On Thu, Jan 06, 2011 at 10:16:31AM -0800, John Jason Jordan wrote: ... > My real beef with the whole TeX family is the philosophy. They were > designed initially for academic papers, e.g., dissertations and theses, > where the formatting is as important as what you say. (Don't get me > started on the insanity of universities.) ...
To set the story straight: Don Knuth found that getting his books published incurred a significant typesetting surcharge becase they were heavy in mathematical notation. He also found that when his manuscripts went through this typesetting process for each new edition, he'd find a new set of errors. He created TeX to avoid the cost, to have control over the special notations, and so that errors occurred only where he blundered. His was not the first utility to transform manuscript text to camera ready copy. The 1960's "runoff" utility is the ancestor of a long line of such programs, with "groff" as the most recent and widely distributed version. BTW, I've used TeX and Scribus each to typeset a book. In the latter case, my programming background led me to use a script to extract the source from special purpose typsetting notation in a text manuscript. -- Randolph Bentson bentson at holmsjoen.com
