Re: TeX was designed to be archival

"TeX was designed with two main goals in mind: to allow anybody to produce
high-quality books using a reasonably minimal amount of effort, and to
provide a system that would give exactly the same results on all computers,
now and in the future"

If the second goal here is not "being archival", then what is?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Allsopp [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Monday, August 26, 2013 3:39 PM
> To: A place for MiKTeX users to discuss MiKTeX related questions.
> Subject: Re: [MiKTeX] TeX was designed to be archival
> 
> Jonathan Fine wrote:
> > David Allsopp wrote:
> > > 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.
> 
> Ah, it's interesting that it's not mentioned *at all* in the TeXbook (even
though
> that was revised 10 years later) - and, to me at least, interesting that
without
> having seen it written I'd say that TeX doesn't in any way demonstrate it
> (platform independence, yes - at least for the most part, but not archival
> repeatability - it's very hard to archive a TeX run of anything but the
most
> trivial plain TeX file accurately: speaking as a Plain TeX, not LaTeX
user).
> 
> > There he wrote that 'The first goal was quality', and that
> 
> Indisputably achieved!
> 
> > 'The second major design goal was to be archival'.
> 
> Cataclysmically missed, in my not-at-all humble opinion!
> 
> > 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
> 
> Thanks for the pointer - a book to add to my reading list :o)
> 
> 
> David
> 
>
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