Extended TeX: Past, Present, and Future 300
First time accepted submitter Hamburg writes "Frank Mittelbach, member of the LaTeX Project and LaTeX3 developer, reviews significant issues of TeX raised already 20 years ago. Today he evaluates which issues are solved, and which still remain open and why. Examples of issues are managing consecutive hyphens, rivers of vertical spaces and identical words across lines, grid-based design, weighed hyphenation points, and overcoming the the mouth/stomach separation. Modern engines such as pdfTeX, XeTeX and LuaTeX are considered with regard to solutions of important problems in typesetting." Note: When TeX was first released, Jimmy Carter was president.
Jimmy Carter was president of TeX?! (Score:0, Funny)
Interesting.
Re:Jimmy Carter was president of TeX?! (Score:2, Funny)
even more surprising, when LaTeX was released in the early 80s, Ronald Reagan was president!
Re:Jimmy Carter was president of TeX?! (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, but there was that helicopter crash; the typesetting community always blamed TeX for that, and ever since then, TeX has been relegated to doing font work in the third world, charity undertakings and the like. And really, who wanted to be limited to 55 fonts per document? Some of us type in the fast lane, buddy.
Wrong Font For Program Name (Score:5, Funny)
Oh dear oh dear, I hope Donald Knuth doesn't see that Slashdot doesn't seem to allow the correct METAFONT for displaying the program name! Pissing off Donald Knuth would be like kicking the Dalai Lama.
Is it possible to represent it in it's proper format via this version of Slashcode?
Re:Jimmy Carter was president of TeX?! (Score:2, Funny)
so old it must be replaced... (Score:5, Funny)
TeX has intentionally horrible formatting (Score:2, Funny)
Hyphens and perfect justification are great when you want to replicate the unreadability of a newspaper from a century ago.
When you actually want something readable that doesn't look like shit, you need to stop it with the stupid stunts. Screwing with the kerning is not acceptable. Splitting words is not acceptable. You shouldn't even be splitting phrases or clauses onto different lines, and preferably not even sentences.
Yes, I'm sure you can disable the hyphenation and justification crap. (right...?) You shouldn't be able to enable it. These "features" are one of two major reasons why TeX documents normally look like crap, the other reason being the horrible Computer Modern font.
Re:Wrong Font For Program Name (Score:4, Funny)