Agree with Timothy Zahn --- his _Ikarus Hunt_ was quite interesting and well-done.
Walter Jon Williams is also pretty cool, as another person noted. Hard not to like someone who gets to play in Roger Zelazny's ``Alley''. (read Damnation Alley by RZ, then Hardwired by WJW)
Michael Moorcock's older stuff can be interesting sometimes, depending on one's tolerance for off-beat politicizing. As you may guess, mostly I read fantasy.
Classic older stuff, David Lindsay's _Voyage to Arcturus_ is way cool.
Hmm, Frank Herbert wasn't in the OP's list --- omission? If not, go and read Dune, _The White Plague_ &c.
Hmm, neither was Heinlein --- read from oldest to newest and stop when you find things irritating (but make sure to read up to at least _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_).
Hmm, that brings to mind Victor Milan's _The Cybernetic Samurai_ which is very, very good.
If you're inclined towards fantasy, Jack Vance's Lyonesse trilogy is fabulous, and Barry Hughart's _Bridge of Birds_ and other Master Li novels are hilarious (don't read them in public if you're embarrassed by laughing out loud).
Steven Brust's stuff wanders back and forth between science and fantasy, but his writing style is uneven in the older books.
Magnesium has been done before --- the original laptop, the GRiD Compass (later succeeded by the GRiDCase, I had a III plus myself), had a magnesium case which was painted black.
Funny, Pascal was also the language used for the back-end of the Web dialect in which Donald E. Knuth wrote the Literate Program TeX (and METAFONT).
If you don't think TeX is used in production, look around you --- it's used in database publishing world-wide (railroad timetables in Germany, a phone directory in India, lots of directories here in the US). (Oh yeah, the macro format texinfo is the default documentation format for a certain ``GNU'' project).
That's pretty cool, no? (And DEK provides rewards for finding errors in his programs and books --- want $327.68? find a bug in TeX. Won't be easy though).
It's also not like Pascal stood still --- it was succeeded by Modula, and then Oberon (and it's interesting to note the language got both simpler and more expressive as time went by).
Correct, the ThinkPad name was derived from the old leather notepads with ``Think'' on them.
The IBM ThinkPad was originally conceived as a pen slate system (but Go Corp. fell behind somewhat, so a clam shell laptop was released instead).
There's a lot of interesting explanation of all this and a lot more in the book _ThinkPad: A Different Shade of Blue, Building a Successful IBM Brand_ by Deborah A. Dell and J. Gerry Purdy, Ph.D., ISBN 0-672-31756-7.
I prefer to make them into.pdfs and read those in Adobe Acrobat Reader on a pen slate (Fujitsu Stylistic).
I've one example up in my portfolio, http://members.aol.com/willadams (it's also in the TeX Showcase, http://www.tug.org/texshowcase ), Okakura Kakuzo's _The Book of Tea_ --- got the text from PG, set it, made some corrections (I've a (letterpress) printed copy in its slip case at home), sent those to PG (took two tries, but they finally accepted and applid most of them), and printed and bound a copy as a gift for my sister.
Let us remember that Visicalc was modelled on the limitations of an accountant's ledger and the Apple ][ screen.
Let us _please_ move past that limitation --- you've got companies that have to _require_ that all ranges used for calculations (even of a single cell) are given names --- Lotus Improv w/ it's cool tear-off ``item dispenser'' instead required one name things as they were made, so that formulas read like:
profit = sales - expenses
Cloning is boring and uninteresting --- contrast LyX (http://www.lyx.org ) to Word for an example of how an opensource app can change the concept and do much better.
For those running Mac OS X, look up http://www.quantrix.com
For those w/ systems running NeXT or OPENSTEP, well, you've already got Lotus Improv or Quantrix already, right?
What would have happened if Apple had released Mac OS X for x86?
They'd've been pilloried for lack of driver support and problematic installs on hardware --- Darwin does run on x86, and the list of supported hardware is quite short.
Take a look back through the usenet:comp.sys.next.* archives for my travails trying to get OPENSTEP 4.2 up and running on a ThinkPad 755C --- failed miserably because I couldn't get Apple tech support to inform me that I had to manually plug in the memsize to the boot arguments (and no, it wasn't in the readme or the install manual --- finally found it in a usenet post _years_ later)
There was a NeXT-related services company which did custom installs of NeXTstep, esp. to laptops and the listed Steve Jobs as ``their favorite customer' with a picture of him and the Toshiba Tecra they'd set him up with. Should be findable at groups.google.com --- they announced it at one time.
He also had an IBM ThinkPad, one of the single-spindle models, also running NeXTstep or OPENSTEP depending on the timeframe --- remember this guy liked Concurrence.app so much he had Apple write Keynote.
Creating a graphical tool to create (La)TeX layouts would be non-trivial, actually, probably approaches hard or impossible --- it takes _four_ levels of grouping to get a frame around an arbitrary-size box for example.
That's not a big deal though, since a normal workflow for a book is to:
- draw up rough layouts by hand, on tissue / vellum w/ a #2 pencil until one has one or more good candidates
- create tight comprehensive layouts of the better versions either by inking or re-drawing the roughs, or re-creating the layouts w/ a graphical tool like FreeHand, Illustrator or Quark or InDesign.
- select the best one
- label all the elements, compare against the document markup and make sure one has exemplars for all elements
- write up an unambiguous, comprehensive specification including coverage of issues such as stacked heads
- send sample layout, specifications and manuscript and art program to a composition house for layout
Better H&J --- this is particularly egregious since TeX's is in the public domain and Adobe even made use of it (by way of URW's HZ) in InDesign
Broader, ink-oriented colour support --- the GIMP needs this too. Forget ``just'' CMYK, let's see a sophisticated, general model for mixing ink reflex blue w/ metallic flake silver. cf. Cerilica's Truism and PowerTone / SilverTone.
Better user interface, say something like Macromedia Freehand on steroids (it kills me that Macromedia didn't follow through on Altsys adding page layout features to their successor to FreeHand 3 Virtuoso --- Altsys Virtuoso 2.0~=Macromedia FreeHand 4, but on NeXTstep).
Also, type manipulation capabilities like Right Brain's TouchType.app (w/ Adobe ``lost'' the source code to so can't make available for Mac OS X).
It'd be nice if it ran in GNUstep so one got Services &c. Where's the equation option?
In the meanwhile, I'll just continue using TeX and Altsys Virtuoso on my NeXT Cube.
\begin{shameless-self-promotion} see http://www.tug.org/tug2003/donate or http://www.tug.org/texshowcase or http://members.aol.com/willadams (check the portfolio link;) \end{shameless-self-promotion}
There was also Marcia Hardy's Aloha AOL e-mail client for the Newton.
No real strings to pull though --- Apple had long been associated w/ AOL and actually licensed the server / client software to create their short-lived eWorld on-line presence.
William
An alternative read, the source of the source
on
Twisty Little Passages
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The ``Literate Programming'' (http://www.literateprogrammng.com ) re-written source to the the original Colossal Caves Adventure re-written for CWEB by Dr. Donald E. Knuth (the guy who wrote my word processor;) see http://www.tug.org/texshowcase for what I mean):
http://www.literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf
or get the source from
http://www.literateprogramming.com/fexamples.htm l
But your OED.app doesn't have COMMAND= reserved to get a definition --- having Webster.app bundled ensured this, and it was then trivial to change which dictionary was used (can you say Jargon.app?)
Moreover, the OED is _so_ comprehensive that it verges on useless for day-to-day usage 'cause one has to wade through countless entries of archaic minutiae (not that I'm against that sort of thing, but sometimes one must be practicable).
NeXTstep was not merely an austere aesthetic experience, w/ minimal distractions and a flexible, customizable UI which allowed one to reduce screen clutter to just a single tile (the NeXT logo), and a pixel or two (dragged off main menu and / or the cursor), but synergistic whole the likes of which sadly are not likely to be seen again.
Panther helps the aesthetics somewhat, but NeXT users still miss / are irritated by (well, I know I am):
- monolithic main menu bar w/ wasted blank space between the menus and the (optional) information / settings menus for Airport &c.
- verbose Mac-style shortcut descriptions w/ arcane symbols instead of concise NeXT-style shortcuts (in NeXTstep, Save is indicated by ``s'' and Save as by ``S'', no Command symbol (it's assumed---Control only as a modifier is reserved for personal shortcuts / Unix-use), Shift by case)
- Print, Hide, Services and Quit are no longer top-level menus where they made more sense and were quicker to get at.
- scroll bars on wrong side (this can't be fixed by theming 'cause Carbon apps are responsible for deciding where scroll bars are placed:( having them on the left means a window is more useful when partially dragged off-screen and results in less-frequent need to resize a window
- no Webster.app, Digital Librarian / Shakespeare or Oxford's Book of Quotations --- in NeXTstep this meant one was guaranteed to have Command = _not_ used in an app so it'd be available for looking things up in Websters. Sure you can d/l OmniGroups dict.org client &c., but it's not the same (esp. if you're on dial-up)
- Pantone colour library --- used to be this was licensed w/ the system, now each graphic app which needs it has to pay a license, and one _doesn't_ get them in one's office apps (major negative for adhering to corporate identity programs where such is specced) until such time as Office apps are written in Cocoa or support the nsColor API/object/whatever.
- vertical menu
- pop-up main menu --- this is wonderfully fast / efficient / elegant. For me, ``Punch'' in Altsys Virtuoso is pretty much a gesture, right-click, down a bit, then straight over and release
- repositionable sub-menus --- no need for inscrutable button bars, and one can make a given command easy to get to as needed (when doing lots of envelopes I tear of the poste.app Services menu, put it in the bottom left corner, then an envelope is merely a selection, mouse move to bottom left, click, shift right to the print menu (also aligned on the bottom edge for this) click away. (takes longer to say / type than to do)
William (who really should save all that and put it on a web page, but this time cribbed from my post to MacSlash;) --- check my rants at http://groups.google.com in comp.sys.next.advocacy to see if I forgot anything...)
I sympathise and agree for the most part. Still haul out my Newton MP 100 occasionally for the odd jaunt.
That said, I've pretty much given up on w small device as a constant companion, switched to black leather Palm Notes Pad from Levenger (www.levenger.com) which holds business cards and 2.5" x 3.5" note cards or paper folded to similiar sizes (a legal sheet cut a few times and then folded fits in it quite nicely making a very elegant accordion book). I've a slightly larger Circa notebook I carry when I'm expecting inspiration and will be away from a wall outlet.
For the rest of the time, I've switched to a Fujitsu Stylistic. It works quite well, and is pretty much fast enough for all the reasonable things I want to do with it (running Virtual PC is not working out though, and XFree86 in Cygwin requires a certain calmness and patience). It's a bit smaller than most laptops, certainly smaller than my ThinkPad in its Port case.
The best thing (of course) is all the spiffy Windows software --- I'd dearly love to see alternatives under Linux or Mac OS X though:
- ArtRage --- http://www.ambientdesign.com (this is my digital sketchbook)
- Fractal Design Expression --- managed to snag a copy ov v1. It kills me that Microsoft renegged on their promise to make v3 available again in November 2003 after purchasing the company, see http://www.creaturehouse.com
- FutureWave SmartSketch --- _This_ is just about perfect since it came to Windows and Classic Mac OS from Go Corporation's PenPoint.
- LyX (oh yeah, this works in Linux already;)
- TeX / Omega (see http://www.tug.org/texshowcase for why;)
- Dirk Stuve's WinTeXShell supports HWR (as does the Windows QT version of LyX;)
Various other standard bits, most notably Extended Character Map (the standard Windows Character Map doesn't work well w/ a pen). Check http://www.tinyapps.org or www.pricelessware.com
I'm still debating licensing PenOffice (http://www.phatware.com).... and am looking for a better MP3 player (currently using 1by1). And I'm still looking for a better file manager 2xplorer seems the best of the free ones thus far.
My first thought on seeing the iMac G4 was, ``detachable screen, integrated processor, battery, storage, pen slate''.
Apple really could do a pen slate very nicely, it plays to a lot of their strengths, and unlike Microsoft, which charges extra for Tablet PC Edition of Windows XP Pro, InkWell (nee Rosetta, the Newton OS 2.x print recognizer) is bundled w/ all copies of the OS (at no extra expense to Apple either).
Battery life too.
Used to be one could install NeXTstep on a 105MB HD --- surely Apple could manage something in say half a gig (or just increase their volume on the 4GIG HDs being used for the iPod Mini and use that).
Oh yeah, one kind of bummer about this device --- there were considering using the spiffy TRON embedded OS, but apparently it was easier to make use of the CD-ROM using Linux. Rather a shame that, I'd love to have a consumer device running TRON (or a desktop either, anyone know of straightforward English instructions on how to install it and set it up?)
Microsoft was actually rather late to the pen computing game --- and only got there by twisting Go Corp.'s invitation to develop apps to an excuse to create pen extensions for Windows since Go didn't follow their suggestion to do so (extrapolation of Jerry Kaplan's version in his book _StartUp_ and the spin placed on the same event in the book _Building Tablet PC Applications_)
Heck, even Atari had a prototype, the STylus.
There was also a Linus machine (no relation to a certain Thorvalds) which a few people have prototypes of.
And of course there was the ill-fated Momenta.
I've been a pen computing afficionado for a long while, and the machines have really gotten practical of late (power, battery life, are decent, storage is phenomenal).
Using a pen system means I've got all of my data with me, and can use it / manipulate it, _without_ needing to sit down and set up / make room for a clamshell laptop (I've been buying laptops since 1985 (GRiDCase III Plus), they're nice enough, but more awkward to use than a pen slate, less acceptable in some situations (meetings, interviews), and require that I schelp around a graphics tablet in addition (okay, graphic designers are pretty much unique in needing that).
But it's a _lot_ easier to mark up a.pdf w/ annotations using a pen than a mouse, esp. with the new Adobe Acrobat 6 (killer app for Linux, extend xpdf to allow it to annotate and fill in.pdf formas), and I don't have to spend time scanning my (paper) sketchbook, or transcribing notes from it.
This device is really interesting 'cause of the size (much smaller than most Tablet PCs --- guess they didn't want to compete with their own LitePad) and for its internal CD-ROM drive --- can you say portable e-book reader? (I'm thinking like the kid CD-ROMs, Living Books, Tivoli, et. al.)
I can't recall saying, and probably wouldn't say TeX is just as good --- for the most part, especially typographically, it's better. TeX is a serviceable alternative for some people for many of the things which FrameMaker is used for.
Here's my rant on Framemaker's limitations from alt.publish.books a while back.
- automatic ligatures (ff, fi, fl, ffi and ffl)---point out that doing this in Word (or beyond fi and fl in FrameMaker) (with an Expert font) must be done manually and will wreak havoc with spell-checking (office become oYce). FM also throws this in w/ using kerning pairs, so if these must be switched off for a style you may have words like w/ f-ligatures which'll be set in two completely different ways on the same page unless one is careful to adjust to compensate).
- paragraph based h&j---adding a word to a paragraph will cause TeX to re-run the entire paragraph looking for the linebreaks which cause the least badness---by contrast h&j fixes in Word (and Frame) are more or less manual (forcing a line to pad out by increasing its spread, preventing a single word from hyphenating, etc.), and introducing a new word may cause the previous fixes to make things look _much_ worse.
- contextual styles---generate a page with text, a numbered list, more text, then a bulleted list with some numbered sub-lists. Word and Frame require a distinct/different style for the numbered sub-list, TeX doesn't. This doesn't seem so bad, until one sees the surprised look of a person who copies / pastes from one bulleted list to the other.
- bullet/text placement---set a bulleted list w/ a Zapf Dingbats ``n''. It sits on the baseline, so unless set rather large, wants to be shifted up-ward---TeX does that quite readily, FM doesn't understand baseline shifting beyond super/sub-script. Consider the fact that neither Word, nor FM can set the \TeX or \LaTeX logos properly and automatically in running text. TeX's internal unit of measure is the ``sp'' (scaled point) which is 1/65,535th of a traditional printer's point---what's the smallest unit of measure for Word or FM? How often does one see a carefully composed Word or FM publication go haywire when its moved from one machine to another 'cause of dimension rounding? (IME often on Word (though turning on the ``handle page/line breaks like WordPerfect'' option helps somewhat) and every so often on FM (we have proofreaders here at work who can spot a baseline page alignment which is less than 1/2 a point off) TeX jobs (on installations w/ identical.tfms) _always_ come out identically (all measurements are converted to sps and all mathematics done is w/ integers).
If you've got solutions for those, I'd be glad to file them away for my next Framemaker book, and for the folks using Frame whom I support.
If you've got a magic incantation w/ Adobe tech support doesn't know about to get an FM publication to switch from RGB to CMYK composite output, I'd like to know that too.
William (who hasn't been charging the TUG production team to help out w/ their pre-press issues (pro bono publico) and has published most of his work related to TeX in TUGboat where it's freely available and who has probably been trolled, oh well, it's entertaining.)
If you'd look up the papers / columns I've written for TUGboat, you'd see that my job title is ``publishing specialist'' (I've been arguing it should be changed to ``publishing TeXnician'';).
I've been trying to discuss this. I've not used any vulgarity, and I've tried to be patient.
Initially, you claimed TeX couldn't use OpenType, so I pointed out that _Digital Typography Using LaTeX_ is typeset in the OpenType version of Palatino (the forward and ToC are available on-line to verify this). You've not acknowledged this, nor mentioned it again --- who's not discussing?
Every other contention you've raised has been similarly disproven, but rather than accept this or discuss it, you'd rather move goalposts and shout vulgarities and engage in ad hominem attacks.
And pretending that doing graphic design at a newspaper is like to doing book production work --- I've done consulting for newspapers, and still check in on some old customers, things are far more changeable there, but the consequences for an error (save some space and ink to print a correction tomorrow) don't begin to approach those for getting a book wrong (single page --- issue a cancel and have someone snick out pages w/ a razor blade and paste in replacements, many pages, pay for a reprint).
As an example of the difference, in technical, math and medical publishing, the standard is to fake a second colour using a CMYK build (usually Cyan is used for this). This avoids the issue of duotone reproduction and colour naming, _and_ allows a publisher to re-use a graphic in a different book w/o having to change it. Check w/ any technical / medical illustration house --- Thomson and John Wiley & Sons even have this written up in their guidelines.
When was the last time your newspaper had a mathematical equation in it? (there's an amusing little bit in the Kaplan book which I did noting how a newspaper's inability to do a simple superscript totally spoiled the meaning of their story) What are you using as an equation editor in InDesign? (FWIW, I like InDesign and think it's the best interactive page layout program going, just a shame that it's taken so long for it to appear and then mature to something usable).
Why does it matter to you that other people are able to use tools which you're either unable or unwilling? I've done books in Framemaker, (e.g. Forouzan's _Foundations of Computer Science: From Data Manipulation to Theory of Computation_)it's pretty limited typographically, but serviceable enough, and it's quite a shame Adobe is treating it and its customer base so cavalierly. Have you ever done a book in TeX? It seems unlikely, and I simply can't imagine what your basis is for posting such poorly researched information which for the most part is patently false.
Hmm, given that when that document is opened in Adobe Acrobat 5 and paged through page-by-page, the text for the Horoscope section heads won't render complaining of being unable to render the subsetted font, I'd be concerned about how well your PDF/X preflighting is working out (it does work okay in Adobe Reader 6 though, I'll try to find time to take it home and look at it on my wife's PowerBook in the full version).
FWIW, I'd really prefer a program w/ a UI more like to Macromedia FreeHand. That I prefer TeX to something like Quark / Adobe Illustrator is a measure of my dislike for their UI;)
This topic will probably be closed soon --- I've a post over on www.macslash.org on this same topic which details my complaints against Framemaker --- continue there?
Oh, well if you'll accept, ``What I Type _Here_ is Displayed As What I'll Get _There_'', then yes, most previewers support that. There's even some interaction between preview windows and the source view as I alluded to.
Display PostScript, while way cool on a NeXT, unfortunately isn't making much of an appearance elsewhere (well, there's Solaris w/ it and Miles 33 &c. and one hopes that Display Ghostscript will continue in GNUstep, http://www.gnustep.org )
Take a look at the source code for poligraf.sty --- it has hooks to allow one to programmatically print arbitrary separations.
However, what's wrong w/ it simply colour tagging stuff, placing colour tagged.pdfs in a.pdf, doing some post-processing if necessary and then having a press-ready.pdf to hand off to the printer?
We send books so prepared off to some of the largest printes in the country, we, our customers and the printers they choose (R.R. Donnelley, Maple-Vail, Quebecor &c.) all find them acceptable.
I'm not saying anyone can do it (that's why we get to charge what we charge;) but it can be done, we do it, and I've provided links to back that up.
Slashdot Mirror
Agree with Timothy Zahn --- his _Ikarus Hunt_ was quite interesting and well-done.
Walter Jon Williams is also pretty cool, as another person noted. Hard not to like someone who gets to play in Roger Zelazny's ``Alley''. (read Damnation Alley by RZ, then Hardwired by WJW)
Michael Moorcock's older stuff can be interesting sometimes, depending on one's tolerance for off-beat politicizing. As you may guess, mostly I read fantasy.
Classic older stuff, David Lindsay's _Voyage to Arcturus_ is way cool.
Hmm, Frank Herbert wasn't in the OP's list --- omission? If not, go and read Dune, _The White Plague_ &c.
Hmm, neither was Heinlein --- read from oldest to newest and stop when you find things irritating (but make sure to read up to at least _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_).
Hmm, that brings to mind Victor Milan's _The Cybernetic Samurai_ which is very, very good.
If you're inclined towards fantasy, Jack Vance's Lyonesse trilogy is fabulous, and Barry Hughart's _Bridge of Birds_ and other Master Li novels are hilarious (don't read them in public if you're embarrassed by laughing out loud).
Steven Brust's stuff wanders back and forth between science and fantasy, but his writing style is uneven in the older books.
William
Magnesium has been done before --- the original laptop, the GRiD Compass (later succeeded by the GRiDCase, I had a III plus myself), had a magnesium case which was painted black.
http://www.pd.com/GRiD.html
William
Funny, Pascal was also the language used for the back-end of the Web dialect in which Donald E. Knuth wrote the Literate Program TeX (and METAFONT).
If you don't think TeX is used in production, look around you --- it's used in database publishing world-wide (railroad timetables in Germany, a phone directory in India, lots of directories here in the US). (Oh yeah, the macro format texinfo is the default documentation format for a certain ``GNU'' project).
That's pretty cool, no? (And DEK provides rewards for finding errors in his programs and books --- want $327.68? find a bug in TeX. Won't be easy though).
It's also not like Pascal stood still --- it was succeeded by Modula, and then Oberon (and it's interesting to note the language got both simpler and more expressive as time went by).
William
Correct, the ThinkPad name was derived from the old leather notepads with ``Think'' on them.
The IBM ThinkPad was originally conceived as a pen slate system (but Go Corp. fell behind somewhat, so a clam shell laptop was released instead).
There's a lot of interesting explanation of all this and a lot more in the book _ThinkPad: A Different Shade of Blue, Building a Successful IBM Brand_ by Deborah A. Dell and J. Gerry Purdy, Ph.D., ISBN 0-672-31756-7.
William
I prefer to make them into .pdfs and read those in Adobe Acrobat Reader on a pen slate (Fujitsu Stylistic).
I've one example up in my portfolio, http://members.aol.com/willadams (it's also in the TeX Showcase, http://www.tug.org/texshowcase ), Okakura Kakuzo's _The Book of Tea_ --- got the text from PG, set it, made some corrections (I've a (letterpress) printed copy in its slip case at home), sent those to PG (took two tries, but they finally accepted and applid most of them), and printed and bound a copy as a gift for my sister.
William
Let us remember that Visicalc was modelled on the limitations of an accountant's ledger and the Apple ][ screen.
Let us _please_ move past that limitation --- you've got companies that have to _require_ that all ranges used for calculations (even of a single cell) are given names --- Lotus Improv w/ it's cool tear-off ``item dispenser'' instead required one name things as they were made, so that formulas read like:
profit = sales - expenses
Cloning is boring and uninteresting --- contrast LyX (http://www.lyx.org ) to Word for an example of how an opensource app can change the concept and do much better.
For those running Mac OS X, look up http://www.quantrix.com
For those w/ systems running NeXT or OPENSTEP, well, you've already got Lotus Improv or Quantrix already, right?
William
For Apple, internally, for machines which Darwin runs on, this is merely switching a flag in the source and recompiling.
That doesn't make it a ready for market commercial product or anywhere near such though.
William
What would have happened if Apple had released Mac OS X for x86?
They'd've been pilloried for lack of driver support and problematic installs on hardware --- Darwin does run on x86, and the list of supported hardware is quite short.
Take a look back through the usenet:comp.sys.next.* archives for my travails trying to get OPENSTEP 4.2 up and running on a ThinkPad 755C --- failed miserably because I couldn't get Apple tech support to inform me that I had to manually plug in the memsize to the boot arguments (and no, it wasn't in the readme or the install manual --- finally found it in a usenet post _years_ later)
William
There was a NeXT-related services company which did custom installs of NeXTstep, esp. to laptops and the listed Steve Jobs as ``their favorite customer' with a picture of him and the Toshiba Tecra they'd set him up with. Should be findable at groups.google.com --- they announced it at one time.
He also had an IBM ThinkPad, one of the single-spindle models, also running NeXTstep or OPENSTEP depending on the timeframe --- remember this guy liked Concurrence.app so much he had Apple write Keynote.
William
Creating a graphical tool to create (La)TeX layouts would be non-trivial, actually, probably approaches hard or impossible --- it takes _four_ levels of grouping to get a frame around an arbitrary-size box for example.
That's not a big deal though, since a normal workflow for a book is to:
- draw up rough layouts by hand, on tissue / vellum w/ a #2 pencil until one has one or more good candidates
- create tight comprehensive layouts of the better versions either by inking or re-drawing the roughs, or re-creating the layouts w/ a graphical tool like FreeHand, Illustrator or Quark or InDesign.
- select the best one
- label all the elements, compare against the document markup and make sure one has exemplars for all elements
- write up an unambiguous, comprehensive specification including coverage of issues such as stacked heads
- send sample layout, specifications and manuscript and art program to a composition house for layout
William
Better H&J --- this is particularly egregious since TeX's is in the public domain and Adobe even made use of it (by way of URW's HZ) in InDesign
;)
Broader, ink-oriented colour support --- the GIMP needs this too. Forget ``just'' CMYK, let's see a sophisticated, general model for mixing ink reflex blue w/ metallic flake silver. cf. Cerilica's Truism and PowerTone / SilverTone.
Better user interface, say something like Macromedia Freehand on steroids (it kills me that Macromedia didn't follow through on Altsys adding page layout features to their successor to FreeHand 3 Virtuoso --- Altsys Virtuoso 2.0~=Macromedia FreeHand 4, but on NeXTstep).
Also, type manipulation capabilities like Right Brain's TouchType.app (w/ Adobe ``lost'' the source code to so can't make available for Mac OS X).
It'd be nice if it ran in GNUstep so one got Services &c. Where's the equation option?
In the meanwhile, I'll just continue using TeX and Altsys Virtuoso on my NeXT Cube.
\begin{shameless-self-promotion}
see http://www.tug.org/tug2003/donate or
http://www.tug.org/texshowcase or http://members.aol.com/willadams
(check the portfolio link
\end{shameless-self-promotion}
There was also Marcia Hardy's Aloha AOL e-mail client for the Newton.
No real strings to pull though --- Apple had long been associated w/ AOL and actually licensed the server / client software to create their short-lived eWorld on-line presence.
William
The ``Literate Programming'' (http://www.literateprogrammng.com ) re-written source to the the original Colossal Caves Adventure re-written for CWEB by Dr. Donald E. Knuth (the guy who wrote my word processor ;) see http://www.tug.org/texshowcase for what I mean):
f
m l
http://www.literateprogramming.com/adventure.pd
or get the source from
http://www.literateprogramming.com/fexamples.ht
William
But your OED.app doesn't have COMMAND= reserved to get a definition --- having Webster.app bundled ensured this, and it was then trivial to change which dictionary was used (can you say Jargon.app?)
Moreover, the OED is _so_ comprehensive that it verges on useless for day-to-day usage 'cause one has to wade through countless entries of archaic minutiae (not that I'm against that sort of thing, but sometimes one must be practicable).
William
NeXTstep was not merely an austere aesthetic experience, w/ minimal distractions and a flexible, customizable UI which allowed one to reduce screen clutter to just a single tile (the NeXT logo), and a pixel or two (dragged off main menu and / or the cursor), but synergistic whole the likes of which sadly are not likely to be seen again.
:( having them on the left means a window is more useful when partially dragged off-screen and results in less-frequent need to resize a window
;) --- check my rants at http://groups.google.com in comp.sys.next.advocacy to see if I forgot anything...)
Panther helps the aesthetics somewhat, but NeXT users still miss / are irritated by (well, I know I am):
- monolithic main menu bar w/ wasted blank space between the menus and the (optional) information / settings menus for Airport &c.
- verbose Mac-style shortcut descriptions w/ arcane symbols instead of concise NeXT-style shortcuts (in NeXTstep, Save is indicated by ``s'' and Save as by ``S'', no Command symbol (it's assumed---Control only as a modifier is reserved for personal shortcuts / Unix-use), Shift by case)
- Print, Hide, Services and Quit are no longer top-level menus where they made more sense and were quicker to get at.
- scroll bars on wrong side (this can't be fixed by theming 'cause Carbon apps are responsible for deciding where scroll bars are placed
- no Webster.app, Digital Librarian / Shakespeare or Oxford's Book of Quotations --- in NeXTstep this meant one was guaranteed to have Command = _not_ used in an app so it'd be available for looking things up in Websters. Sure you can d/l OmniGroups dict.org client &c., but it's not the same (esp. if you're on dial-up)
- Pantone colour library --- used to be this was licensed w/ the system, now each graphic app which needs it has to pay a license, and one _doesn't_ get them in one's office apps (major negative for adhering to corporate identity programs where such is specced) until such time as Office apps are written in Cocoa or support the nsColor API/object/whatever.
- vertical menu
- pop-up main menu --- this is wonderfully fast / efficient / elegant. For me, ``Punch'' in Altsys Virtuoso is pretty much a gesture, right-click, down a bit, then straight over and release
- repositionable sub-menus --- no need for inscrutable button bars, and one can make a given command easy to get to as needed (when doing lots of envelopes I tear of the poste.app Services menu, put it in the bottom left corner, then an envelope is merely a selection, mouse move to bottom left, click, shift right to the print menu (also aligned on the bottom edge for this) click away. (takes longer to say / type than to do)
William
(who really should save all that and put it on a web page, but this time cribbed from my post to MacSlash
Described as, ``Where Alice would have gone if Alice had Hypercard''.
All sorts of fun on a b/w compact Mac.
William
I sympathise and agree for the most part. Still haul out my Newton MP 100 occasionally for the odd jaunt.
;)
;)
;)
That said, I've pretty much given up on w small device as a constant companion, switched to black leather Palm Notes Pad from Levenger (www.levenger.com) which holds business cards and 2.5" x 3.5" note cards or paper folded to similiar sizes (a legal sheet cut a few times and then folded fits in it quite nicely making a very elegant accordion book). I've a slightly larger Circa notebook I carry when I'm expecting inspiration and will be away from a wall outlet.
For the rest of the time, I've switched to a Fujitsu Stylistic. It works quite well, and is pretty much fast enough for all the reasonable things I want to do with it (running Virtual PC is not working out though, and XFree86 in Cygwin requires a certain calmness and patience). It's a bit smaller than most laptops, certainly smaller than my ThinkPad in its Port case.
The best thing (of course) is all the spiffy Windows software --- I'd dearly love to see alternatives under Linux or Mac OS X though:
- ArtRage --- http://www.ambientdesign.com (this is my digital sketchbook)
- Fractal Design Expression --- managed to snag a copy ov v1. It kills me that Microsoft renegged on their promise to make v3 available again in November 2003 after purchasing the company, see http://www.creaturehouse.com
- FutureWave SmartSketch --- _This_ is just about perfect since it came to Windows and Classic Mac OS from Go Corporation's PenPoint.
- LyX (oh yeah, this works in Linux already
- TeX / Omega (see http://www.tug.org/texshowcase for why
- Dirk Stuve's WinTeXShell supports HWR (as does the Windows QT version of LyX
Various other standard bits, most notably Extended Character Map (the standard Windows Character Map doesn't work well w/ a pen). Check http://www.tinyapps.org or www.pricelessware.com
I'm still debating licensing PenOffice (http://www.phatware.com).... and am looking for a better MP3 player (currently using 1by1). And I'm still looking for a better file manager 2xplorer seems the best of the free ones thus far.
William
My first thought on seeing the iMac G4 was, ``detachable screen, integrated processor, battery, storage, pen slate''.
Apple really could do a pen slate very nicely, it plays to a lot of their strengths, and unlike Microsoft, which charges extra for Tablet PC Edition of Windows XP Pro, InkWell (nee Rosetta, the Newton OS 2.x print recognizer) is bundled w/ all copies of the OS (at no extra expense to Apple either).
Battery life too.
Used to be one could install NeXTstep on a 105MB HD --- surely Apple could manage something in say half a gig (or just increase their volume on the 4GIG HDs being used for the iPod Mini and use that).
Oh yeah, one kind of bummer about this device --- there were considering using the spiffy TRON embedded OS, but apparently it was easier to make use of the CD-ROM using Linux. Rather a shame that, I'd love to have a consumer device running TRON (or a desktop either, anyone know of straightforward English instructions on how to install it and set it up?)
William
_not_ MS.
.pdf w/ annotations using a pen than a mouse, esp. with the new Adobe Acrobat 6 (killer app for Linux, extend xpdf to allow it to annotate and fill in .pdf formas), and I don't have to spend time scanning my (paper) sketchbook, or transcribing notes from it.
Microsoft was actually rather late to the pen computing game --- and only got there by twisting Go Corp.'s invitation to develop apps to an excuse to create pen extensions for Windows since Go didn't follow their suggestion to do so (extrapolation of Jerry Kaplan's version in his book _StartUp_ and the spin placed on the same event in the book _Building Tablet PC Applications_)
Heck, even Atari had a prototype, the STylus.
There was also a Linus machine (no relation to a certain Thorvalds) which a few people have prototypes of.
And of course there was the ill-fated Momenta.
I've been a pen computing afficionado for a long while, and the machines have really gotten practical of late (power, battery life, are decent, storage is phenomenal).
Using a pen system means I've got all of my data with me, and can use it / manipulate it, _without_ needing to sit down and set up / make room for a clamshell laptop (I've been buying laptops since 1985 (GRiDCase III Plus), they're nice enough, but more awkward to use than a pen slate, less acceptable in some situations (meetings, interviews), and require that I schelp around a graphics tablet in addition (okay, graphic designers are pretty much unique in needing that).
But it's a _lot_ easier to mark up a
This device is really interesting 'cause of the size (much smaller than most Tablet PCs --- guess they didn't want to compete with their own LitePad) and for its internal CD-ROM drive --- can you say portable e-book reader? (I'm thinking like the kid CD-ROMs, Living Books, Tivoli, et. al.)
William
I can't recall saying, and probably wouldn't say TeX is just as good --- for the most part, especially typographically, it's better. TeX is a serviceable alternative for some people for many of the things which FrameMaker is used for.
.tfms) _always_
Here's my rant on Framemaker's limitations from alt.publish.books a while back.
- automatic ligatures (ff, fi, fl, ffi and ffl)---point out that doing this in
Word (or beyond fi and fl in FrameMaker) (with an Expert font) must be done
manually and will wreak havoc with spell-checking (office become oYce). FM also
throws this in w/ using kerning pairs, so if these must be switched off for a
style you may have words like w/ f-ligatures which'll be set in two completely
different ways on the same page unless one is careful to adjust to compensate).
- paragraph based h&j---adding a word to a paragraph will cause TeX to re-run
the entire paragraph looking for the linebreaks which cause the least
badness---by contrast h&j fixes in Word (and Frame) are more or less manual
(forcing a line to pad out by increasing its spread, preventing a single word
from hyphenating, etc.), and introducing a new word may cause the previous
fixes to make things look _much_ worse.
- contextual styles---generate a page with text, a numbered list, more text,
then a bulleted list with some numbered sub-lists. Word and Frame require a
distinct/different style for the numbered sub-list, TeX doesn't. This doesn't
seem so bad, until one sees the surprised look of a person who copies / pastes
from one bulleted list to the other.
- bullet/text placement---set a bulleted list w/ a Zapf Dingbats ``n''. It
sits on the baseline, so unless set rather large, wants to be shifted
up-ward---TeX does that quite readily, FM doesn't understand baseline shifting
beyond super/sub-script. Consider the fact that neither Word, nor FM can set
the \TeX or \LaTeX logos properly and automatically in running text. TeX's
internal unit of measure is the ``sp'' (scaled point) which is 1/65,535th of a
traditional printer's point---what's the smallest unit of measure for Word or
FM? How often does one see a carefully composed Word or FM publication go
haywire when its moved from one machine to another 'cause of dimension
rounding? (IME often on Word (though turning on the ``handle page/line breaks
like WordPerfect'' option helps somewhat) and every so often on FM (we have
proofreaders here at work who can spot a baseline page alignment which is less
than 1/2 a point off) TeX jobs (on installations w/ identical
come out identically (all measurements are converted to sps and all mathematics
done is w/ integers).
If you've got solutions for those, I'd be glad to file them away for my next Framemaker book, and for the folks using Frame whom I support.
If you've got a magic incantation w/ Adobe tech support doesn't know about to get an FM publication to switch from RGB to CMYK composite output, I'd like to know that too.
William
(who hasn't been charging the TUG production team to help out w/ their pre-press issues (pro bono publico) and has published most of his work related to TeX in TUGboat where it's freely available and who has probably been trolled, oh well, it's entertaining.)
If you'd look up the papers / columns I've written for TUGboat, you'd see that my job title is ``publishing specialist'' (I've been arguing it should be changed to ``publishing TeXnician'' ;).
William
I've been trying to discuss this. I've not used any vulgarity, and I've tried to be patient.
Initially, you claimed TeX couldn't use OpenType, so I pointed out that _Digital Typography Using LaTeX_ is typeset in the OpenType version of Palatino (the forward and ToC are available on-line to verify this). You've not acknowledged this, nor mentioned it again --- who's not discussing?
Every other contention you've raised has been similarly disproven, but rather than accept this or discuss it, you'd rather move goalposts and shout vulgarities and engage in ad hominem attacks.
And pretending that doing graphic design at a newspaper is like to doing book production work --- I've done consulting for newspapers, and still check in on some old customers, things are far more changeable there, but the consequences for an error (save some space and ink to print a correction tomorrow) don't begin to approach those for getting a book wrong (single page --- issue a cancel and have someone snick out pages w/ a razor blade and paste in replacements, many pages, pay for a reprint).
As an example of the difference, in technical, math and medical publishing, the standard is to fake a second colour using a CMYK build (usually Cyan is used for this). This avoids the issue of duotone reproduction and colour naming, _and_ allows a publisher to re-use a graphic in a different book w/o having to change it. Check w/ any technical / medical illustration house --- Thomson and John Wiley & Sons even have this written up in their guidelines.
When was the last time your newspaper had a mathematical equation in it? (there's an amusing little bit in the Kaplan book which I did noting how a newspaper's inability to do a simple superscript totally spoiled the meaning of their story) What are you using as an equation editor in InDesign? (FWIW, I like InDesign and think it's the best interactive page layout program going, just a shame that it's taken so long for it to appear and then mature to something usable).
Why does it matter to you that other people are able to use tools which you're either unable or unwilling? I've done books in Framemaker, (e.g. Forouzan's _Foundations of Computer Science: From Data Manipulation to Theory of Computation_)it's pretty limited typographically, but serviceable enough, and it's quite a shame Adobe is treating it and its customer base so cavalierly. Have you ever done a book in TeX? It seems unlikely, and I simply can't imagine what your basis is for posting such poorly researched information which for the most part is patently false.
William
Hmm, given that when that document is opened in Adobe Acrobat 5 and paged through page-by-page, the text for the Horoscope section heads won't render complaining of being unable to render the subsetted font, I'd be concerned about how well your PDF/X preflighting is working out (it does work okay in Adobe Reader 6 though, I'll try to find time to take it home and look at it on my wife's PowerBook in the full version).
;)
FWIW, I'd really prefer a program w/ a UI more like to Macromedia FreeHand. That I prefer TeX to something like Quark / Adobe Illustrator is a measure of my dislike for their UI
This topic will probably be closed soon --- I've a post over on www.macslash.org on this same topic which details my complaints against Framemaker --- continue there?
William
Oh, well if you'll accept, ``What I Type _Here_ is Displayed As What I'll Get _There_'', then yes, most previewers support that. There's even some interaction between preview windows and the source view as I alluded to.
Display PostScript, while way cool on a NeXT, unfortunately isn't making much of an appearance elsewhere (well, there's Solaris w/ it and Miles 33 &c. and one hopes that Display Ghostscript will continue in GNUstep, http://www.gnustep.org )
William
Take a look at the source code for poligraf.sty --- it has hooks to allow one to programmatically print arbitrary separations.
.pdfs in a .pdf, doing some post-processing if necessary and then having a press-ready .pdf to hand off to the printer?
;) but it can be done, we do it, and I've provided links to back that up.
However, what's wrong w/ it simply colour tagging stuff, placing colour tagged
We send books so prepared off to some of the largest printes in the country, we, our customers and the printers they choose (R.R. Donnelley, Maple-Vail, Quebecor &c.) all find them acceptable.
I'm not saying anyone can do it (that's why we get to charge what we charge
William