On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 12:11:00PM +0900, Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote:
> I have no idea what impression your word "very restricted" implies.
> I imagine Latin alphabet people have long tradition of typewriter.
> If lack of proportional font were such very annoying thing for them,
> why typewriter was so widely used?
Typewriters are a pragmatic thing. Until recently, they were the
only way to produce decent print (i.e. not handwritten) quickly and
cheaply. Every so often, I find a book in the library, usually in
the linguistics section, where it was typed up on a typewriter and
all the accents were added in by hand. If they had had an option,
almost any option, they would have used it, because the end result
looks awful. Good typesetting is the top of my list on things I
appreciate computers for.
> (I have even read a journal which
> use typewritter (courier?) for typesetting.)
Find, if you can, Donald Knuth's "TeX and Metafont: New Directions
in Typesetting". In it, Knuth shows the typographic history of "The
Transactions of the American Mathematical Society" through 1977, and
shows where, at one point to save costs, they went to a typewriter
style printing. "At this point I regretfully stopped submitting
papers to the American Mathematical Society, as the finished product
was just too painful for me to look at. Similar fluctuations of
typegraphical quality have appeared recetly in all technical fields,
especially in physics where the situation has gotten even worse."
(page 7). Later he explains how the decreasing quality of The Art of
Computer Programming's typesetting got him to design TeX.
--
David Starner - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org
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