Equations

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2007-10-05 15:03, Frank Jahnke <jahnke at sonatabio.com> wrote:
>On Fri, 2007-10-05 at 23:34 +0200, michaelgrunewald at yahoo.fr wrote:
>> I am always a bit surprised that TeX was released in 78 (before my
>> birth!) and---despite its algorithms are published---its output
>> quality remains unmatched [1] by common programs. Why these programs
>> do not apply TeX's strategies to solve their problems? This makes me
>> wonder.
> 
> This is a good question.  TeX didn't really hit its stride until about
> 1989 (with Metafont and the language freeze), and the effort learned a
> lot from troff.  Nevertheless, I am always struck by how ugly is the
> type that Word produces.  You can always tell.  I've read about how
> sophisticated its algorithm for this or that is, but the end result is
> terribly inferior to both troff and TeX.
> 
> I don't really know why -- and it extends beyond the hyphenation
> algorithm to things like inter-word kerning and type face formation --
> but I just don't like the way Word documents look.  Maybe one of these
> days I'll look into it.  I also find the insistence of the TeX
> community to use the dreadful CM font family to be misguided.  There's
> a reason that the classical fonts are classics.

As far as journals are concerned, I think the insistence about CM fonts
is usually an attempt to "keep the original style of the journal", and
not so much a lack of respect for the beauty of classic font families.

Since the first releases of TeX, there have been many interesting
developments about font-handling in the TeX world, like the typeface
definitions of ConTeXt, and the drop-in packages of LaTeX which allow
one to use Palatino, Helvetica, and other classic fonts.

This is getting off-topic for the original topic, but I learnt something
new (about the LyX wiki), so -- at least for me -- it was worth it :)

Giorgos