Re: An important article about computer typography

Peter T. Daniels wrote:

>I'm glad you said that. As far as I'm concerned, TeX output is hideous
>-- I assume most of it is done in this "Computer Modern" -- with serifs
>that are far too big, default leading that's far too wide, and the worst
>sort of Scotch Roman hooks on the italics. I know mathematicians love it
>because it's easy to compose formulas in the system (I just picked up
>that enormous history of mathematics pub. Norton at Strand for $15), but
>there's really no excuse for anyone else. E.g. the Santa Fe volume on
>language origins ed. Hawkins and Gell-Mann, or anything Ruhlen puts out,
>
>

They say that TeX and METAFONT had their birth when Knuth was writing
his extremely influential series, "the Art of Computer Programming," and
looked at the pages and thought "wow, the typesetting really sucks. I
think I'll take a sabbatical and write a program for doing typesetting,
especially for math..." (and while he was at it, one for designing fonts
too). Computer Modern, I must admit, doesn't appeal to me all that much
either. But for really, REALLY persnickety typesetting, for control over
every jot and tittle JUST SO, you can't beat TeX. You can tweak
placement in whatever increment you want, etc etc. (though sometimes the
coding can be hard).

>See also Jonathan Rodgers's translation of W. Fischer's Arabic grammar
>(Yale) -- the default Arabic is pretty bad, too. So is the Hebrew -- I
>forget where I've seen it.
>
>Now if Gentium could somehow be married to TeX ...
>
>

For some nice Hebrew with TeX, see Yannis Haralambous' Tiqwah system for
typesetting Biblical Hebrew in TeX, and the version of it in use at
http://www.bibles.org.uk/ (see their Bibles Repository and the
"Bibles.org.uk" version, tnk.pdf. It's a big file, though). Generated by
Tiqwah through TeX, with every last vowel-point and accent accounted
for--and when there do appear conflicts, they twiddle the code a little
and fix it. Not much fault to be found with their typesetting.

~mark