On Oct 28, 2011, at 12:54 PM, George N. White III wrote: > 0. Why is Tex still necessary? My impression is that Knuth hoped to > see his work used in more creative ways than TeX distros.
Well, that's why LuaTeX is being developed, and the thought behind the development of ANT (though I haven't had much luck getting more recent versions of the latter compiled). > 1. Knuth wanted to create beautiful books, yet many distinctly > unbeautiful books are still being published. Lack of support for > font design size, too similar fonts used for text and maths (e.g., > same glyph for letter "a" and variable "a") contribute to lack of > beauty. I'm reminded of Knuth's early paper in which he analyzed > bugs in discarded decks of punched cards and found many examples of > errors resulting from failure to apply well-known principles taught in > into courses. Sturgeon's law. > 2. Knuth created his own fonts and tools and these are still part of > a TeX system. What problems are still present in the fonts and > support provided by modern GUI environments? I'd really like to see a super-font-family developed which encompasses _every_ possible axis and design option in NFSS. In GUI environments, selecting optical sizes is a pain, as is selecting character variations. > 3. Knuth was concerned with maths. There are now many groups that > use TeX for documents that do not involved maths. What do the > descendants of TeX have that other general purpose tools lack? Free licensing and easy operation from a simple text file and efficiency. > 4. Knuth was concerned primarily with typeset material. Since then > there have been developments in linearization/flattened maths for > communications, and math markup for web (html) documents. It would be neat to see a TeX variant which would make a .ePub, adding special characters (such as zero-width-non-joiners and discretionary hyphens) to improve rendering. > 5. Knuth built a compiler that is used in batch mode, but the > majority of documents are created using GUI tools. What use cases > are better served by batch mode, and in what cases is TeX used by > default because of available GUI tools refuse to play. Large database publications. Variable data printing. William -- William Adams senior graphic designer Fry Communications Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow. -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex