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From: reid@glacier.ARPA (Brian Reid)
Newsgroups: net.text
Subject: Re: embedded-command text systems
Message-ID: <2168@glacier.ARPA>
Date: Sun, 8-Dec-85 11:23:07 EST
Article-I.D.: glacier.2168
Posted: Sun Dec  8 11:23:07 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 9-Dec-85 06:31:18 EST
References: <705@unc.unc.UUCP>
Reply-To: reid@glacier.UUCP (Brian Reid)
Distribution: net
Organization: Stanford University, Computer Systems Lab
Lines: 35

In article <705@unc.unc.UUCP> rentsch@unc.UUCP (Tim Rentsch) writes:
>This is exactly what we see with document processing systems and
>technical typesetters.  Pick up a copy of Ullman's book on
>Databases, typeset with TeX.  The typesetting is inexcusably bad!

Actually, the typesetting isn't all THAT bad. What is inexcusably bad, at
least in my copy of that book, is the type imaging and printing. The pages
are fuzzy. Most of this is a failure of the printer when making lithographic
plates. Some of it is the design of the type face. Neither of those has
anything to do with TeX, save that TeX only knows how to work with its own
type faces.

>Of course it is not fair to judge a typesetter by only one of its
>uses.  Look around.  Almost all of the documents (books, papers) I
>have read that were typeset with TeX are awful.  If this is the
>future of technical typesetting, I don't want it -- and it doesn't
>matter whether it was done with TeX, Scribe, WYSIWYG, or chiseling
>stone tablets.

You are right that most of what is done with TeX is ugly, but the reason for
this has nothing to do with TeX. It has to do with the aesthetic sense of
the person using TeX. Systems like TeX give the author too much control over
the appearance of the document, and if the author misuses that control the
resulting document is ugly.

I would like to offer up the new Addison-Wesley PostScript reference manual
as an example of an attractive book typeset in Scribe. The reason it is
attractive is that its appearance was specified by a professional graphic
designer and not by a programmer. 

WYSIWYG systems give the user even more control over the appearance than TeX
does--with the concomitant possibility of even more abuse of that control.
-- 
	Brian Reid	decwrl!glacier!reid
	Stanford	reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA