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From: ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Comments on TeX - The Program
Message-ID: <2799@sol.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 30-Sep-87 20:24:21 EDT
Article-I.D.: sol.2799
Posted: Wed Sep 30 20:24:21 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 5-Oct-87 00:36:05 EDT
References: <3360@blia.BLI.COM> <3044@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com>
Reply-To: ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap)
Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY
Lines: 39

|The really amusing thing about TeX is that it seems designed to make it
|unlikely that you can send your friends a TeX file that they can print,
|because they may not have "cmramrmagicfont at 14pt"
|
|We all know the canonical TeX hacker advice: Of course dummy you have
|the old PXL GF AMR CM fonts why don't you be manly and bring up METAFONT
|and design your own hobbit fonts at 23.5 pt surely you have an extra 10MB
|of disk space."
|
|Maybe LaTeX helps?  I try to avoid anything in which the word FRAGILE appears
|in the documentation but a lot of people use it but then a lot of people smoke
|cigarettes too.  Would anyone care to estimate the fraction of contributions
|to the TeXhax mailing list that deal with fonts?
|
|Now this.
|Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus!

Actually, not as likely as you make it sound.

(1) Most people stick to what they get with LaTeX and the standard size
changing commands. This means most sites will have the fonts.

(2) Some drivers allow font substitution.

More often than not, a DVI file generated elsewhere, even on say a VM
system, will print alright on our Unix system. However I strongly
prefer to have TeX input, for the same reason I want sources for the
programs I intend to work on. In such cases, it is normally 20 seconds
work to locate any weird font declarations and make them sane.

Most of the traffic in TeXhax seems to be centered on two kinds of topics:

(1) How can I get a left aligned, numbered, indented and italicized
thingy in my document on even pages (or some variant thereof :-)).

(2) How can I get a driver/previewer for my 1969 Shakerattleandroll
23-1/2 by 63 column terminal :-).

	Ken