On 12/10/2012 02:01 PM, stefano franchi wrote:
<rant>
8<
Such programs [Word and Wordstar] (and still are) were usually very
bad at typesetting complex mathematical formulas unless each single
formula was tweaked by hand, a very painful and expensive proposition.
That was prompted D Knuth to invent TeX---the poor quality of
professional typesetting software for math, not the similar but
irrelevant problem in word processing program.
Actually, TeX predated Word, and Wordstar (or Wordperfect). People used
to run it on DECs. While there were other math-typsetting (to use the
phrase loosely) PC programs before TeX became usable on PCs, such as Jim
Milgram's "Techprint" which he wrote for Radio-Shack computers with 28K
ram, most of us used a combination of typewriters and hand-written
symbols. A respectable journal would typeset the paper from the
typewritten copy, but a few insisted on "camera-ready" --- literally ---
proofs, which resulted in published papers and books with handwritten
symbols. I suspect that Knuth was reacting to that mess rather than
equations in Word. I typed my own Ph.D. thesis on an IBM selectric,
with those interchangeable golf-ball fonts, going over each line 2 or 3
times. A nightmare.
I experienced the full range of mathematical text preparation. I've
written papers on the typewriter, using hand-drawn symbols and markups
for a typesetter, Techprint (another nightmare), 2 or 3 PC-based,
non-graphical programs that produced half-assed output, a couple of
WYSIWYG programs, plain AMS-TeX using a text editor with occasional
previews, to LyX. Clearly the present situation has been the only
reasonable one.
The same radical cost-cutting measures took place in the Natural
sciences/Engineering, of course. But since *they* were already using
Latex/TeX, the quality of their journal and books was only minimally
affected
With the exception of those journals and texts that were typeset with a
full array of symbols, the use of TeX has vastly improved the appearance
of papers (if not the content). The AMS journals from the 1970s and
before were works of art, but even most Springer-Verlag monographs were
truly ugly.
--
David L. Johnson
The motor car reflects our standard of living and gauges the speed of
our present life. It long ago ran down Simple Living, and never halted
to inquire about the prostrate figure which fell as its victim.
-- Warren G. Harding
