Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!purdue!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: Tex
Message-ID: <11357@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 20 Oct 89 15:14:08 GMT
References: <392CA75D7DFF80091D@HMCVAX.BITNET>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 20

In article <392CA75D7DFF80091D@HMCVAX.BITNET> SELLSWORTH@HMCVAX.CLAREMONT.EDU ("Scott, part time fuzzy") writes:
>Last I looked, TeX was a montrous, but not unreasonable, pile of Pascal code.

Actually, it's WEB, which needs to be preprocessed before being fed to the
compiler.  There is also a corresponding C translation available, and that's
the one usually used on UNIX systems.

>I would bet that we have the processor horsepower, and certainly the memory.

Don't be so sure about that.

>As I recall, Knuth made it very easy to implement on any machine that ran
>standard Pascal.

Ease of implementation (actually, porting) lies in the eye of the beholder.
TEX itself is by no means the only thing you'll need.  You also need device
postprocessor support for the Apple IIGS display (which is lousy) and for
whatever hardcopy printers you want to support.  In turn, this requires
storage for Metafont descriptions (or font bitmaps, if you take that
approach).  I personally don't think it would be worth the trouble.