Re: English versus German

Peter T. Daniels wrote:
On Jul 2, 12:02 am, "John Atkinson" <johna...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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.

Obviously not, or we wouldn't be bombarded with crappy-looking books
by computer scientists pretending to do linguistics.

You don't have to be a computer scientist to write a crappy-looking book! You just have to not care. (Whether computer scientists on average care less about that sort of thing than other linguists, I've no idea.)

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.

Note: engineering.

I had to use OpenOffice for several weeks while I was getting an
upgraded PC and found it utterly hopeless because of the impossibility
of adding keyboard shortcuts -- do you remember what you had to go
through to get small capitals?

Sorry, I've don't think I've ever felt the urge to write anything in small capitals. If I did, I'd just change the font size for the duration. I agree that if I was interested in trying to write professional-looking linguistics text involving lots of them small caps, it might well be more convenient to do it via a "shortcut".

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.

What's mathematcs to me, or me to mathematics?

No reason an efficient GUI couldn't have been devised for writing
mathematics. But I did manage to copy every formula in Chomsky 1951
using Word's Equations Field tool.

"Copying" is one thing. Writing original text is quite another.

When I'm composing text involving mathematical formulas and equations, I want to do it the same way whether I'm using a pencil and paper or LaTex -- and the same way as when I'm writing an English sentence -- I want to start at the beginning and continue through to the end; and I want the program to do all the fiddly layout stuff. Just like Brian does. I can't stand having to "compose" the formula separately in some box, moving bits and pieces of it around to get the layout more or less right, and then copy it into where I want it. It completely disrupts one's train of thought.

John.

.

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