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Sorry, Linus is not Donald Knuth ( http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=TeXfuture )

Please, please use a command like \mathit or \text around text used in maths mode. I see $italics$ far too often still in papers and presentations.

So, you should e.g. write: $\Psi_\mathit{classical computer}$

See also: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=mathstext

pi rounds to 3.1416

TeX's versioning is done by adding one more digit of pi so that the version number becomes more accurate with each upgrade.

Your nerd card revoking card is hereby revoked.

LaTeX is very good within its niche, which is typesetting books and journal articles (and it's particularly good for mathematical and scientific texts).

However, that doesn't mean it's perfect for every situation. Things can start getting complicated very quickly if you are doing anything other than typesetting a book or journal article, particularly if you have very particular layout desires. For example, flowing text round images can be incredibly difficult to get right.

In fact, some layouts -- even deceptively simple ones are essentially impossible to produce automatically, so you have to fall back on manual tweaking. At which point you're no longer using LaTeX for its automatic layout capabilities, which are its strong point: you're just using it as a slow and non-visual tool for manual layout, which is the one thing WYSIWYG word processors are better for.

There was a German transcription for DTP - "Dumme Treiben Plötsinn" (along the lines of "Dumbheads Try Printing"). So it is more likely that language and readability of printed matter will decline/degrade even more. But that does not matter, cause technical quality (10^y dpi, full colour) will be state-of-the-art.

The readibility will decline even if the prose is decent. I doubt these firms are providing users with the ability to designate the language of certain blocks of texts, which is necessary for proper hyphenation and ligatures. Everything will just end up being hyphenated like in English, which will really break the occasional foreign word you have in your document. And what if you are using a lot of non-ISO-8859 characters? If your book explores some of the upper ranges of Unicode, the company's fonts may not suffice.

On the other hand, maybe there's a firm out there that will accept PDFs, so one is able to typeset one's work in LaTeX, or other professional typesetting software, instead of relying on the company's solution.

I wish LaTeX were thought of more around here. Even if LaTeX isn't a solution for 99% of pedestrian users, there's no reason why Slashdotters with their technical skills couldn't use it for all their needs. Just consult the TeX FAQ and get a small tutorial like Kopka & Daly's Guide to LaTeX . It would be nice to break the tradition of using Word (or, for Free Software afficionados) OpenOffice.org for important stuff.

Not only might they not have enough money to distribute, but I can't see them doing decent typsetting either. The new publishing firms like iUniverse, essentially vanity press, will print your book, but don't spend any time actually making it look professional since that threatens profit. As an example, I recently picked up Solar Labyrinth , Robert Borski's kookish commentary on the writings of Gene Wolfe, and the book was so obviously done in a second-rate word-processor without even the slightest effort to emulate the standards of real typesetting engines. From what I've seen, Another Sky Press doesn't even have things like hyphenation.

It really sucks that in the era of TeX, when the finest typesetting of the pre-computer golden age can be had again, publishing houses are getting even worse in making their products readable and easy on the eye.

There's plenty of WYSIWYG tools for Latex.

I'm always happy to see fellow TeX evangelists here. If you don't know about LaTeX yet, check out the TeX Frequently Asked Questions and discover the joys of a typesetting system that is not only high-quality, but free as in freedom and immensely extendable.

LaTeX's markup makes so much sense that a WYSIWYG tool isn't necessary, for even the man on the street can be just a productive with doing it up in a text editor. A good and free as in beer guide to the system is The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e , though if you are going to be markup up lots of math (LaTeX's specialty) you'll probably want Graetzer's Math Into LaTeX since LShort doesn't cover it so much.

I must agree. I use LaTeX now for everything, big or small, and I could never go back to a word processor. The system is designed for high-quality typesetting of manuscripts, and it excels in that, but one can use it for other things as well. If I just need a quick note, I can just use the article document class with no \settitle, and it works just like a word-processor. I find the letter document class very nice too, regardless of what some naysayers might say.

The only problem with marketing LaTeX to (tech-savvy) everyday users is that the available print documentation is rarely up-to-date. For example, LaTeX is now capable of handling UTF-8 input, which means a variety of scripts can be typeset in the same document with little problem. There's no reason to use older encodings like ISO-8859-1. Yet, even recent books like the second edition of The LaTeX Companion still talk as if we are stuck in the dark ages of limited encodings.

There's been some debate recently on the license-discuss list hosted by the OSI on how to release code as open source while still requiring that it be compatible with a test suite that must be distributed as part of the code.

This software is copyright but you are granted a license which gives you, the "user" of the software, legal permission to copy, distribute, and/or modify the software. However, if you modify the software and then distribute it (even just locally) you must change the name of the software to avoid confusion.

No they don't. Some bugs in OpenOffice are 2 or 3 years old and nobody is fixing them. The address book problem with Mozilla is there since 1.0 and nobody is fixing it. A quick look showed that KDE still has 7497 bugs, but they still prefer to add new shiny things. Do you want me to go on?

Hey, I reported a Java bug to Sun 7 years ago, it has hundreds of votes in their bug database, and it *still* hasn't been fixed. Large software projects entail a large number of bugs, that's just a fact of life. The question is, how rapidly is the software progressing generally? That's a factor not of open source vs. closed source, but of the number of people working on the problems, and the complexity of the code.

The number one rule with OSS should be : no new feature until all know bugs are fixed (alphas excluded of course). Can you name a single project with this philosophy?

You mean like TeX?

There are very few projects, open or closed, that have that philosophy, I'm afraid.

I don't really want to go the LaTeX -> DVI -> PS -> PDF because it is somewhat cumbersome and the DVI -> Postscript conversion has the problem of rasterizing the fonts is special care is not taken. It was this problem that made me find dvipdfm for conversion of DVI to PDF while skipping the PS step. Pdflatex sounds like it's one better, doing the conversion directly.

You mean like metafont?

I thought it was $\pi$.

Surely it should be the final version number of TeX.

TeX is a most excellent portable typesetting system that is all ascii based (that is, works on nearly all platforms, goes well with CVS, vi, emacs, and automated scripts and is easily legible even before being processed into a beautifully formatted document) and free.

Hey, I said this was off topic, but it warms my heart to see TeX used these days. Plus, TeX is bug free.

Have you seen PDFScreen? Look at the screen formatted manual then at the the print form. You might change your mind. I think a lot of the readability of the screen form is in using non-cmr fonts, which unfortunately are not specified. I wish there were a guidebook to TeX fonts, in the manner of the "Companion" series of LaTeX books!

Have you seen PDFScreen? Look at the screen formatted manual then at the the print form. You might change your mind. I think a lot of the readability of the screen form is in using non-cmr fonts, which unfortunately are not specified. I wish there were a guidebook to TeX fonts, in the manner of the "Companion" series of LaTeX books!

Have you seen PDFScreen? Look at the screen formatted manual then at the the print form. You might change your mind. I think a lot of the readability of the screen form is in using non-cmr fonts, which unfortunately are not specified. I wish there were a guidebook to TeX fonts, in the manner of the "Companion" series of LaTeX books!

Mozilla .999999843 released!

Are you implying that Mozilla will use an "asymptotic fraction of 1" version numbering system similar to TeX's "asymptotic fraction of " system?

Speaking of TeX, it appears that if a new bug pops up in TeX the day after Knuth dies, it won't get fixed for 70 years (or longer if Disney's Congress continues to extend the copyright term) because Knuth's last will and testament includes freezing TeX.

This can easily be changed. See the TeX FAQ

I recently started using ps2pdf to generate PDF output (after running latex, then dvips) to put on the course web page. But the output looks really horrible on-screen, although it prints out OK.

However, I often include EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) files in my LaTeX documents, and pdflatex can't deal with them.

The docs for dvipdfm also seem to indicate that it can't deal with embedded EPS files. So I guess I'm still stuck with ps2pdf...

Allow me to quote from a widely-reprinted history of BSD:

Up through the release of 4.3BSD-Tahoe, all recipients of BSD had to first get an AT&T source license. That was because the BSD systems were never released by Berkeley in a binary-only format; the distributions always contained the complete source to every part of the system. The history of the Unix system and the BSD system in particular had shown the power of making the source available to the users. Instead of passively using the system, they actively worked to fix bugs, improve performance and functionality, and even add completely new features.

With the increasing cost of the AT&T source licenses, vendors that wanted to build standalone TCP/IP-based networking products for the PC market using the BSD code found the per-binary costs prohibitive. So, they requested that Berkeley break out the networking code and utilities and provide them under licensing terms that did not require an AT&T source license. The TCP/IP networking code clearly did not exist in 32/V and thus had been developed entirely by Berkeley and its contributors. The BSD originated networking code and supporting utilities were released in June 1989 as Networking Release 1, the first freely-redistributable code from Berkeley.

The first Berkeley distribution was in 1977. The first free distribution was eleven years later. Saying that BSD was developed as open source is just plain wrong.

I don't think that you know anything about compiler theory if you're seriously claiming that GCC is innovative.

Your statements about Timbuktu and X Window are unsupported. In particular, your statement that Timbuktu long postdates X is apparently false, since the X history links I gave earlier show that X is from the late 1980's, while Timbuktu was an early Mac product.

As for TeX, I do find one source showing a book date earlier than 1986, which is 1984 -- which, again, is after the release of the Macintosh. Apparently the actual language documentation was not released until 1986, so I don't know what an earlier "release" could have meant. I believe the 1980 date for TUG may be in error.

I have spent quite a while looking over TeX history links and they are ambiguous on the initial release date and original licensing conditions. I have found, in this thread and the previous one, that open source advocates often falsely claim that closed-source software projects originated as open source, so I am unwilling to accept an unsupported claim that TeX was developed as open source. Anyone who has actual information, as opposed to the kind of flame I'm responding to, is invited to speak up here or to write me. Thanks.

Tim

If TEX by Donald Knuth doesn't bring tears to eyes nothing will. ;-) But seriously, there probably isn't a better example of programming at it's finest, particularly if you are interested in Literate Programming

I find LaTeX with Acrobat to produce very nice results (using either ps2pdf or pdftex to produce the pdf files). The FoilTeX package (check here ;, for example) I think does a dramatically better job than the seminar class.

word2x makes a decent enough job of it (although I've only looked at its plain text output).

Um, do you even know what you're talking about?

Yes, unfortunately for you, trollboy, I do.

Sure python is open, but how many users on all platforms will have a python engine that'll be compatable with any future KOffice implementation?

Any that don't can download one for free. If M$ truly gave a *&^% about open standards, they would include one by default, but even lacking that it is easy and free to correct their mistake.

Or what about xpaint? How many people will be pissed when they open their KWord document in Word for Windows and can't edit the image cause they don't have xpaint or an xbm compatible editor?

I am running win32 right now (I have linux on this machine as well, but at the moment I am in windows) and I have no difficulty viewing and editing X-window bitmaps (.xbms) with freely available tools without even rebooting. Try again, trollboy.

We are talking about comptiblility across platforms here right?

Yep. So what's your excuse for not following open protocols, microserf? I keep asking but you never reply.

I'm saying it's not that easy cause of the generalisation and extensibility of the DOC format.

Bzzzzt! Wrong! Try again, troll boy. If you and your employer cared one bit about generalisation and extensibility, M$ Word would be outputting TeX files. Come up with another excuse, before all the naive moderators that are trying to prove they aren't biased by moderating your posts up catch on to your game...

CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, was modeled after CTAN (the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network), and is highly successful. I think that CPAN is one of the primary reasons that Perl itself is so successful. It would be a good thing for Java to have something that is modeled after CPAN.

One of CPAN's key features is that its structure encourages collaboration - there is a group that ensures new modules are put into appropriate namespaces, so if a bunch of people want to work on stuff about XML, this group will make sure they choose an appropriate namespace (probably XML::something).

Java, on the other hand, has a naming convention that I feel discourages cooperation. For example, on CPAN, take two modules such as XML::XPath and XML::Writer. It's clear that these packages were meant to work together, and in theory, they could share some package-specific data (maybe they do, maybe they don't - the point is, they could, if it was necessary to fulfill the mission of the XML:: package).

If these same authors had written these modules for Java, and if they had followed the Java naming conventions, the modules would be called org.sergeant.xml.XPath and com.megginson.xml.Writer. This makes it difficult for them to share package-scoped data, and also makes it less clear that they are meant to work together.