department of Mathematics (502)588-6826 University of Louisville Louisville, Kentucky 40292 USA ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 29 May 92 10:34:08 -0600 Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: "Jonathan M. Gilligan" Subject: TeX is perfect In-Reply-To: LMLARS01%ULKYVX.BITNET@vm.gmd.de's message of Fri, 29 May 92 10:45:00 EST <9205291502.AA17150@lilac.csd.bldrdoc.gov> Lee Larson writes that he finds TeX increasingly anachronistic in the face of fancy WSIWYG word processors. I disagree completely. I don't want to start a flame war, but I do want to distinguish a) word-processing from typesetting b) logical vs. visual composition c) the comparative advantages and disadvantages of WSIWYG vs. straight text for ease of entering the document into the computer and editing it. Rather than rehash arguments we've all seen before, saying that my preferences are morally superior to Lee's, I'll just say that I prefer LaTeX over Word for Windows, Word for Dos, or Word Perfect. I'm agnostic about MacIntosh software. There _are_ many features that current commercial word-processing and typesetting programs have that I wish TeX had (\include creeping.features) but when I try to use the aforementioned commercial word-processors (I have no experience with typesetting software other than TeX) I miss the sense of logical structure that I get with LaTeX. I don't _want_ to drag things around on the page. I want to tell LaTeX once how to place them and have it do that automatically thereafter. One final point is that when I write data-analysis software, it's far easier for me to have it generate reports in LaTeX than in some mysterious proprietary document format. Why is this relevant to the NTS discussion? Because many of the things Lee would like to dispense with are what I value in TeX, and I don't see the value in having someone spend ten years writing a clone of MathWriter. ---Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jonathan M. Gilligan Time and Frequency Division National Institute of Standards and Technology Boulder, Colorado, USA Disclaimer --- The government probably disagrees with my opinions. ======================================================================== Date: Fri, 29 May 92 13:12:00 EST Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: LMLARS01@ULKYVX.bitnet Subject: Re: TeX is perfect Jonathon Gilligan writes: >Lee Larson writes that he finds TeX increasingly anachronistic in the face of >fancy WSIWYG word processors. I disagree completely. I don't want to start a >flame war, but I do want to distinguish >a) word-processing from typesetting I am well aware of the religious battles which have been waged over this issue in recent years. I think I do understand the difference and that is why I use several programs. But, increasingly, scientific journals are encouraging people to submit papers in TeX (most commonly LaTeX) format and this blurs the distinction because many of us are using TeX to write the papers; we don't pass them to a professional typesetter. In fact, I'll bet the majority of TeX users are in this position. >b) logical vs. visual composition Not all things can be foreseen. When I paste a Mathematica graph into a MathWriter document, I can see exactly how it affects pagebreaks and how it relates to the surrounding text. TeX gives me no clue until I have previewed it. >c) the comparative advantages and disadvantages of WSIWYG vs. straight text > for ease of entering the document into the computer and editing it. I don't see why it's any easier to enter and use $\int_0^\infty f(x)\,dx$ than the real thing, which can be entered and edited just as easily, and looks just as good when it's printed. >Rather than rehash arguments we've all seen before, saying that my >preferences are morally superior to Lee's, I'll just say that I prefer >LaTeX over Word for Windows, Word for Dos, or Word Perfect. I'm agnostic >about MacIntosh software. I prefer LaTeX over all the ones you mention by name. Perhaps I'm not a total moral degenerate! :-) >There _are_ many features that current commercial word-processing and >typesetting programs have that I wish TeX had >(\include creeping.features) but when I try to use the aforementioned >commercial word-processors (I have no experience with typesetting >software other than TeX) I miss the sense of logical structure that I >get with LaTeX. I don't _want_ to drag things around on the page. I >want to tell LaTeX once how to place them and have it do that >automatically thereafter. I don't disagree. But I don't think the inclusion of graphics will ever be as automatic as that and I don't see any reason why a front end can't take this into account. Graphics are becoming ever more important as their generation becomes easier and their standardization becomes ever more prevalent. Any typesetting system has to take this into account, or it will join the dinosaur. My main point is that there is no reason not to support graphics or use the real symbols such as \le, \ge, \cap, \cup, \to, etc. when nothing is lost by doing so. Why does this remove logical structure? It seems to me such things are unrelated to the logical structure of the format. >Why is this relevant to the NTS discussion? Because many of the things >Lee would like to dispense with are what I value in TeX, and I don't >see the value in having someone spend ten years writing a clone of >MathWriter. Since the original took less than half that, I don't think it would take 10 years unless there was galloping featuritis. :-). ============================================================================= Lee Larson lmlars01@ulkyvx.louisville.edu Department of Mathematics (502)588-6826 University of Louisville Louisville, Kentucky 40292 USA ======================================================================== Date: Wed, 27 May 92 03:34:42 +0200 Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Claus Langhans Subject: Re: Backward compatibility (was Welcome message) NDl> one reason i do remember for knuth's decision not to support certain NDl> features (e.g. graphics) is that these were already handled well NDl> enough by other existing software, and were also largely device NDl> dependent. portability and device independence are two of the major NDl> guiding principles behind the present tex system, and i doubt that NDl> tex would have spread as widely as it has (and we wouldn't now be NDl> discussing whether to change the ground rules) otherwise. You are right, that the portability of TeX is one of the main reasons for its success, but the necessity for some way producing graphics with TeX is obvious: TeX itself and its files are portable, but in the moment one uses any kind of graphic, the files loose their portability. I know that it is very complicate to make a standard for including bitmap graphic into TeX, but I think vector graphic schould make its way into NTS. Bitmap graphic is also one of my whishes, and in my opinion there must be a compromise between portabilty and graphic support. Claus Mail : Claus Langhans, U.d.Nussbaeumen 19, D-6233 Kelkheim, Germany /// Voice : ++49-6195-8868 22:00 - 24:00 MEZ/MESZ /// Fido : Claus Langhans@2:243/43.16 \\\/// UseNet: Claus_Langhans@wildcat.fido.de \XX/ ======================================================================== Date: Sat, 30 May 92 11:34:36 EDT Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Michael Barr Subject: TeX is not perfect! Not only is TeX lousy at commutative diagrams, but half the latest tugboat consists of long articles about how to make it do perfectly reasonable things that can only be done with subtle and difficult programming. Actually, they are mostly about how to make a programming language out of Tex. I don't know what DEK's reasons for refusing to make a programming language, but I can't imagine that they are valid today. (I put in the time qualifier because they may have had a lot to do with limited computing power.) One article had a piece of code with fifteen (15) \expandafter's in a row! Something's wrong somewhere. I answer to the complaint about creeping featurism, I am afraid that that is exactly what I want. If TeX is poor and/or inefficient about commutative diagrams and if I find something that will do them better, then I may well change to that something. If commutative diagrams are of no interest to you, then you will not care about that, but may care very much about something else. A lot of network bandwidth is taken by complaint about floats, which I have never used. So if new features include better handling of floats and commutative diagrams, then there will features I do and don't use. It is pretty safe to say that every feature will be just what _someone_ needs. Many people are using \special's for doing whatever TeX cannot. Since I consider the machine invariance of TeX one of its most important aspects, I can view this only with alarm. It is this, as much as anything else, that has convinced that a successor must be sought. I only hope that it is sufficiently well designed to keep us going for another ten years. Among the features I consider crucial are the ability of doing bezier curves as primitives. Probably, TeX should just accept them and pass them through the .dvi file to the device driver. This is likely to be the most efficient, in both time and space, way of doing it. This one change would make it possible to at least incorporate vector graphics in a standard into TeX. Michael Barr ======================================================================== Date: Sat, 30 May 92 14:05:20 -0700 Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Arthur Ogawa Subject: subject of this list In-Reply-To: Karl Berry's message of Thu, 28 May 92 12:43:40 EDT <9205281646.AA23664@orion.arc.nasa.gov> > I want the discussion to *start* from the assumption that adding some new > primitives and (maybe) changing others is what we want to do. I would also like to discuss this approach. I think the discussion of a ground-up re-design of the programmable typesetting system should be carried on separately. Let's decide to separate the two subjects, please. Art ======================================================================== Date: Sun, 31 May 92 00:28:28 EDT Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: laurent@MATH.TORONTO.EDU Subject: BETTER LINE SPACING IN PROSE WITH MATH BETTER LINE SPACING IN PROSE WITH MATH Here is one problem that is preventing TeX from achieving "professional quality" in ordinary mathematical typesetting. Suppose that big symbols (with excess depth and height) occur on successive lines. The current mechanisms of TeX involving the \baselineskip, \lineskip, and \lineskiplimit normally lead to excessive separation of the lines. This is because the two successive rectangular line boxes are forced \lineskip apart. This is "necessary" only when the oversize symbols happen to be aligned one above the other, a fairly rare occurrence. A more pleasing result is almost always obtained by a different formula which assures that each line box is \lineskip from the a "standard prose core" of the the lines above and below. Can such a rule already be implemented with TeX? I would also like a marginal warning to help me check that no accidental collision of big symbols has occurred; when it occasionally does, I could quickly fix it with a \vadjust{\vskip??}. And of course in case there are many big symbols I would like to be able to revert gracefully to Knuth's regime. (Texperts please forgive me for ignoring the subtlties of \lineskiplimit, which are not very relevant here.) Classical typesetters managed in the above circumstances to separate the lines just enough that there be \lineskip distance from the ink of the one to the ink of the next. What I am asking is that TeX be able to achieve something like this fairly automatically. It is not doing so currently and the quality of its mathematical output is suffering. Laurent Siebenmann ======================================================================== Date: Sun, 31 May 92 15:43:03 -0400 Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: laurent@MATH.TORONTO.EDU Subject: LATE PATTERNS LATE PATTERNS TeX of 1982 was able to erase and/or assimilate hyphenation patterns at any time. TeX in versions >=3 cannot. I regret this. It has made the portability of tex typescript using exotic hyphenation patterns a much more complicated matter because recompilation of the format using INITEX or VIRTEX is normally required at the site where the manuscript is received. It also puts severe practical limits on the number of languages that TeX can handle in the same typescript, and that may cost TeX the loyalty of some European organisations. Laurent Siebenmann ======================================================================== Date: Sun, 31 May 92 15:56:08 EDT Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: eijkhout@CS.UTK.EDU Subject: Re: BETTER LINE SPACING IN PROSE WITH MATH In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 31 May 92 00:28:28 EDT." <9205310429.AA25484@CS.UTK.EDU> Laurent Siebenmann complains about line spacing in the presence of math. > A more pleasing result is almost >always obtained by a different formula which assures that each line >box is \lineskip from the a "standard prose core" of the the lines ^^^^^ ^^^^^^^ Let's hope I interpret this correctly :-) >above and below. Can such a rule already be implemented with TeX? I Laurent, what is the 'standard prose core'? The x-height? Or the height of whatever text is present? Surely not that latter, because then line spacing would be irregular if some line had no ascenders or descenders (some wag once called this 'female prose'. It is rather hard to write female prose in English. Still, we have to cover that case.) So do I understand that you want a fixed baseline-to-baseline spacing? Just set \lineskiplimit-\maxdimen and the \baselineskip value will be applied no matter how high/low the lines are. If that's too drastic for some parts of the text, how about \everymath{\smash} \def\smash#1${\setbox\z@\hbox{$#1$}\ht\z@\z@ \dp\z@\z@ \box\z@$} ? >would also like a marginal warning to help me check that no accidental >collision of big symbols has occurred; when it occasionally does, I Yes, this would be nice, but it would be substantial addition to TeX. >could quickly fix it with a \vadjust{\vskip??}. And of course in case Fixing it by hand? Tsk. Contrary to the TeX philosphy that everything can be automated. >there are many big symbols I would like to be able to revert >gracefully to Knuth's regime. But seriously, your proposed extension sounds somewhat ad hoc. I'd be much more inclined to favour it seriously if it were part of some general mechanism. Remember that the baseline mechanism of TeX now is very general, and that it applies to all vertically stacked boxes. Victor Eijkhout Department of Computer Science; University of Tennessee at Knoxville 104 Ayres Hall; 1403 Circle Dr.; Knoxville TN 37996-1301 phone: +1 615 974 8298 (secretary 8295; fax 8296); home +1 615 558 3069 Support the League for Programming Freedom! league@prep.ai.mit.edu ======================================================================== Date: Sun, 31 May 92 22:10:52 CET Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: bbeeton Subject: Re: LATE PATTERNS In-Reply-To: <01GKO0KUWCXUELNRMD@MATH.AMS.COM> larry siebenmann states that "tex of 1982 was able to erase and/or assimilate hyphenation patterns at any time." i may be mistaken, but believe that the unextended tex82 (i don't know what may have been true in mltex, for example) has always been able to accept hyphenation *patterns* only into initex. (lists of hyphenation *exceptions* have always been acceptable at any time.) i'm also not aware of any facility to erase hyphenation patterns at any stage. (can someone please confirm or rebut?) i agree that portability under such conditions is difficult, and this is a feature that might profitably be looked at more carefully. by the way, an increase in size of even the english hyphenation patterns, such as suggested by gerard kuiken (tugboat 11 #1), requires a larger value for the number of tries than is provided by tex's default. this and other defaults are an area that can usefully be examined now for "standardization" of larger recommended values without any extensions required. -- bb ======================================================================== Date: Sun, 31 May 92 17:26:21 -0400 Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: laurent@MATH.TORONTO.EDU Subject: More on BETTER LINE SPACING IN PROSE WITH MATH More on BETTER LINE SPACING IN PROSE WITH MATH Michael Barr made a quick reply to BETTER LINE SPACING IN PROSE WITH MATH as follows: You are certainly correct about what happens. I guess the short answer is that this behaviour is implicit in TeX' box-and-glue model of text. Once a line is set, that line is an hbox of a certain height, which is the max of the heights of the constituent boxes. What you want would require a ``skyline'' model of the line and TeX doesn't do that. Whether it could or should is another matter entirely. It can, of course, be hand tuned by playing with negative rules or something. More precisely, putting your large symbols or whatever in a box and adjusting the height of the box. I suspect that doing this automatically would simply involve a large amount of extra computation. Actually, I've noticed the opposite problem; not enough space when a letter with descender happens to be right above a large symbol. There is no obvious solution. Here is my response: MB> What you want would require a ``skyline'' model of the line and MB> TeX doesn't do that. I cannot imagine TeX ever being made to see and use an honest "skyline" model of a line although the master artisan most certainly does. I was trying to be realistic and suggest something almost as good that TeX 4 (alias NTS) most definitely could do at high speed and with little extra code. Let me add a little explanation. Since horizontal and math modes are already nicely distinguished by TeX, it should not be too difficult for NTS to register seperately the height and depth of the math in a given line that appears as $...$ in prose and other stuff, and also the height and depth of the prose and other stuff. (By puting math in an explicit \hbox it would be assimilated as other along with the prose.) This simple extra information is all that I was proposing the new vertical list mechanism should use. Naturally, I would hope that this behavior would be made possibly more by "opening up" some of the black boxes in TeX than by adding new structure. In any case, I emphasize that such a new mode of action should be an OPTION available for high quality typesetting under texpert surveillance. The default behavior of TeX should NOT change. Laurent Siebenmann PS MB> Actually, I've noticed the opposite problem; not enough MB> space when a letter with descender happens to be right MB> above a large symbol. This sounds like a problem to be solved by increasing \lineskiplimit. ======================================================================== Date: Sun, 31 May 92 19:51:36 EDT Reply-To: "NTS-L Distribution list" From: Michael Barr Subject: Re: More on BETTER LINE SPACING IN PROSE WITH MATH Well, Victor Eijkhout has explained how to use \everymath to ignore th height of math boxes. As for my other problem, that is just the point. If you increase \lineskiplimit, you get too much space most of the time instead of not enough occasionally. Michael Barr