Re: An important article about computer typography

Mark E. Shoulson wrote:

>
> 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.

You're talking about typesetting. I'm talking about typography. (Type
design.)

What you said in your last message about making all the thin and thick
strokes _exactly_ the same would seem to be a major part of the program.
That's not how eyes and lettershapes interact, even if engineers would
like it to be.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...