Knuth: All Questions Answered

sunhou writes: "The AMS published a lecture by Donald Knuth called All Questions Answered (pdf), where Knuth simply responded to questions from the audience. Topics ranged from errors in software ('I think Microsoft should say, "You'll get a check from Bill Gates every time you find an error"') to how he gets distracted by fonts on restaurant menus, to software patents. There were some really good questions (and responses)."

Comments

Mirror

[Russ Nelson]

http://russnelson.com/fea-knuth.pdf

acrobat works fine in linux

[spotter]

Acrobat works fine in linux. I'm currently using the plugin in galeon and it displays fine. No need to use windows.

Here's another mirror
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~spotter/fea-kn uth.pdf

Re:The technology behind TeX

[Lictor]

>but the only game in town (for mathematics or anything)? No, not really.

I can't speak for general publishing, but for serious math publishing I have to respectfully disagree. If you have ever even remotely come into contact with serious mathematics you will be aware that Springer-Verlag (http://www.springer.de/) is one of the major publishers.

I have never prepared a manuscript for a Springer book or journal that was *not* in TeX format.

Could you give me some examples of the "quite a lot of software used before latex"? Specifically what "math" publishers use standards other than TeX... I'd truly be interested because I've never come across one.

As a side note, please be careful not to confuse LaTeX with TeX. LaTeX (which I admit to using most of the time) is kind of like "TeX for dummies". (Thats not entirely fair... LaTeX makes 95% of what I want to do easier and faster than plain TeX... but for that last 5%, LaTeX makes me want to punch things. LaTeX=easy, TeX=flexible).

Online PDF Conversion Here --

[sh0rtie]

http://access.adobe.com/adv_form.html

just enter the url of said pdf and hit submit and voila good ol' html is returned

Why it's called "All Questions Answered"

[sunhou]

Apparently Richard Feynman, on the last day of classes each semester, made the class an optional thing where students could come and ask questions on any topic except religion, politics, and the final exam. And Knuth followed his example.

Now that I'm teaching, I'm thinking of trying that. I can't decide if I really want to exclude religion and politics, though. I wonder if they excluded those topics to avoid offending people, or because they thought those topics are too subjective/personal, or if it was for some other reason?

I also wonder if anyone would come on that day; the last day of classes in the spring at Cornell is "Slope Day", where all the undergrads hang out on the hill by the main library and get drunk (the police basically look the other way, as long as people aren't getting hurt). It's truly a sight to behold.

math package for HTML

[Trepidity]

MathML is intended to be such. Without some additional formatting work it wouldn't be a good typesetting language though, as (in the tradition of HTML) it merely specifies the mathematical formulae, leaving their exact rendering up to the browser (while for typesetting you probably want some more exact control).

Letting browser control rendering is usually good

[billstewart]

If MathML does a good enough job, and is supported well enough by popular browsers, that's fine - it's the proper approach according to the SGML religion that led to HTML. That way, the browser can respond not only to user preferences, but to the limitations of the display - if it's a clumsy display, the fine tweaking you did is wasted and may make things worse.

As an example of what can go wrong, look at your average TeX-written math/cs paper on your average PC screen. The font's too grainy and greeky to read at 75-100dpi, and it's probably in some two-column format that looks really nice printed on portrait-mode dead trees, but is horrendously annoying to read on a portrait-mode screen that can only display about half a paper page at bad resolution. Arrrgh!

Somebody once commented that there are better renditions of the TeX fonts for PCs - I think it was a TrueType implementation of CMR fonts or something, but it's been too long to remember the correct details.

LaTeX and PDF

[borud]

As an example of what can go wrong, look at your average TeX-written math/cs paper on your average PC screen. The font's too grainy and greeky to read at 75-100dpi [...]

I usually generate two outputs of my LaTeX documents: Postscript and PDF. The PDF version usually looks a bit better on screen than the PostScript version.

mind you: I generate the PDF version using pdflatex . I can't remember exactly, but I think I've seen a utility that converts DVI files to PDF and that this produced horrible output. use pdflatex .

because generate multiple output formats (PS, PDF and HTML) from the same LaTeX document, I usually use a package I wrote that contains a lot of convenient macros to make use of the different features in the different formats -- in addition to automating a lot of boring tasks.

I remember how delighted I was when I discovered pdflatex. once you work it into your repertoire you get all this cool stuff for free, like hyperlinks in PDF documents etc. I really recommend you give it a try.

Check out the PDFTeX web page for more information.
Also have a look at Matt Welsh' page about creating presentations in PDFLaTeX. He has some useful information on how to install TrueType fonts for use by PDFLaTeX.

-Bjørn

Re:The technology behind TeX

[FFFish]

Ventura Publisher, according to this history, was released in April, 1986, by a group of Xerox employees who couldn't get that company to get a clue.

Same year as LaTex, and with a GUI to boot.

Still around, still in active development (new release has been mentioned by Corel), and still the best layout application that is available, bar none. Even four or five years after its last release, it still does things that InDesign and Quark don't.