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

[Andreas Politz <politza@fh-trier.de>]

Xah Lee wrote:
> 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.

It looks to me that Tex is one of only 2 specific systems with it's
own subsubsection in this subsection.


> 
> 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.

You seem to have noticed this by now and trying here to diminish this fact
by attacking the people who wrote the article.

I am not forwarding this to comp.text.tex. I suspect you have enough
entertainment there already.

-ap

> 
> 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/
> 
> ☄