Paul Isambert <[email protected]> wrote: > Selon Robin Fairbairns <[email protected]>: > > > Philipp Gesang <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > ···<date: 2012-12-02, Sunday>···<from: Petr Olsak>··· > > > > > > > The solution which loads some sty > > > > file and starts loading 18 another .sty files (!!) to solve one > > > > SIMPLE problem is not compatible with plainTeX philosophy. > > > > but of course. but then, luatex isn't exactly compatible with the > > plaintex philosophy, what with plain's weird mangling of ascii and all. > > I'm not sure what you refer to with the mangling of ASCII,
the first quadrant of ascii is replaced with a bunch of odds and ends, as is space. > but anyway if plain > TeX philosophy is -- at least that's how I see it -- ``power to the user'' (so > s/he can feel hairy on the chest), I think no engine is better fitted than > LuaTeX to fulfill that program. at a q&a at tug95, don was asked whether he had used latex; he said he "didn't like large systems". (cheers from back of room...) while it's (just about) arguable that tex itself is a small system, one has to strain the definition to breaking point to accept that luatex is such a one, too. personally, this doesn't bother me; the side effect -- complicated font loading -- seems to bother some. > But then, I'm both a do-it-yourself fundamentalist and LuaTeX fanatic :) i am happy to do-it-myself when "it" hasn't already been done well enough by someone else. (or i used to be ... as i get older, i'm slowing down.) remember, the argument started because of a complaint that "load a font" in luatex seemed to involve a large bunch of packages -- which was "incompatible with the plain philosophy". plain's approach to fonts was to work well enough with a small set of carefully tailored fonts. petr has written a plain tex font-selector (ofs) which allows the user to go beyond knuth's tailored fonts; istm that ofs bursts the bounds of the philosophy, by being (rather) big. _i_ am impressed by ofs; surely a plain tex philosopher would frown at it. fwiw, i'm not terribly keen on computer modern, any more. its style is 150 (or so) years old, and as my eyesight fails i find it harder and harder to read. (my partially-sighted wife can't cope with it at all, but her choice of fonts seems pretty odd to me.) robin
