Re: English versus German

Peter T. Daniels wrote:
On Jul 1, 6:22 pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article
<4c2f566c-da1c-4a08-9b92-18b180169...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:





On Jul 1, 4:25 pm, Adam Funk <a24...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2009-07-01, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

I have seen travesties by Knuth in three areas: calligraphy,
typography, and biblical interpretation. If there's anything he's
good at, it's not anything he's attempted to popularize.

Your dubious personal prejudices do not constitute natural law (and
see <guruoe$243...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> for a recent goof on the
subject). You could certainly take a lesson from Knuth's total lack
of arrogance.

I'm not aware that he's written any "popular" works, unless you
count _3:16_ as a coffee-table book.

There's another book of "theology" as well. *3:16* does double duty
in the calligraphy column. (I saw the exhibition of the orignal
works at the Wheaton College art gallery ca. 1994 and bought the
poster.)

My calligraphy teacher did Genesis. He didn't like his assignment --
it's a very pedestrian verse.

One year his Christmas keepsake was the Babel story, which he wrote
out in a number of languages -- and he insisted on making the Lamed in
the Hebrew portion narrower than the other letters and refused to
accept that it was a mistake!

The typography travesty, of course, is TeX and LaTeX.

What don't you like about TeX? The page layout and paragraph breaking
routines are incredibly sophisticated.

And incredibly complicated to use. Something only a programmer could
love. (Jonathan Rodgers said that much of the delay in his translation
of Fischer's Arabic Grammar was due to the intricacies of the
programming. Nowadays it would be a cinch in Word. Soon I'll know
whether Arabic can be successfully poured into InDesign -- I've seen
claims that you need a special Middle East version for it to handle
right-to-left scripts.)

(Note that the Computer Modern
font, which I bet is what you're really talking about, is not TeX.)

That's "typography" -- type design. The default TeX font.

Knuth did not create LaTeX. That was Leslie Lamport's creation.

And it gives you Computer Modern out of the box.

So what? Changing fonts is trivial.

I used to use LaTeX for all my lecture notes and journal papers (and just about everything else) when I was still with the university teaching engineering. I liked it, especially the page layout facilities. Nowadays I don't write much mathematics, and I haven't even bothered to install LaTeX on this computer. I use Word (or rather, Open Office, which is very similar and IMO marginally better) for just about everything, just because it's there, and a text editor for playing with html.

There's no doubt, however, that Word is _absolutely_hopeless_ for any sort of mathematical work, and that it's still very primitive as far as page layout etc is concerned compared with LaTeX. I don't doubt you it may well be better for some of the tasks linguists might want to do. But for engineers and mathematicians who want to write equations (and that's nearly all of them), forget it.

John.

.

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