Extended TeX: Past, Present, and Future

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.

Comments

Re:TeX for Math

[Anonymous Coward]

The question would be whether you could create a TeX-alike engine that supports the additional functions required in HTML and can convert any well-formed SGML document into a TeX-alike document. If you could, you can have one rendering engine and subsume HTML and XML entirely within it.

TeX is a document typesetting language. HTML, regardless of its flavor, is a markup language that describes the document's contents but doesn't tell the browser how to lay it out.

There's no hope for TeX-as-HTML ever working because they're built on fundamentally incompatible document models.

-JS

P.S. If you want to see what math for HTML looks like, go look at MathML. Next, try actually writing a non-trivial equation in MathML, something like

$\int_{-\infty}^{\infty} e^{-x^2} dx = \sqrt{\pi}$

Then you'll understand why those of use who do this for a living still write our papers in TeX. Even if you don't know TeX, you can probably guess what my equation should look like; you wouldn't say that about the MathML.