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Extended TeX: Past, Present, and Future

Posted by timothy on from the 30-years-of-chugging-away dept.

First time accepted submitter Hamburg writes "Frank Mittelbach, member of the LaTeX Project and LaTeX3 developer, reviews significant issues of TeX raised already 20 years ago. Today he evaluates which issues are solved, and which still remain open and why. Examples of issues are managing consecutive hyphens, rivers of vertical spaces and identical words across lines, grid-based design, weighed hyphenation points, and overcoming the the mouth/stomach separation. Modern engines such as pdfTeX, XeTeX and LuaTeX are considered with regard to solutions of important problems in typesetting." Note: When TeX was first released, Jimmy Carter was president.

8 of 300 comments (clear)

  1. Jimmy Carter was president of TeX?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

    Interesting.

    1. Re:Jimmy Carter was president of TeX?! by rubycodez · · Score: 1, Funny

      even more surprising, when LaTeX was released in the early 80s, Ronald Reagan was president!

    2. Re:Jimmy Carter was president of TeX?! by fyngyrz · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yes, but there was that helicopter crash; the typesetting community always blamed TeX for that, and ever since then, TeX has been relegated to doing font work in the third world, charity undertakings and the like. And really, who wanted to be limited to 55 fonts per document? Some of us type in the fast lane, buddy.

      --
      I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
    3. Re:Jimmy Carter was president of TeX?! by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1, Funny

      And MS Word hadn't really taken off until Clinton seized the steering wheel. Now you know who to blame for that!

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
  2. Wrong Font For Program Name by Freshly+Exhumed · · Score: 4, Funny

    Oh dear oh dear, I hope Donald Knuth doesn't see that Slashdot doesn't seem to allow the correct METAFONT for displaying the program name! Pissing off Donald Knuth would be like kicking the Dalai Lama.

    Is it possible to represent it in it's proper format via this version of Slashcode?

    --
    I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
    1. Re:Wrong Font For Program Name by martin-boundary · · Score: 3, Funny

      True, but he uses a special Tektronix terminal with a custom ROM that computes on the fly the optimal TeX rendering of any HTML document while he's browsing it. Please nobody tell him what the rest of us see...

  3. so old it must be replaced... by smoothnorman · · Score: 5, Funny

    nothing that old can possibly be relevant anymore (cf "trust no one over 30"). it should be replaced with something more responsive to a one-hand touch interface abbrev friendly imho. math, a central theme in TeX, no longer has any relevance to the modern world (just ask any millionaire agile scrum extreme php programmer). any remaining bits of math are done entirely by app; the vestigial remnants of the usefulness of "math" can only be found in the interjections of animated characters. only a tiny ancient dying breed of tenured academics (and i suspect *europeans*) would ever seek typography beyond the standards of MSWord. page layout was forever perfected by expensive per seat layout software around 1996 and requires no more changes. markup languages are too hard to learn. anything that requires a compiling phase has gone the way of C++. the world is better now as everything old and outmoded quickly recedes. sine-die.

  4. TeX has intentionally horrible formatting by r00t · · Score: 1, Funny

    Hyphens and perfect justification are great when you want to replicate the unreadability of a newspaper from a century ago.

    When you actually want something readable that doesn't look like shit, you need to stop it with the stupid stunts. Screwing with the kerning is not acceptable. Splitting words is not acceptable. You shouldn't even be splitting phrases or clauses onto different lines, and preferably not even sentences.

    Yes, I'm sure you can disable the hyphenation and justification crap. (right...?) You shouldn't be able to enable it. These "features" are one of two major reasons why TeX documents normally look like crap, the other reason being the horrible Computer Modern font.