Re: "Paleofonts V. 2" - Freeware paleographical fonts

Christopher Culver wrote:

"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
Mr Daniels, I don't understand why you assume Windows and Word are the
only alternatives to Framemaker. There's also TeX, which is
Unicode-aware,

Unicode DID NOT EXIST then.

Unicode has been around since the late 1980s, and TeX did support
nearly every script that came to compose the Basic Multilingual Plane,
so it's equivalent to awareness of Unicode.

I'll say it again: TeX IS THE WORST CRAP EVER INVENTED FOR TYPESETTING
BOOKS.

Too bad most professional typesetters would disagree. LaTeX may been
seen as too opaque for the common man, but it's very widely used, and
the principles it is based on are those of the great guides of the
pre-computer golden age of typesetting.

Everyone who thinks Knuth is a great typographer and type designer
doesn't know their ass from their elbow. The output of TeX is
hideous -- open anything by Ruhlen to see an example, or Jonathan
Rodgers's translation of Fischer's Arabic grammar --

LaTeX doesn't have one fixed formatting, it's infinitely
customizable. Blame the typesetters for using such poor document
styles instead of some other possibility, don't blame TeX for just
doing what it was told to do.

Notice how you've slipped from TeX to LaTeX, as if they were the same
thing.

TeX out of the box produces crap, and obviously most of the engineers
who type in it have the esthetic sense of a Knuth, thus not the wit to
improve it.

Incidentally, plenty of Cambridge University Press linguistics works
are typeset with LaTeX. They look no different than those typeset with
Quark or Framemaker. You've undoubtedly looked at myriad LaTeX
products without knowing it. It's all a matter of the custom-designed
styles that the publishing company uses.

PLUS, I am told, typing in it is tantamount to programming every bit
of formatting.

It's generally programing every bit of structure. For example, if one
is typing an English-language document with some German quotations in
there, it is obviously a good idea to surround the German with markup

Rather than "surround the German with markup," in Word you select the
text and click "Language: German."

to let the engine know that German hyphenation rules should be invoked
in those portions. Of course you are just relying on hearsay ("I am
told"), I guess you can't be bothered to actually examine a tool
before you rage against its usability.

And where would I have the opportunity to do so?

Did it run on Mac?

Yes, there have been TeX systems for the Macintosh since the
mid-1980s.

But you're now flogging LaTeX, not TeX.

How much simpler would it have been for me to create the 15 or 20 fonts
in TeX or in LaTeX that I did in Fontographer? Things like Coptic,
Gothic, Samaritan, Oriya, Javanese ...?
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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