But it was apparently created in Microsoft Word running in Mac OS X.
The typesetting is also rather pedestrian... probably wouldn't be all that pleasant to read (and awkward to print since it's two up on a landscape letter-sized page)
Should be straightforward enough to take the.html and typeset that though --- either use xmltex or work up a script to convert it to LaTeX or your preferred style of TeX markup.
Actually, no, a point isn't / wasn't always 1/72nd of an inch.
That was set by John Warnock (you may know him better as the founder of Adobe Systems) when he wrote a little program called PostScript. He chose to do this for efficiency's sake since he knew all fonts would have to be re-created for use in his system.
Prior to that there were two different types of points, English points (72.27 to an inch) and Cicero / Didot points (some funny number to a meter).
So, when one specs points in publishing, one should always ascertain whether one means the DTP point (72 to an inch), or Printer's points or something else.
The original Mac OS set the screen dpi to be 72 pixels per inch, but Apple hasn't made a screen which matches that for a long while AFAIK. Windows sets the default logical screen dpi to 96 by default, but allows one to change it. Unfortunately a lot of programs are Mac ports which are hard-wired to 72 dpi, so it's actually better to set to that.
For those who need more on this, I'd suggest www.schaedler-rulers.com --- also look up Victor Eijkhout's spiffy TeX ruler (should be on CTAN).
Most font licenses explicitly allow one to embed (a subset) of the font into a.pdf (Emigre and Castle Systems are notable exceptions).
If one has to do a fully GPL system though, use Latin Modern, the fonts donated to the X Consortium or some other completely free font (or hire someone to create something which you then make freely available --- I'm available for this, e-mail me).
No, ostensibly Times New Roman was created by Stanley Morison for _The Times_ of London w/ the assistance of Times draughtsman Victor Lardent --- it's pretty much ``a narrowed, sharpened Plantin'' (see Walter Tracy's _Letters of Credit_ for that ref).
Linotype then filed for a trademark on Times in the US (see Dr. Bigelow's post to comp.fonts on this)
_However_ there's since been a claim that the design was actually by Starling Burgess, the American yacht designer, not used by Monotype and then appropriated by Morison. This is based on fairly circumstantial evidence (matrices bearing the same series numbers), and AFAIK, there was never a follow-up to the article in the APHA on it.
Unfortunately, Garamond isn't readily available to all systems the government is likely to be purchasing / using, so the choice of Times New Roman (a Windows core font, and available on all Macs which have Internet Explorer installed) makes good fiscal sense.
There's a ``gentleman's agreement'' w/ Linotype Corporation which allows them to use / produce ``Times'' (For the backstory on this, look up an article published in the APHA's journal and Walter Tracy's wonderful book _Letters of Credit_).
However, URW did a clone of Times (Nimbus Serif, I believe it's provided as), which they've since made freely available (see the link to this at www.tug.org) and which can be easily used in free systems such as TeX, and is readily installable w/ XFree86 so that one may use it w/ Linux, Gnome, KDE &c.
For those who're curious on the specifics of typeface copyright &c., www.typeright.org is a good starting point.
The problem is, the service is so little in demand in the US that when one sends it, they phone the message in initially, then send the printed copy by mail --- not quite the same effect. YMMV in other countries where the telecommunications system isn't so saturating.
William (who convinced his brother-in-law to spend a small fortune to send the traditional congratulatory telegram to his father-in-law --- at least he kept it)
Actually, the typically available Times New Roman has lining figures which are an ``en-space'' wide.
If one types _just_ numbers things line up as if one were using a monospaced font. The problem is the default space (I checked TimesNewRomanPS YMMV w/ other versions) is half an en-space, so that even if one sets up the typesetting to not vary the space, one has to double up on the spaces. Naturally, people should just use tabs properly, but.....
Microsoft has focused their OpenType work on linguistics, not typesetting capabilities, so the above should hold even for Windows 2000 and later (naturally it doesn't hold if someone is using Adobe InDesign and sets the option for old-style figures and proportional numbers).
For those who're curious, I touch on some of this sort of thing in some of my didactic typography samples available from my website URL.
Unfortunately, as you point out, no one is making a TabletPC w/ a monochrome display --- actually, I think the TabletPC specification _requires_ a colour display. It'd be great for outdoor viewability though, as you point out and battery life too. You can pick up Fujitsy Stylistic 1200s w/ outdoor viewable monochrome displays pretty cheaply though. It's a pen tablet computer though, not a ``Tablet PC''.
That said, there's been some great work done on making daylight-viewable displays for the newer TabletPCs, Fujitsu has them as an option for their Stylistic systems, and www.infocater.com offers an optional upgrade w/ the Motion (possibly other) systems which they sell for a special glass screen replacement &c. for daylight viewable displays.
I don't think a high-contrast colour scheme is going to help much though --- either your display backlight and filter is able to display decently in daylight or it's not.
Given that he's accustomed to NeXT/OPENstep which didn't allow much (Dock alternatives like Fiend.app), not much I'd guess.
Probably has a couple of Services installed though, almost certainly one to fill the void left by Webster.app's absence (OmniGroup OmniDictionary perhaps?), but I doubt much beyond that.
After all, if he likes / wants a program / utility it becomes a part of Mac OS X proper, or an Apple product (e.g., Watson / Sherlock or Concurrence.app / Keynote)
Once David Pogue whined in his MacWorld column about Steve Jobs using a ThinkPad running Win95 right after Apple bought NeXT --- he was half right, it was a ThinkPad (He also had a Toshiba Tecra), but it ran (of course) OPENSTEP.
Time was someone published the headers of a private e-mail from Steve Jobs' e-mail account at Pixar to show that it was from a machine running OPENSTEP.
Interestingly, one of the things which kept him on OPENSTEP was Concurrence.app (a presentation program) --- which goes a long way to explaining the existence of Keynote, no?
After doing a bit more research, I'm leaning towards agreeing with the myth interpretation above, w/ a slight modification for temperature variations and _incredibly_ _slight_ melting brought on by high temperatures (say it's 105 degrees in the shade, a window is going to warm up somewhat right? Perhaps enough to have a small bit almost sorta kinda begin to melt / flow just a eensy teensy little bit?
Okay then --- that glass which makes up the CRT / LCD you're looking at now --- solid or liquid?
Solid?
Hmm, take a walk down an old, established neighbourhood w/ buildings hundreds of years old w/ original glass --- hmm, what's that ripple effect in the old window glass? Could it be that over the course of 100 years glass flows down a little bit?
AIUI, the answer is that glass is really a liquid, only one which flows _incredibly_ slowly.
Definitions have to be redefined for the sort of descriptive precision outside of the normal world-view which modern physics requires.
It'd be nice if they were more affordable though (this is where that nasty global economy / foreign currency things comes into play:(
Actually, I've been kind of surprised that Lego hasn't hit upon the idea of marketing kits directly to grown-ups, say a line of desk accessories (the pens struck me as lame).
When I got a Fujitsu Point 510 pen slate, I didn't bother to get a stand---thought about making one out of wood, but instead chose to use my old Legos (I've since added a pen holder and a stand for a CD-RW drive to lift it up behind the Fujitsu Stylistic I did purchase a stand for (was running low on Legos)).
Pictures of the Point 510 and stand should be here:
These things can't be had for love nor (reasonable quantities) of money --- they sell on EBay for twice what they cost from Microsoft ($19.95 originally).
Unfortunately I bought a system which was supposed to have Win98SE on it, it didn't I didn't fuss 'cause I heard Win98 was more stable, then when I went to purchase some accessories found that there's a _lot_ of stuff which only works w/ Win98SE or later (and doesn't w/ Win98 first edition).
The weird thing is MS will sell one a CD w/ patches for Win98 first edition, but it won't get one to Second.
William (who would switch the system to Linux if there were Linux alternatives for Fractal Design Expression, Macromedia FreeHand, FutureWave SmartSketch and IBM InkManager and PenOffice 2.5e --- it's a Fujitsu Stylistic pen slate)
My first laptop was a GRiDCase III Plus which I bought back in 1985.
$8,150
For my part, it looks like a _really_ nice machine, but it makes me sad that Sony recently got burned on the pen computing thing, so won't be doing a pen slate or convertible --- oh well, there's always the NEC or the Fujitsu or even the Electrovaya Scribbler...
Actually, Display PostSript wasn't that much of a chokepoint on NeXTstep---it _is_ a multi-threaded system after all (the problem was DPS granularity was 1 PostScript operator and sometimes 1 OS op. is ``Display this multi-megabyte bitmap graphic''. The NeXTDimension board off-loaded this from the main CPU though, greatly assisting performance.
Turbo NeXTs were 68040 at 33MHz (the standard was an '040 at 25MHz and the original Cube was an '030 at 25MHz). There were a few pre-production ``Nitro'' accelerator cards (estimates range from 6 to a couple of dozen) which ran at 40MHz in Turbo hardware, and there was a ``Pyro'' CPU upgrade which allowed one to run a clock-doubled 50MHz CPU in _non_ Turbo hardware.
Agree, having X11.app is nice 'cause one doesn't have to wait for things to be ported (just recompile), though QT support for things like LyX for Aqua is _way_ cool.
Misses the ``sturm und drang'' over Adobe's promising a free, then low-cost, then no-way-what's-your-market-cap license for Display PostScript (originally co-developed by NeXT and Apple), as well as the free ``Yellow Box'' run-time which went away at that time, as well as the moving target of the up-dated APIs when Apple ceased to think of Mac OS X as an OpenStep implementation.
Apple's support for PDF/X gainsays the claim the pdf support isn't a replacement for Adobe Acrobat to a certain extant. By tweaking a few settings one can get a press-ready.pdf out of pretty much any app. If one needs access to other features, well, there's always pdfTeX....(which provides access to things which the Adobe Acrobat GUI _doesn't_)
And the author misses Gerben Wierda's spiffy iInstaller.app which is a neat way to install iInstaller packages (which includes TeX, xfig, imagemagick, Ghostscript &c.). This was developed to work around (then limitations) of Apple's Installer.app and to make updating packages more efficient---way cool stuff.
osx.hyperjeff.net is a way-cool app tracker....
Also misses Macromedia FreeHand MX and the irony of NeXTstep's premier drawing / page-layout application having come to Mac OS X as a Carbon app:(
When Israel took control of its territory, said territory was under the control of Jordan and other countries in the area.
God made the Mississippi River, the Suez Canal was built by the French (along the path of an abandoned canal from the 13th--8th BC) and later purchased by the Brits. Moreover, the Suez Canal has been held to be an international waterway since 1888, and the UN has consistently upheld that since its inception.
from http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/History/Suez_War. html On August 9, 1949, the UN Mixed Armistice Commission upheld Israel's complaint that Egypt was illegally blocking the canal. UN negotiator Ralph Bunche declared: "There should be free movement for legitimate shipping and no vestiges of the wartime blockade should be allowed to remain, as they are inconsistent with both the letter and the spirit of the armistice agreements."
It's worth noting that the Palestinian land in question wasn't controlled by the Palestinians, but by other Arab nations who didn't feel it was worth their while to create a Palestinian state. Look up how Jordan for example treated Palestinians who didn't elect Jordanian citizenship (shelling one camp during the Yom Kippur War 'cause they were concerned about the possiblity of armed revolution).
``Israel began a war in 1967'' only tells part of the story---Israel _responded_ to a legitimate ``cassus belli'', the closing of the Suez Canal to Israeli shipping by Egypt. Moreover, their pre-emptive strike (known in the West as, ``The Six Day War'' and in the Arab World as, ``The Setback'') only started the war which Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Jordan and Syria were poised to begin. This war frustrated Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon in their attempt to destroy Israel.
The accidental attack on the USS Liberty was a case of mis-identification by the Israeli Navy (who were notorious for such errors). Israel also paid out several hundred million in reparations for the accidental attack, for which they apologized profusely, and which immense relief was felt (the concern was that it was a Russian ship and that said attack would further escalate Russian involvement).
And of course, the Golan Heights were used by Syria to shell civilian settlements.
Take a look at the membership rolls for TUG, dante, bachotex &c. There're a _lot_ more than 210 _members_ of any one of those organizations.
Estimates of TeX's _direct_ userbase range up in the millions, to say nothing of indirect usage such as the typesetting of catalogs, databases, railroad timetables & dynamic web publishing, look at http://custompub.aimsapp.com for one example of the latter.
Take a look at Han The Thanh's pdftex project. You are aware that the pdf specification provides capabilities which Adobe Acrobat _doesn't_ provide access to? \usepackage{hyperref} enables many of them, and for the others, well there's always \pdfliteral....
You are aware that Adobe's InDesign uses (finally!) TeX's H&J as the basis for its multi-line composer which they acquired by way of URW's HZ? Funny how for almost twenty years _no one_ developed a better H&J algorithm (Quark, PageMaker, Ventura Publisher, et. al. use ``dumb'' line-at-a-time systems which'll blithely set a tight line next to a loose one requiring _lots_ of manual intervention / tweaking for decent results).
Spellchecking is trivial in a TeX-aware editor, just use the ``aspell'' program and dictionaries which are aware of TeX tags. LyX even makes it interactive, just like Word.
As regards what Word or TeX can or cannot do---at my day job I do database publishing, using TeX as the typesetting engine most of the time, take a look at http://custompub.aimsapp.com and let me know what you think it'd cost to develop such a thing using Microsoft tech, and then to deploy it --- I'm pretty sure we beat those costs;)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there is a .pdf provided...
.html and typeset that though --- either use xmltex or work up a script to convert it to LaTeX or your preferred style of TeX markup.
But it was apparently created in Microsoft Word running in Mac OS X.
The typesetting is also rather pedestrian... probably wouldn't be all that pleasant to read (and awkward to print since it's two up on a landscape letter-sized page)
Should be straightforward enough to take the
William
Helvetica / Arial aren't readable, they're _decipherable_ and suffer badly from poor spacing, awkward character shapes &c.
Compare Arial / Helvetica to a decently spaced sans some time, say Adrian Frutiger's Univers to see what a readable sans serif can be.
William
Actually, no, a point isn't / wasn't always 1/72nd of an inch.
That was set by John Warnock (you may know him better as the founder of Adobe Systems) when he wrote a little program called PostScript. He chose to do this for efficiency's sake since he knew all fonts would have to be re-created for use in his system.
Prior to that there were two different types of points, English points (72.27 to an inch) and Cicero / Didot points (some funny number to a meter).
So, when one specs points in publishing, one should always ascertain whether one means the DTP point (72 to an inch), or Printer's points or something else.
The original Mac OS set the screen dpi to be 72 pixels per inch, but Apple hasn't made a screen which matches that for a long while AFAIK. Windows sets the default logical screen dpi to 96 by default, but allows one to change it. Unfortunately a lot of programs are Mac ports which are hard-wired to 72 dpi, so it's actually better to set to that.
For those who need more on this, I'd suggest www.schaedler-rulers.com --- also look up Victor Eijkhout's spiffy TeX ruler (should be on CTAN).
William
That's what licenses are for.
.pdf (Emigre and Castle Systems are notable exceptions).
Most font licenses explicitly allow one to embed (a subset) of the font into a
If one has to do a fully GPL system though, use Latin Modern, the fonts donated to the X Consortium or some other completely free font (or hire someone to create something which you then make freely available --- I'm available for this, e-mail me).
William
No, ostensibly Times New Roman was created by Stanley Morison for _The Times_ of London w/ the assistance of Times draughtsman Victor Lardent --- it's pretty much ``a narrowed, sharpened Plantin'' (see Walter Tracy's _Letters of Credit_ for that ref).
Linotype then filed for a trademark on Times in the US (see Dr. Bigelow's post to comp.fonts on this)
_However_ there's since been a claim that the design was actually by Starling Burgess, the American yacht designer, not used by Monotype and then appropriated by Morison. This is based on fairly circumstantial evidence (matrices bearing the same series numbers), and AFAIK, there was never a follow-up to the article in the APHA on it.
William
Unfortunately, Garamond isn't readily available to all systems the government is likely to be purchasing / using, so the choice of Times New Roman (a Windows core font, and available on all Macs which have Internet Explorer installed) makes good fiscal sense.
William
Times New Roman is owned by Monotype Corporation.
There's a ``gentleman's agreement'' w/ Linotype Corporation which allows them to use / produce ``Times'' (For the backstory on this, look up an article published in the APHA's journal and Walter Tracy's wonderful book _Letters of Credit_).
However, URW did a clone of Times (Nimbus Serif, I believe it's provided as), which they've since made freely available (see the link to this at www.tug.org) and which can be easily used in free systems such as TeX, and is readily installable w/ XFree86 so that one may use it w/ Linux, Gnome, KDE &c.
For those who're curious on the specifics of typeface copyright &c., www.typeright.org is a good starting point.
William
Same place one has always gone, Western Union &c.
The problem is, the service is so little in demand in the US that when one sends it, they phone the message in initially, then send the printed copy by mail --- not quite the same effect. YMMV in other countries where the telecommunications system isn't so saturating.
William
(who convinced his brother-in-law to spend a small fortune to send the traditional congratulatory telegram to his father-in-law --- at least he kept it)
Actually, the typically available Times New Roman has lining figures which are an ``en-space'' wide.
If one types _just_ numbers things line up as if one were using a monospaced font. The problem is the default space (I checked TimesNewRomanPS YMMV w/ other versions) is half an en-space, so that even if one sets up the typesetting to not vary the space, one has to double up on the spaces. Naturally, people should just use tabs properly, but.....
Microsoft has focused their OpenType work on linguistics, not typesetting capabilities, so the above should hold even for Windows 2000 and later (naturally it doesn't hold if someone is using Adobe InDesign and sets the option for old-style figures and proportional numbers).
For those who're curious, I touch on some of this sort of thing in some of my didactic typography samples available from my website URL.
William
Wasn't it Mark Twain (Samuel Clements) who said, ``I've got no respect for a man who only knows one way to spell a given word.''?
William
Unfortunately, as you point out, no one is making a TabletPC w/ a monochrome display --- actually, I think the TabletPC specification _requires_ a colour display. It'd be great for outdoor viewability though, as you point out and battery life too. You can pick up Fujitsy Stylistic 1200s w/ outdoor viewable monochrome displays pretty cheaply though. It's a pen tablet computer though, not a ``Tablet PC''.
That said, there's been some great work done on making daylight-viewable displays for the newer TabletPCs, Fujitsu has them as an option for their Stylistic systems, and www.infocater.com offers an optional upgrade w/ the Motion (possibly other) systems which they sell for a special glass screen replacement &c. for daylight viewable displays.
I don't think a high-contrast colour scheme is going to help much though --- either your display backlight and filter is able to display decently in daylight or it's not.
William
Given that he's accustomed to NeXT/OPENstep which didn't allow much (Dock alternatives like Fiend.app), not much I'd guess.
Probably has a couple of Services installed though, almost certainly one to fill the void left by Webster.app's absence (OmniGroup OmniDictionary perhaps?), but I doubt much beyond that.
After all, if he likes / wants a program / utility it becomes a part of Mac OS X proper, or an Apple product (e.g., Watson / Sherlock or Concurrence.app / Keynote)
William
Once David Pogue whined in his MacWorld column about Steve Jobs using a ThinkPad running Win95 right after Apple bought NeXT --- he was half right, it was a ThinkPad (He also had a Toshiba Tecra), but it ran (of course) OPENSTEP.
Time was someone published the headers of a private e-mail from Steve Jobs' e-mail account at Pixar to show that it was from a machine running OPENSTEP.
Interestingly, one of the things which kept him on OPENSTEP was Concurrence.app (a presentation program) --- which goes a long way to explaining the existence of Keynote, no?
William
After doing a bit more research, I'm leaning towards agreeing with the myth interpretation above, w/ a slight modification for temperature variations and _incredibly_ _slight_ melting brought on by high temperatures (say it's 105 degrees in the shade, a window is going to warm up somewhat right? Perhaps enough to have a small bit almost sorta kinda begin to melt / flow just a eensy teensy little bit?
William
Okay then --- that glass which makes up the CRT / LCD you're looking at now --- solid or liquid?
Solid?
Hmm, take a walk down an old, established neighbourhood w/ buildings hundreds of years old w/ original glass --- hmm, what's that ripple effect in the old window glass? Could it be that over the course of 100 years glass flows down a little bit?
AIUI, the answer is that glass is really a liquid, only one which flows _incredibly_ slowly.
Definitions have to be redefined for the sort of descriptive precision outside of the normal world-view which modern physics requires.
William
The link in the post wasn't working, sorry.
d /WillAda ms/200312182035_JamCam006.jpg
A da ms/20031218211_JamCam008.jpg
Try these:
http://www.tabletpcbuzz.com/forum/uploade
http://www.tabletpcbuzz.com/forum/uploaded/Will
William
It'd be nice if they were more affordable though (this is where that nasty global economy / foreign currency things comes into play :(
I C_ ID=7109
Actually, I've been kind of surprised that Lego hasn't hit upon the idea of marketing kits directly to grown-ups, say a line of desk accessories (the pens struck me as lame).
When I got a Fujitsu Point 510 pen slate, I didn't bother to get a stand---thought about making one out of wood, but instead chose to use my old Legos (I've since added a pen holder and a stand for a CD-RW drive to lift it up behind the Fujitsu Stylistic I did purchase a stand for (was running low on Legos)).
Pictures of the Point 510 and stand should be here:
http://www.tabletpcbuzz.com/forum/topic.asp?TOP
William
These things can't be had for love nor (reasonable quantities) of money --- they sell on EBay for twice what they cost from Microsoft ($19.95 originally).
Unfortunately I bought a system which was supposed to have Win98SE on it, it didn't I didn't fuss 'cause I heard Win98 was more stable, then when I went to purchase some accessories found that there's a _lot_ of stuff which only works w/ Win98SE or later (and doesn't w/ Win98 first edition).
The weird thing is MS will sell one a CD w/ patches for Win98 first edition, but it won't get one to Second.
William
(who would switch the system to Linux if there were Linux alternatives for Fractal Design Expression, Macromedia FreeHand, FutureWave SmartSketch and IBM InkManager and PenOffice 2.5e --- it's a Fujitsu Stylistic pen slate)
My first laptop was a GRiDCase III Plus which I bought back in 1985.
$8,150
For my part, it looks like a _really_ nice machine, but it makes me sad that Sony recently got burned on the pen computing thing, so won't be doing a pen slate or convertible --- oh well, there's always the NEC or the Fujitsu or even the Electrovaya Scribbler...
William
Actually, Display PostSript wasn't that much of a chokepoint on NeXTstep---it _is_ a multi-threaded system after all (the problem was DPS granularity was 1 PostScript operator and sometimes 1 OS op. is ``Display this multi-megabyte bitmap graphic''. The NeXTDimension board off-loaded this from the main CPU though, greatly assisting performance.
Turbo NeXTs were 68040 at 33MHz (the standard was an '040 at 25MHz and the original Cube was an '030 at 25MHz). There were a few pre-production ``Nitro'' accelerator cards (estimates range from 6 to a couple of dozen) which ran at 40MHz in Turbo hardware, and there was a ``Pyro'' CPU upgrade which allowed one to run a clock-doubled 50MHz CPU in _non_ Turbo hardware.
Agree, having X11.app is nice 'cause one doesn't have to wait for things to be ported (just recompile), though QT support for things like LyX for Aqua is _way_ cool.
William
Misses the ``sturm und drang'' over Adobe's promising a free, then low-cost, then no-way-what's-your-market-cap license for Display PostScript (originally co-developed by NeXT and Apple), as well as the free ``Yellow Box'' run-time which went away at that time, as well as the moving target of the up-dated APIs when Apple ceased to think of Mac OS X as an OpenStep implementation.
.pdf out of pretty much any app. If one needs access to other features, well, there's always pdfTeX....(which provides access to things which the Adobe Acrobat GUI _doesn't_)
:(
Apple's support for PDF/X gainsays the claim the pdf support isn't a replacement for Adobe Acrobat to a certain extant. By tweaking a few settings one can get a press-ready
And the author misses Gerben Wierda's spiffy iInstaller.app which is a neat way to install iInstaller packages (which includes TeX, xfig, imagemagick, Ghostscript &c.). This was developed to work around (then limitations) of Apple's Installer.app and to make updating packages more efficient---way cool stuff.
osx.hyperjeff.net is a way-cool app tracker....
Also misses Macromedia FreeHand MX and the irony of NeXTstep's premier drawing / page-layout application having come to Mac OS X as a Carbon app
But a nice, informative article naetheless.
William
When Israel took control of its territory, said territory was under the control of Jordan and other countries in the area.
. html
God made the Mississippi River, the Suez Canal was built by the French (along the path of an abandoned canal from the 13th--8th BC) and later purchased by the Brits. Moreover, the Suez Canal has been held to be an international waterway since 1888, and the UN has consistently upheld that since its inception.
from http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/History/Suez_War
On August 9, 1949, the UN Mixed Armistice Commission upheld Israel's complaint that Egypt was illegally blocking the canal. UN negotiator Ralph Bunche declared: "There should be free movement for legitimate shipping and no vestiges of the wartime blockade should be allowed to remain, as they are inconsistent with both the letter and the spirit of the armistice agreements."
William
It's worth noting that the Palestinian land in question wasn't controlled by the Palestinians, but by other Arab nations who didn't feel it was worth their while to create a Palestinian state. Look up how Jordan for example treated Palestinians who didn't elect Jordanian citizenship (shelling one camp during the Yom Kippur War 'cause they were concerned about the possiblity of armed revolution).
``Israel began a war in 1967'' only tells part of the story---Israel _responded_ to a legitimate ``cassus belli'', the closing of the Suez Canal to Israeli shipping by Egypt. Moreover, their pre-emptive strike (known in the West as, ``The Six Day War'' and in the Arab World as, ``The Setback'') only started the war which Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Jordan and Syria were poised to begin. This war frustrated Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon in their attempt to destroy Israel.
The accidental attack on the USS Liberty was a case of mis-identification by the Israeli Navy (who were notorious for such errors). Israel also paid out several hundred million in reparations for the accidental attack, for which they apologized profusely, and which immense relief was felt (the concern was that it was a Russian ship and that said attack would further escalate Russian involvement).
And of course, the Golan Heights were used by Syria to shell civilian settlements.
William
Take a look at the membership rolls for TUG, dante, bachotex &c. There're a _lot_ more than 210 _members_ of any one of those organizations.
Estimates of TeX's _direct_ userbase range up in the millions, to say nothing of indirect usage such as the typesetting of catalogs, databases, railroad timetables & dynamic web publishing, look at http://custompub.aimsapp.com for one example of the latter.
William
Take a look at Han The Thanh's pdftex project. You are aware that the pdf specification provides capabilities which Adobe Acrobat _doesn't_ provide access to? \usepackage{hyperref} enables many of them, and for the others, well there's always \pdfliteral....
;)
You are aware that Adobe's InDesign uses (finally!) TeX's H&J as the basis for its multi-line composer which they acquired by way of URW's HZ? Funny how for almost twenty years _no one_ developed a better H&J algorithm (Quark, PageMaker, Ventura Publisher, et. al. use ``dumb'' line-at-a-time systems which'll blithely set a tight line next to a loose one requiring _lots_ of manual intervention / tweaking for decent results).
Spellchecking is trivial in a TeX-aware editor, just use the ``aspell'' program and dictionaries which are aware of TeX tags. LyX even makes it interactive, just like Word.
As regards what Word or TeX can or cannot do---at my day job I do database publishing, using TeX as the typesetting engine most of the time, take a look at http://custompub.aimsapp.com and let me know what you think it'd cost to develop such a thing using Microsoft tech, and then to deploy it --- I'm pretty sure we beat those costs
William