Re: TeX was designed to be archival

First, TeX != LaTeX, so the authors of LaTeX need not feel bound by
constraints placed on TeX.

Second, TeX produces .dvi files, so avoids many font-specific issues.

Some people prefer vintage sports cars while others want power steering,
air conditioning, ABS brakes, hybrid propulsion, and GPS.  There are also
people who would prefer to stick with plain TeX, use pk fonts, and staples
(to attach figures to the back of their printout).  Others who want to
embed figures and use system fonts to create PDF's that can be edited using
GUI apps, indexed and searched using general purpose tools, etc.

In my view, text representations are far from being a solved problem.  The
need to be able to accommodate the full range of living as well as dead
languages on a wide range of devices, make text from speech and speech from
text, etc. may not be compatible with the desire for archival goodness.
In the distant future, people will still be able to
process ASCII text (using a language called Fortran).




On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 9:30 AM, Jonathan.Fine <[email protected]>wrote:

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Allsopp [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: 20 August 2013 16:19
> To: A place for MiKTeX users to discuss MiKTeX related questions.
> Subject: Re: [MiKTeX] Package Documentation Language
>
> Jonathan Fine wrote:
> > >But I got this
> > >
> > >You are attempting to make a LaTex format from a source file That is
> > >more than five yers old.
> >
> > I've come across this.  TeX was designed to be archival.
>
> Out of curiosity, what gave you this idea? TeX may be feature-frozen, but
> the brittle font subsystem makes it a generally inappropriate choice for
> archiving - it's quite difficult to archive the environment in which a TeX
> file is run.
>
> ____________________________________________
>
>
> I got this idea from Don Knuth's remarks at the 'coming out' party for TeX
> in May 1986.  There he wrote that 'The first goal was quality', and that
> 'The second major design goal was to be archival'.
>
> You can read this article in Don's Digital Typography.  The quotes come
> from page 559.   I use these and similar quotes in
> www.ntg.nl/EuroTeX2009/slides/jfine-slides-mainstream.pdf
>
>
> Jonathan
> -- The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an
> exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC
> 038302).
>
>
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-- 
George N. White III <[email protected]>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia
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