I prefer quality over quantity --- I'm not claiming that that works in the marketplace in general, but it is one of the traditional pitches for Mac users.
Find me a drawing program on Windows which works w/ the elegant synergy which Altsys Virtuoso enjoys on NeXTstep. FreeHand ain't it --- no Services, primitive Windows display model, awful type palette --- that's why I mostly use TeX, at least it's consistent across platforms (and the nicest implementation is TeXshop in Mac OS X).
I look forward to, and expect to be using more NeXT-derived/inspired software in the future --- the number of programs conceived of on Windows which I use by preference is vanishingly small. Sadly, I use a Windows PC because Microsoft is the only company pushing my preferred hardware form factor (pen computers), but hopefully this will change at some point in the future as well.
William
NeXT retrospective (was Re:If you love .net)
on
Modern Mac Development?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
People who loved/used NeXTstep
- John Carmack - Tim Berners-Lee - Andrew Stone
Companies successful w/ NeXTstep (other than the afore-mentioned Omni):
- Lighthouse Design (bought out by Sun to do Java development) - Stone Corp. - the company MCI hired to create the database which made ``Friends and Family'' work --- they liked it so much, they bought the company
Programs w/ a heavy NeXT heritage:
- Doom - WorldWideWeb.app - TeXshop (Alan Hoenig's book, _TeX Unbound_ is basically a paean to to glories of Display PostScript w/ TeX) - FreeHand (FreeHand 4 ~= Altsys Virtuoso 2 - bugs and w/o Services, DPS, &c.) - Softmagic's Project M (their sole competitor gave up on trying to code an equivalent in Windows and licensed their product instead)
Oh yeah, and there's this little project called GNUstep....
Names don't have sufficient expressibility to fall under copyright law.
Trademark also won't allow one to usurp an extant name save in a very specific / limited role (an example of the extreme to which this can be taken is McDonald's in the US). Then, it falls under law for ``trade dress'' &c.
A friend of mine's patronymic was used in a certain recent fantasy series --- sent a nastygram by an overzealous (and ignorant) person in a law office alleging violation of their trademark he responded w/ copies of his incorporation certificate for his company (long before the novels were written), and his birth certificate (he's older than the author, and his family name is an old one in Wales). He then received two different responses, one apologising, the other threatening further action. He responded to the first, but included a copy of the latter.
He received personal phone calls from a principal in the law firm and the movie studio which had gotten the rights for the book, apologising, and thanking him for his forbearance, and asking what they could do to put a physical expression on the apology. They also stated that the person who'd sent the second letter was now sending out resume's instead.
He wound up w/ round trip tickets to England to the premier, and a chance to meet the author who was delighted by his name.
There's a cue for a question I've been wondering about for a while.
What was the first reference / usage of ``LoC'' as a unit of knowledge measurement?
The first time I recall seeing it was in Michael Gear's novels, _The Artifact_ if memory serves, ~1976.
Anyone have an earlier instance?
William
Re:Art of Computer Programming is -snip- then?
on
Donald Knuth On NPR
·
· Score: 1
What do you mean be ``perfectly good compatible successors''?
Omega? Aleph? XeTeX? activetex? passivetex?
As the last three names imply, they're still TeX, and Omega and Aleph can pass the trip tex test as well.
I didn't claim that TeX was the only option, merely that it still remains useful and viable, esp. for the sort of work I do.
FrameMaker is only available for Windows and Unix these days (but not native to Mac OS X), Quark XPress 5 and 6 were too little, too late, InDesign needs almost as many plug-ins to be useful for long document publishing as Quark XPress does (and once tricked out like that loses anything resembling decent manuscript exchange unless one is using Windows and MathType), RagTime, while I've always been fond of it has yet to get a decent H&J algorithm, or sophisticated page breaking and Scribus, while I'd really like to like it, is only just becoming usable for short ads &c.
Using TeX I can accept author submissions done in LaTeX (or LyX or Scientific Word for the graphically minded), work on them directly, and then by commenting out a single line (or providing a null.sty file) return the author's source files ready for working on the next edition, including all equations, links to graphics (which can be updated externally) and it ``just works''. Even accepting Word.doc submissions isn't that bad thanks to latex2rtf and word2tex. They're pretty rare for what I do at my day job (submissions are more in line w/ what one sees at http://arxiv.org).
What is there which I've not considered? Arbortext's 3B2? We roll our own XML typesetting systems. XyVision? Miles 33? Penta?
I need a tool which can handle short documents w/ sophisticated font handling (like http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio/typogra phy/peace_on_earth.pdf and http://www.tug.org/tug2003/donate/texharvest.pdf) as well as longer documents (http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio/typogr aphy/thebookoftea.pdf --- not that long, but feel free to dig out the URL for my day job's on-line samples), and TeX is the most flexible I've found thus far --- it's only limits are human ingenuity and computer processing power --- interactive tools w/ people in the loop all-too-often limit one to available manpower and one's willingness to pay overtime to get things done on schedule. With batch tools, once the first chapter is one, so's the last chapter.
FWIW, DEK has stated in the past that he feels that the literate programming concept which he created to create and maintain and document TeX and METAFONT is the most important thing he's done.
Well, it's not like there isn't a sufficiency of LaTeX alternatives:
- Lollipop
- ConTeXt
- activetex
- eplain
as well as advanced documentclasses such as komascript or memoir. The LaTeX3 team has also been quite open about wanting more help --- the problem is few people are willing to invest in doing the research necessary to be able to help out.
FWIW, there was a paper done a while back on a technique to get METAFONTs into a PostScript file as vector graphics using the Type 3 font mechnism, and Knuth published papers on how to use MF to extend TeX to do halftoning for bitmps, so I don't get your complaint on these fronts.
If there's something you want supported, just stuff it into the.dvi and get it out the other end, either by using one of the extent post processors or writing your own;)
I was able to use this to good effect to get Zapfino to function in TeX, look at http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio.html or http://www.tug.org/texshowcase and check out the ``Peace on Earth'' card (if you're a member of TUG you got a copy w/ your last CD/DVD mailing).
William
Re:What I found interesting.
on
Donald Knuth On NPR
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
A classic experience relating to my perception of fundamentalism was w/ a friend's child who was finally taken to see her grandfather's workshop (he was a classic old-school cabinetmaker w/ the only power tool in his shop a band saw 'cause he couldn't find apprentices to do that sort of tedious thing who was said to ``make things by hand'').
The daughter on seeing the shop and the walls lined w/ neatly arranged saws, chisels, draw knives, planes, spokeshaves, clamps &c. shrieked, ``Mommy! You lied! Grandpa doesn't make things by hand! He uses tools!''
IME fundamental creationists exhibit a similar na{\"\i}vet\'e as to how God works.
William
beer hypothesis (was Re:What I found interesting.)
on
Donald Knuth On NPR
·
· Score: 1
``Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to prosper.''
--- Benjamin Franklin.
xtermin8 said: >TeX is already long in the tooth, and will become obsolete soon.
Really?
Take a look at http://opensource.adobe.com (check out the ``Personal Foreword'') and explain the appearance and nature of all of the equations then.[1]
At the least I guess this removes any doubt about the fate of FrameMaker:/
William
[1] For those who're curious the equations are typeset in Computer Modern ``img class="formulaInl" alt="$ f(x) \rightarrow x' $" src="form_0.png"''
If you need to do Unicode, the successor to Lambda is called Mem (see recent discussion on the Aleph mailing list), or if you've got access to a Mac OS X box use XeTeX available from http://scripts.sil.org/xetex which allows access to any font available to Mac OS X to TeX.
NeXTstep's worldwideweb.app could display _anything_ which one's NeXT system was set up to display and thanks to the magic of Filter Services,.jpg support was trivial.
William (who still hasn't updated his personal web site to xhtml and css so that he can view it from his Cube)
- Fountain pen
- Crossbow
- Kaleidoscope (this was actually hailed as an incredible entertainment which would never be forgotten...)
- spy glass
- portable desk / writing case
- portable easel / paint box (blanking on the name)
- sword cane
- pocket flask
#80 - Fisher Space Pen #63 - Maglite (Solitaire on my keychain, AAA on my jacket pocket) #67 - Leatherman Pocket Tool #39 - Newton (MP 100 in my laptop bag for notes, ebooks and contacts and todo list) #31 - Thumbdrive (Kingston)
and have had (just counting computers): #27 - NEC Ultralite (I'd've also included the Sharp PC-6220 / TI Travelmate / who else made it?) #26 - GRiD Compass (way cool machine --- it did have a battery though, but one could swap a power supply into the battery compartment which I've always thought was brilliant) #7 - Palm Pilot
Thing I'm surprised they didn't list:
- Fountain pen
- Rotring Quattro four-function pen
- interchangeable tip jewelry / camera screwdriver tool sets (I've got a camera toolset in a leather ``safety case'' (designed for tools for knitting machine mechanics) which is invaluable)
- GRiDPad or NCR-3125
Might've been more interesting by product category....
At the time that TeX was developed there weren't any computer typesetting systems to speak of, and non which handled mathematics adquately (later there was Penta, but say again how an author was to provide source files for typesetting? Oh, handwritten, huh? And how would one work collaboratively by e-mail? Wait! I know, you'd write it out by hand and have it recognized by the computer and converted to a textual representation as is done by http://www.caisystem.co.jp/infty/ [1]).
TeX gets used for a lot more than just mathematics too. Take a look at http://www.tug.org/texshowcase or consider things like Germany's on-line railroad timetables, or http://custompub.aimsapp.com --- or the lovely coffee table book _Life Cast: Behind the Mask_ by Willa Shalit which was typeset in TeX because no compositor using WYSIWYG tools considered it feasible to do.
William
[1] For those who don't want to take the time to follow the link, the Infty editor converts handwritten mathematics into LaTeX;)
I'm afraid Dr. Knuth has since switch banks (or uses a different account for errors found in his books than for errors found in tex) --- my reward check was a more prosaic / typical format, the faux parchment / antique scheme which one can get from most banks.
Agreed. It's mystifying why Mac OS X set so that if one sets a 1" line and views it at 100% in a graphics program 72 pixels are used to display it?
The really egregious thing is the Mac display system being hard-wired for 72 dpi means that Mac apps ported to Windows _won't_ take advantage of Windows' facility to allow a user to set their on-screen ``logical'' dpi.
Go Corporation's PenPoint had flexible screen dpi settings ~15 years ago.... why can't anyone else get this consistently?
Not only that, but some rapidly accessed menu items become almost gestural in their access (and easily learned, which is the big complaint against most gesture-based systems).
``Punch'' in Altsys Virtuoso for me is
- right-click
- down a bit
- right through two menus
- release
Sometimes I catch myself trying to do it at work in FreeHand.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, I'm new here. I didn't realise it was so important to stay on-topic even in a sub-thread w/ an altered Subject line.
William
I prefer quality over quantity --- I'm not claiming that that works in the marketplace in general, but it is one of the traditional pitches for Mac users.
Find me a drawing program on Windows which works w/ the elegant synergy which Altsys Virtuoso enjoys on NeXTstep. FreeHand ain't it --- no Services, primitive Windows display model, awful type palette --- that's why I mostly use TeX, at least it's consistent across platforms (and the nicest implementation is TeXshop in Mac OS X).
I look forward to, and expect to be using more NeXT-derived/inspired software in the future --- the number of programs conceived of on Windows which I use by preference is vanishingly small. Sadly, I use a Windows PC because Microsoft is the only company pushing my preferred hardware form factor (pen computers), but hopefully this will change at some point in the future as well.
William
People who loved/used NeXTstep
- John Carmack
- Tim Berners-Lee
- Andrew Stone
Companies successful w/ NeXTstep (other than the afore-mentioned Omni):
- Lighthouse Design (bought out by Sun to do Java development)
- Stone Corp.
- the company MCI hired to create the database which made ``Friends and Family'' work --- they liked it so much, they bought the company
Programs w/ a heavy NeXT heritage:
- Doom
- WorldWideWeb.app
- TeXshop (Alan Hoenig's book, _TeX Unbound_ is basically a paean to to glories of Display PostScript w/ TeX)
- FreeHand (FreeHand 4 ~= Altsys Virtuoso 2 - bugs and w/o Services, DPS, &c.)
- Softmagic's Project M (their sole competitor gave up on trying to code an equivalent in Windows and licensed their product instead)
Oh yeah, and there's this little project called GNUstep....
William
Mike Brotherton has just released his (award-winning, actually printed by Tor) hard SF novel Stardragon under a Creative Commons license,
.pdf, or corrected .txt version up soon.
http://www.mikebrotherton.com/novels/index.html
Hopefully there'll be a nicer version of the
John Mark Ockerbloom's Onlinebooks page is the best collection / search engine for free etexts I've yet found:
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/
William
Correct.
Names don't have sufficient expressibility to fall under copyright law.
Trademark also won't allow one to usurp an extant name save in a very specific / limited role (an example of the extreme to which this can be taken is McDonald's in the US). Then, it falls under law for ``trade dress'' &c.
A friend of mine's patronymic was used in a certain recent fantasy series --- sent a nastygram by an overzealous (and ignorant) person in a law office alleging violation of their trademark he responded w/ copies of his incorporation certificate for his company (long before the novels were written), and his birth certificate (he's older than the author, and his family name is an old one in Wales). He then received two different responses, one apologising, the other threatening further action. He responded to the first, but included a copy of the latter.
He received personal phone calls from a principal in the law firm and the movie studio which had gotten the rights for the book, apologising, and thanking him for his forbearance, and asking what they could do to put a physical expression on the apology. They also stated that the person who'd sent the second letter was now sending out resume's instead.
He wound up w/ round trip tickets to England to the premier, and a chance to meet the author who was delighted by his name.
William
There's a cue for a question I've been wondering about for a while.
What was the first reference / usage of ``LoC'' as a unit of knowledge measurement?
The first time I recall seeing it was in Michael Gear's novels, _The Artifact_ if memory serves, ~1976.
Anyone have an earlier instance?
William
What do you mean be ``perfectly good compatible successors''?
.sty file) return the author's source files ready for working on the next edition, including all equations, links to graphics (which can be updated externally) and it ``just works''. Even accepting Word .doc submissions isn't that bad thanks to latex2rtf and word2tex. They're pretty rare for what I do at my day job (submissions are more in line w/ what one sees at http://arxiv.org).
a phy/peace_on_earth.pdf and http://www.tug.org/tug2003/donate/texharvest.pdf) as well as longer documents (http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio/typogr aphy/thebookoftea.pdf --- not that long, but feel free to dig out the URL for my day job's on-line samples), and TeX is the most flexible I've found thus far --- it's only limits are human ingenuity and computer processing power --- interactive tools w/ people in the loop all-too-often limit one to available manpower and one's willingness to pay overtime to get things done on schedule. With batch tools, once the first chapter is one, so's the last chapter.
Omega? Aleph? XeTeX? activetex? passivetex?
As the last three names imply, they're still TeX, and Omega and Aleph can pass the trip tex test as well.
I didn't claim that TeX was the only option, merely that it still remains useful and viable, esp. for the sort of work I do.
FrameMaker is only available for Windows and Unix these days (but not native to Mac OS X), Quark XPress 5 and 6 were too little, too late, InDesign needs almost as many plug-ins to be useful for long document publishing as Quark XPress does (and once tricked out like that loses anything resembling decent manuscript exchange unless one is using Windows and MathType), RagTime, while I've always been fond of it has yet to get a decent H&J algorithm, or sophisticated page breaking and Scribus, while I'd really like to like it, is only just becoming usable for short ads &c.
Using TeX I can accept author submissions done in LaTeX (or LyX or Scientific Word for the graphically minded), work on them directly, and then by commenting out a single line (or providing a null
What is there which I've not considered? Arbortext's 3B2? We roll our own XML typesetting systems. XyVision? Miles 33? Penta?
I need a tool which can handle short documents w/ sophisticated font handling (like http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio/typogr
FWIW, DEK has stated in the past that he feels that the literate programming concept which he created to create and maintain and document TeX and METAFONT is the most important thing he's done.
William
Well, it's not like there isn't a sufficiency of LaTeX alternatives:
.dvi and get it out the other end, either by using one of the extent post processors or writing your own ;)
- Lollipop
- ConTeXt
- activetex
- eplain
as well as advanced documentclasses such as komascript or memoir. The LaTeX3 team has also been quite open about wanting more help --- the problem is few people are willing to invest in doing the research necessary to be able to help out.
FWIW, there was a paper done a while back on a technique to get METAFONTs into a PostScript file as vector graphics using the Type 3 font mechnism, and Knuth published papers on how to use MF to extend TeX to do halftoning for bitmps, so I don't get your complaint on these fronts.
If there's something you want supported, just stuff it into the
I was able to use this to good effect to get Zapfino to function in TeX, look at http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio.html or http://www.tug.org/texshowcase and check out the ``Peace on Earth'' card (if you're a member of TUG you got a copy w/ your last CD/DVD mailing).
William
A classic experience relating to my perception of fundamentalism was w/ a friend's child who was finally taken to see her grandfather's workshop (he was a classic old-school cabinetmaker w/ the only power tool in his shop a band saw 'cause he couldn't find apprentices to do that sort of tedious thing who was said to ``make things by hand'').
The daughter on seeing the shop and the walls lined w/ neatly arranged saws, chisels, draw knives, planes, spokeshaves, clamps &c. shrieked, ``Mommy! You lied! Grandpa doesn't make things by hand! He uses tools!''
IME fundamental creationists exhibit a similar na{\"\i}vet\'e as to how God works.
William
``Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to prosper.''
--- Benjamin Franklin.
William
xtermin8 said:
:/
>TeX is already long in the tooth, and will become obsolete soon.
Really?
Take a look at http://opensource.adobe.com (check out the ``Personal Foreword'') and explain the appearance and nature of all of the equations then.[1]
At the least I guess this removes any doubt about the fate of FrameMaker
William
[1] For those who're curious the equations are typeset in Computer Modern ``img class="formulaInl" alt="$ f(x) \rightarrow x' $" src="form_0.png"''
Take a look at
m pr ehensive/symbols-letter.pdf
The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List, 2,590 symbols tabulated and indexed.
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/symbols/co
If you need to do Unicode, the successor to Lambda is called Mem (see recent discussion on the Aleph mailing list), or if you've got access to a Mac OS X box use XeTeX available from http://scripts.sil.org/xetex which allows access to any font available to Mac OS X to TeX.
William
NeXTstep's worldwideweb.app could display _anything_ which one's NeXT system was set up to display and thanks to the magic of Filter Services, .jpg support was trivial.
William
(who still hasn't updated his personal web site to xhtml and css so that he can view it from his Cube)
http://winik.sourceforge.net/
It's a Cygwin version intended for (more) ease of use and wider distribution / use.
William
Lessee...
- Fountain pen
- Crossbow
- Kaleidoscope (this was actually hailed as an incredible entertainment which would never be forgotten...)
- spy glass
- portable desk / writing case
- portable easel / paint box (blanking on the name)
- sword cane
- pocket flask
(not sure if the last two count or no)
William
Lessee, I've got:
#80 - Fisher Space Pen
#63 - Maglite (Solitaire on my keychain, AAA on my jacket pocket)
#67 - Leatherman Pocket Tool
#39 - Newton (MP 100 in my laptop bag for notes, ebooks and contacts and todo list)
#31 - Thumbdrive (Kingston)
and have had (just counting computers):
#27 - NEC Ultralite (I'd've also included the Sharp PC-6220 / TI Travelmate / who else made it?)
#26 - GRiD Compass (way cool machine --- it did have a battery though, but one could swap a power supply into the battery compartment which I've always thought was brilliant)
#7 - Palm Pilot
Thing I'm surprised they didn't list:
- Fountain pen
- Rotring Quattro four-function pen
- interchangeable tip jewelry / camera screwdriver tool sets (I've got a camera toolset in a leather ``safety case'' (designed for tools for knitting machine mechanics) which is invaluable)
- GRiDPad or NCR-3125
Might've been more interesting by product category....
William
as opposed to WYSIWYG.
Available at http://www.lyx.org
excellent explanation as to why here:
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html
William
At the time that TeX was developed there weren't any computer typesetting systems to speak of, and non which handled mathematics adquately (later there was Penta, but say again how an author was to provide source files for typesetting? Oh, handwritten, huh? And how would one work collaboratively by e-mail? Wait! I know, you'd write it out by hand and have it recognized by the computer and converted to a textual representation as is done by http://www.caisystem.co.jp/infty/ [1]).
;)
TeX gets used for a lot more than just mathematics too. Take a look at http://www.tug.org/texshowcase or consider things like Germany's on-line railroad timetables, or http://custompub.aimsapp.com --- or the lovely coffee table book _Life Cast: Behind the Mask_ by Willa Shalit which was typeset in TeX because no compositor using WYSIWYG tools considered it feasible to do.
William
[1] For those who don't want to take the time to follow the link, the Infty editor converts handwritten mathematics into LaTeX
I'm envious ;)
Definitely different accounts for the software and the books then (which I guess isn't surprising).
So, my guess is not a spiffy looking Wells Fargo cheque for erros in the fascicles (but it's still way cool to get regardless)
William
Actually, the use of standard PostScript fonts probably would've been:
\usepackage{pslatex}
That said, \usepackage{times} is obsolete (see the PSNFSS docs), instead use:
\usepackage{mathptmx}
If instead you want Palatino (well, URW's knock-off):
\usepackage{mathpazo}
Other font-oriented packages to try:
- helvet
- avant
- courier
- chancery
- bookman
- newcent
- utopia
- charter
as well as packages for Euler, and to match Utopia, use the fourier package to get matching math fonts.
and those are just the freely available options. Lots more if one wants to purchas font sets.
See http://www.tug.org/texshowcase for a sample of what can be done with TeX / LaTeX / ConTeXt &c.
another pretty cool example is up at:
http://www.tug.org/tug2003/donate/
William
(ob. discl. some stuff from my portfolio is in the above, http://members.aol.com/willadams )
You're basing that on Dr. Kinch's posted cheque?
I'm afraid Dr. Knuth has since switch banks (or uses a different account for errors found in his books than for errors found in tex) --- my reward check was a more prosaic / typical format, the faux parchment / antique scheme which one can get from most banks.
William
You mean ``Doom as a tool for system administration''?
It's been done (as a research project!) on Linux though.
http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/
William
Agreed. It's mystifying why Mac OS X set so that if one sets a 1" line and views it at 100% in a graphics program 72 pixels are used to display it?
The really egregious thing is the Mac display system being hard-wired for 72 dpi means that Mac apps ported to Windows _won't_ take advantage of Windows' facility to allow a user to set their on-screen ``logical'' dpi.
Go Corporation's PenPoint had flexible screen dpi settings ~15 years ago.... why can't anyone else get this consistently?
William
How is Apple going to get a shortcut key as memorable / easy-to-access as command= _and_ get all apps to make said combination available?
William
(who still hits command= away from his NeXT Cube)
::applause::
Not only that, but some rapidly accessed menu items become almost gestural in their access (and easily learned, which is the big complaint against most gesture-based systems).
``Punch'' in Altsys Virtuoso for me is
- right-click
- down a bit
- right through two menus
- release
Sometimes I catch myself trying to do it at work in FreeHand.
William