Re: wikipedia's (ascii) math notation? emacs easy-way to translate it?

[Xah Lee <xahlee@gmail.com>]

Xah Lee wrote:
> > TeX is proprobably not among one of the best tool among typesetting
> > professionals.


G. A. Edgar wrote:
> Correct.  TeX is only the best tool among those typesetting
> professionals who typeset mathematics.  Most typesetting professionals
> hate to do mathematics.
>
> Get a math research journal from the library.  Any one. Read the
> "instructions for authors" contained there.  It will say that
> manuscripts must be in Latex.  A few journals may grudgingly also
> accept Microsoft Word.  That's it.
>
> --
> G. A. Edgar         http://www.math.ohio-state.edu/~edgar/

The issue is this thread, is not “is TeX used by math publishers?” or
“is TeX good for typesetting mathematics?”.

The question in this thread is:

Is TeX among one of the best tool among typesetting professionals.

My claim is that no.

For example, if you look at Wikipedia on the article typesetting,
under their Digital Era subsection, you'll see that TeX is mentioned
only after the discussion of some 10 or so other systems.

Also, if you look into the article to see whether TeX is used other
than by math and programing tech geekers, you find this curious last
paragraph, i quote:

TeX is a very powerful typesetting system used in many applications
other than mathematics. The Editora graphical user interface written
by D. Klutz[citation needed], using TeX as typesetting engine, offers
a powerful pagination tool for Classified Ads Newspapers and Magazines
[citation needed]. Editora is used by the major Classified Ads
Newspapers and Magazines in France[citation needed]. The 12,000 pages
landmark French dictionary Le Robert edition 2003 was typeset by TeX
in less than 10 minutes[citation needed].

That paragraph sounds like some TeX geeking fanatic tried to make TeX
look better on that page. Also notice the lots of “citation needed”
claims. The first sentence defensively sets out a claim. The last
sentence about Le Robert seems to pull a rabbit out of a hat.

here's a full quote of the Wikipedia's article on typesetting on the
section “Digital Era” as of toda 2008-12-04. (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typesetting#Digital_era )
--------------------------------------
Digital era

The next generation of phototypesetting machines to emerge were those
that generated characters on a Cathode ray tube. Typical of the type
was the Autologic APS5. These machines were the mainstay of
phototypesetting for much of the 1970s and 1980s. Such machines could
be 'driven online' by a computer front-end system or take their data
from magnetic tape. Type fonts were stored digitally on conventional
magnetic disk drives.

Computers excel at automatically typesetting documents. Character-by-
character computer-aided phototypesetting was in turn rapidly rendered
obsolete in the 1980s by fully digital systems employing a raster
image processor to render an entire page to a single high-resolution
digital image, now known as imagesetting.

The first commercially successful laser imagesetter, able to make use
of a raster image processor was the Monotype Lasercomp. ECRM,
Compugraphic (later purchased by Agfa) and others rapidly followed
suit with machines of their own.

Early minicomputer-based typesetting software introduced in the 1970s
and early 1980s such as Datalogics Pager, Penta, Miles 33, Xyvision,
troff from Bell Labs, and IBM's Script product with CRT terminals,
replaced these electro-mechanical devices and used text markup
languages to describe type and other page formatting information. The
descendants of these text markup languages include SGML, XML and HTML.

The minicomputer systems output columns of text on film for paste-up
and eventually produced entire pages and signatures of 4, 8, 16 or
more pages using imposition software on devices such as the Israeli-
made Scitex Dolev. The data stream used by these systems to drive page
layout on printers and imagesetters led to the development of printer
control languages such as Adobe PostScript and Hewlett-Packard's HP
PCL.

Text typeset in Iowan Old Style roman, italics and small caps,
optimised at approximately 10 words per line, typeface sized at 14
points on 1.4 x leading, with 0.2 points extra tracking. Extract of an
essay by Oscar Wilde The Renaissance of English Art ca. 1882.

Before the 1980s, practically all typesetting for publishers and
advertisers was performed by specialist typesetting companies. These
companies performed keyboarding, editing and production of paper or
film output, and formed a large component of the graphic arts
industry. In the United States these companies were located in rural
Pennsylvania, New England or the Midwest where labor was cheap, but
within a few hours' travel time of the major publishing centers.

In 1985, desktop publishing became available, starting with the Apple
Macintosh, Adobe PageMaker (and later QuarkXPress) and PostScript.
Improvements in software and hardware, and rapidly-lowering costs,
popularized desktop publishing and enabled very fine control of
typeset results much less expensively than the minicomputer dedicated
systems. At the same time, word processing systems such as Wang and
WordPerfect revolutionized office documents. They did not, however,
have the typographic ability or flexibility required for complicated
book layout, graphics, mathematics, or advanced hyphenation and
justification rules (H and J).

By the year 2000 this industry segment had shrunk because publishers
were now capable of integrating typesetting and graphic design on
their own in-house computers. Many found that the cost of maintaining
high standards of typographic design and technical skill made it more
economical to out-source to freelancers and graphic design
specialists.

The availability of cheap, or free, fonts made the conversion to do-it-
yourself easier but also opened up a gap between skilled designers and
amateurs. The advent of PostScript, supplemented by the PDF file
format, provided a universal method of proofing designs and layouts,
readable on major computer and operating systems.

[edit]
SGML and XML systems

The arrival of SGML/XML as the document model made other typesetting
engines popular. Such engines include Datalogics Pager, Penta, Miles
33, OASYS, Xyvision's XML Professional Publisher (XPP), FrameMaker,
Arbortext, YesLogic's Prince, QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign. These
products allow users to program their typesetting process around the
SGML/XML with the help of scripting languages. Some of them, such as
UltraXML, provide attractive WYSIWYG interfaces with support for XML
standards and Unicode to attract a wider spectrum of users.

[edit]
Troff and Successors
Main article: Troff

During the mid-1970s Joseph Ossanna, working at Bell Laboratories,
wrote the troff typesetting program to drive a Wang C/A/T
phototypesetter owned by the Labs; it was later enhanced by Brian
Kernighan to support output to different equipment such as laser
printers and the like. While its use has fallen off, it is still
included with a number of Unix and Unix-like systems and has been used
to typeset a number of high-profile technical and computer books. Some
versions, as well as a GNU work-alike called groff, are now open
source.

[edit]
TeX and LaTeX

Mathematical text typeset using TeX and the AMS Euler font.
Main article: TeX

The TeX system, developed by Donald E. Knuth at the end of 70s, is
another widespread and powerful automated typesetting system that has
set high standards, especially for typesetting mathematics. TeX is
considered fairly difficult to learn on its own, and deals more with
appearance than structure. The LaTeX macro package written by Leslie
Lamport at the beginning of 80s, offered a simpler interface, and an
easier way to systematically encode the structure of a document. LaTeX
markup is very widely used in academic circles for published papers
and even books. Standard TeX does not provide a WYSIWYG interface,
though there are programs such as LyX and Scientific Workplace that
provide one. Another WYSIWYG editor very much inspired by TeX is
TeXmacs.

TeX is a very powerful typesetting system used in many applications
other than mathematics. The Editora graphical user interface written
by D. Klutz[citation needed], using TeX as typesetting engine, offers
a powerful pagination tool for Classified Ads Newspapers and Magazines
[citation needed]. Editora is used by the major Classified Ads
Newspapers and Magazines in France[citation needed]. The 12,000 pages
landmark French dictionary Le Robert edition 2003 was typeset by TeX
in less than 10 minutes[citation needed].

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄