Re: English versus German

In article
<05b88efd-7205-4508-a4a7-2170a4432abc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> 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:

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.

????

You type the text. TeX formats the pages and paragraphs
automatically, spacing characters, words, and lines in such a way to
take the look of the entire page into account, optimizing the whole
page (not just one line at a time) to avoid bad kinds of white space,
such as rivers. The user doesn't have to do anything special to make
that happen.

(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.

Do you use the default font in Word? When you want to use a different
font, do you just throw up your hands and cry "But they gave me a
default, so I have to use it!"?

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

And it gives you Computer Modern out of the box.

And out of the box, Word gives you (among other terrible things)
woefully inadequate kerning and no fi/fl ligatures.

Take a wild guess which is easier to change: the font in (La)TeX, or
the kerning and ligatures in Word.

Nathan

--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/
.

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