Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!olivea!samsung!think.com!rpi!batcomputer!cornell!uw-beaver!stowe.cs.washington.edu!pauld From: pauld@stowe.cs.washington.edu (Paul Barton-Davis) Newsgroups: comp.text.tex Subject: Re: Why use TeX if ... Message-ID: <1991May9.204113.17636@beaver.cs.washington.edu> Date: 9 May 91 20:41:13 GMT References: <1991May4.191951.26699@csrd.uiuc.edu>> <1991May9.164341.14084@csrd.uiuc.edu> Sender: news@beaver.cs.washington.edu (USENET News System) Organization: Computer Science & Engineering, U. of Washington, Seattle Lines: 102 In article <1991May9.164341.14084@csrd.uiuc.edu> eijkhout@s41.csrd.uiuc.edu (Victor Eijkhout) writes: >Damian.Cugley@prg.ox.ac.uk (Damian Cugley) writes: > >>Great, now do it in TeX and make it "flow" around a PostScript picture > >You mean around the figure, not just around the bounding box? >The latter is easy. I always wondered how you'd do the former. >It means you'd have to have a postscript interpreter aboard. > Myself and Tim Bradshaw (tim@cstr.ed.ac.uk) talked a lot about this a couple of years back. We came to conclusion that TeX's internal model of typesetting operations is not powerful enough to do this. You cannot even specify the exact shape of the picture and wrap around it, at least not in any general manner. We began work on a program called TinT (TinT Is Not TeX) that used Lisp as its extension language, was TeX compatible (i.e all your macros would work) and retained, amongst other things, TeX's hyphenation and math setting features. It was intended that TinT would pass the trip test. The primary difference was the internal model - we were going to change it from "boxes+glue" to something a little more PostScript like, and rather more reflective of digital typesetting than the model Knuth picked. We liked to think that were writing the TeX Knuth would have written if PageMaker had been around when he began. Unfortunately, I moved to the US, and Tim moved to Edinburgh, and that was that. Who knows, perhaps we or someone else will pick up the challenge again. >> Indent the left edge of the text of the >>page to make room for a 50mmx50mm illustration. Produce a title page >>with the lettering set around a circle -- in less than half an hour. > >Both no sweat. > >>There is a lot that TeX cannot do. There is a lot that TeX can only do >>with unreasonable difficulty -- very simple magazine layouts (with >>*non*-floating illustrations) require a lot of TeX GrandMastery. > >Agreed. But TeX was never meant for that. It is basically >a book typesetter, not a page formatter. > I would have said that TeX is a formatter using a boxes+glue model. If you can do it with boxes+glue (or rules and leading) then you can do it with TeX. Printers used to charge a lot more for the type of thing that Mac software has made easy, but TeX works like a typesetter, not like a computer. >>What makes TeX good? TeX is portable, has the most sophisticated >>line-breaking and maths-setting systems, and has one semi-standard >>markup style (LaTeX 2.x). It is the only system where a pauper such as >>myself has a chance of making and using their own typefaces. On the >>other hand people who don't have the time to waste becoming an >>arch-hacker and who don't care about the rather poor typesetting >>produced by DTP systems will be better off with MacWhatever. > The hacking problem is primarily caused by the fact that the TeX extension language was designed (apparently) as a macro replacement language. If TeX has a "normal" or "proper" programming language, then it would a lot easier to extend, without getting used to its arcane grammar. >I don't agree. First of all it's not a choice of having >poor typesetting (and personally, I can live easier >without text flowing around figures than without decent >typesetting) *or* becoming an arch-hacker. If LaTeX >suits your purposes (and it does for many people) >using TeX is just fine. >Only if you want to do sophisticated page >design do you need some fancy dtp package. Here, I don't agree with Victor. There are a *lot* of things that are very difficult to do with TeX by way of general solution, and very slow and tricky to do in any specific instance. I've come across some very tough things even for very normal pages. Yes, I solved them, but then I've been willing to put hours into learning. I've seen Mac people produce stuff that is way more complex than anything I've done with TeX - the only thing is is that its normally a per-page process. That's where TeX really wins - once you master how to do something properly, it works again, and again and again. >But then, what's the use of doing that? I may do it >in a report that I'm writing, but when I submit that >to a journal they tell me 'great, just give us the figure >on glossy paper'. > Buy an 1200dpi printer, get some good halftoning software, and do it in PostScript. This is not an ad for the company I used to work for, of course .... :-))) >Victor. -- paul -- Paul Barton-Davis UW Computer Science Lab "People cannot cooperate towards common goals if they are forced to compete with each other in order to guarantee their own survival."