English versus German
DKleinecke
/* setup handler list binary searchable array hash table (in
german, that'd be one word ;) */
Setup is a verb. The next seven words are an English compound noun. I
leave it's substructure as an exercise for the reader. Theoretically
these things can be infinitely long - but has anyone seen a longer one
in the wild (meaning not concocted to prove such things are possible)?
And it is really one word in German?
Helmut Richter
> I found the following comment in a computer program
>
> /* setup handler list binary searchable array hash table (in
> german, that'd be one word ;) */
>
> Setup is a verb. The next seven words are an English compound noun. I
> leave it's substructure as an exercise for the reader.
> [...]
I am sorry I do not see any structure in this word, so I cannot answer the
following question.
> And it is really one word in German?
> Theoretically
> these things can be infinitely long - but has anyone seen a longer one
> in the wild (meaning not concocted to prove such things are possible)?
--
Helmut Richter
Peter T. Daniels
In English, setup is a noun; the verb would be set up. That appears to
be an expression in a computer language, rather than in English.
Joachim Pense
Let me try.
setup handler list: Einstellungsbearbeiterliste
hash table: Suchtabelle
binary searchable array: Binärsuchvektor (or Binärsucharray)
Together: Einstellungsbearbeiterlistenbinärsuchvektorsuchtabelle.
Well, er, hmm ...
JKoachim
Pierre Jelenc
> On Jun 30, 1:00?pm, DKleinecke <dkleine...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I found the following comment in a computer program
> >
> > german, that'd be one word ;) */
> >
> > Setup is a verb. The next seven words are an English compound noun. I
> > leave it's substructure as an exercise for the reader. Theoretically
> > these things can be infinitely long - but has anyone seen a longer one
> > in the wild (meaning not concocted to prove such things are possible)?
> >
> > And it is really one word in German?
>
> In English, setup is a noun; the verb would be set up. That appears to
> be an expression in a computer language, rather than in English.
One can parse it as:
setup-handler list: [binary-searchable array [hash table]]
i.e. "The setup-handler program in question uses a list that is the hash
table of a binary-searchable array."
Maybe.
Pierre
--
Pierre Jelenc
The Gigometer www.gigometer.com
The NYC Beer Guide www.nycbeer.org
Ruud Harmsen
sci.lang:
>On Tue, 30 Jun 2009, DKleinecke wrote:
>
>> I found the following comment in a computer program
>>
>> /* setup handler list binary searchable array hash table (in
>> german, that'd be one word ;) */
>>
>> Setup is a verb. The next seven words are an English compound noun. I
>> leave it's substructure as an exercise for the reader.
>> [...]
>
>I am sorry I do not see any structure in this word, so I cannot answer the
>following question.
>
>> And it is really one word in German?
Not the answer, but about the subject:
http://rudhar.com/lingtics/lngcmpen.htm
--
Ruud Harmsen, http://rudhar.com
Adam Funk
> I found the following comment in a computer program
>
> /* setup handler list binary searchable array hash table (in
> german, that'd be one word ;) */
>
> Setup is a verb.
"Setup" is a noun (although I prefer to hyphenate it) unless it's a
mistake for "set up": "the set-up" means roughly "the way things are
set up".
> The next seven words are an English compound noun. I
> leave it's substructure as an exercise for the reader. Theoretically
> these things can be infinitely long - but has anyone seen a longer one
> in the wild (meaning not concocted to prove such things are possible)?
>
> And it is really one word in German?
It sounds plausible.
--
In Karhide king and kyorremy have a good deal of control over what
people do, but very little over what they hear, and none over what
they say. Here, the government can check not only act but thought.
Surely no men should have such power over others. (LeGuin 1969)
Brian M. Scott
<hh...@web.de> wrote in
<news:Pine.LNX.4.64.09...@lxhri01.lrz.lrz-muenchen.de>
in sci.lang:
> On Tue, 30 Jun 2009, DKleinecke wrote:
>> I found the following comment in a computer program
>> /* setup handler list binary searchable array hash table (in
>> german, that'd be one word ;) */
>> Setup is a verb.
Noun.
>> The next seven words are an English compound noun. I
>> leave it's substructure as an exercise for the reader.
>> [...]
> I am sorry I do not see any structure in this word, [...]
It's a hash table in the form of a binary searchable array,
and it's for the setup handler, i.e., the part of the
program that handles some sort of initiation.
Brian
Christian Weisgerber
> I found the following comment in a computer program
>
> /* setup handler list binary searchable array hash table (in
> german, that'd be one word ;) */
>
> Setup is a verb. The next seven words are an English compound noun.
"Setup" (or "set-up") is a noun. "Set up" would be the verb.
Certainly the whole eight parts could form a single compound.
> And it is really one word in German?
It would most likely not be phrased as such.
--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber na...@mips.inka.de
Tak To
> I found the following comment in a computer program
>
> /* setup handler list binary searchable array hash table (in
> german, that'd be one word ;) */
This does not make much sense to a programmer. List,
arrays and hash tables are data structures that have
mutually exclusive characteristics, so treating triplet
as a hybrid does not make sense. Moreover, they are
too generic to be a cascade of subparts. (E.g "hotel
kitchen cabinet door lock" sounds plausible but not
"hotel kitchen container box bottle".)
"Binary searchable array" sounds odd too. Most
programmers would call it a "sorted array".
The whole thing sounds like something made up by
someone familiar with (English) programmer jargon.
Tak
--
----------------------------------------------------------------+-----
Tak To ta...@alum.mit.eduxx
--------------------------------------------------------------------^^
[taode takto ~{LU5B~}] NB: trim the xx to get my real email addr
DKleinecke
Setup is a relatively common VERB among computer programmers. It might
be spelled wrong - but I would spell it the same way the programmer
did. I observe the Google groups spell checker rejects it.
The comment I quoted is NOT an expression in a computer language. It
is the English language explanation for the statement
g_handler_list_bsa_ht = g_hash_table_new (g_direct_hash, NULL);
which is in a computer language (C to be exact). You can read it in
the g_signal_init function in the GObject file in GLib which is
available online.
Probably you need to know that handler lists are being manipulated in
order to make sense out it.
Let's be open-minded about this. Open source computer programs are a
form of literature. Don Knuth has urged that they be written as
literature. In most open source programs there are only fragments of
English writing in the comments.
I, for one, am not prepared to exclude written English from the
subject matter of linguistics.
Peter T. Daniels
> On Jun 30, 10:52 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Jun 30, 1:00 pm, DKleinecke <dkleine...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > I found the following comment in a computer program
>
> > > /* setup handler list binary searchable array hash table (in
> > > german, that'd be one word ;) */
>
> > > Setup is a verb. The next seven words are an English compound noun. I
> > > leave it's substructure as an exercise for the reader. Theoretically
> > > these things can be infinitely long - but has anyone seen a longer one
> > > in the wild (meaning not concocted to prove such things are possible)?
>
> > > And it is really one word in German?
>
> > In English, setup is a noun; the verb would be set up. That appears to
> > be an expression in a computer language, rather than in English.
>
> Setup is a relatively common VERB among computer programmers. It might
> be spelled wrong - but I would spell it the same way the programmer
> did. I observe the Google groups spell checker rejects it.
>
> The comment I quoted is NOT an expression in a computer language. It
> is the English language explanation for the statement
No, it isn't.
> g_handler_list_bsa_ht = g_hash_table_new (g_direct_hash, NULL);
>
> which is in a computer language (C to be exact). You can read it in
> the g_signal_init function in the GObject file in GLib which is
> available online.
>
> Probably you need to know that handler lists are being manipulated in
> order to make sense out it.
>
> Let's be open-minded about this. Open source computer programs are a
> form of literature. Don Knuth has urged that they be written as
> literature. In most open source programs there are only fragments of
> English writing in the comments.
I have seen travesties by Knuth in three areas: calligraphy,
typography, and biblical interpretation. If there's anything he's good
at, it's not anything he's attempted to popularize.
> I, for one, am not prepared to exclude written English from the
> subject matter of linguistics.-
But your original line isn't an example of written English.
Brian M. Scott
<gram...@verizon.net> wrote in
<news:b7f9c12b-15d3-4100...@t21g2000yqi.googlegroups.com>
in sci.lang:
> On Jun 30, 10:59�pm, DKleinecke <dkleine...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Jun 30, 10:52�am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>>> On Jun 30, 1:00�pm, DKleinecke <dkleine...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> I found the following comment in a computer program
>>>> � � � /* setup handler list binary searchable array hash table (in
>>>> german, that'd be one word ;) */
>>>> Setup is a verb. The next seven words are an English
>>>> compound noun. I leave it's substructure as an
>>>> exercise for the reader. Theoretically these things
>>>> can be infinitely long - but has anyone seen a longer
>>>> one in the wild (meaning not concocted to prove such
>>>> things are possible)?
>>> > And it is really one word in German?
>>> In English, setup is a noun; the verb would be set up.
>>> That appears to be an expression in a computer
>>> language, rather than in English.
>> Setup is a relatively common VERB among computer
>> programmers. It might be spelled wrong - but I would
>> spell it the same way the programmer did.
It is certainly spelled wrong if it's intended to be the
verb and not the noun. And it matters, because the comment
is interpretable either way, but with different meanings.
>> I observe the Google groups spell checker rejects it.
>> The comment I quoted is NOT an expression in a computer
>> language. It is the English language explanation for the
>> statement
> No, it isn't.
It is in the English-language jargon of a particular field.
>> � � � � g_handler_list_bsa_ht = g_hash_table_new (g_direct_hash, NULL);
>> which is in a computer language (C to be exact). You can
>> read it in the g_signal_init function in the GObject
>> file in GLib which is available online.
>> Probably you need to know that handler lists are being
>> manipulated in order to make sense out it.
>> Let's be open-minded about this. Open source computer
>> programs are a form of literature. Don Knuth has urged
>> that they be written as literature.
Sensible fellow.
>> In most open source programs there are only fragments of
>> English writing in the comments.
> I have seen travesties by Knuth in three areas:
> calligraphy, typography, and biblical interpretation. If
> there's anything he's good at, it's not anything he's
> attempted to popularize.
You're wrong, unless 'popularize' excludes serious
textbooks.
[...]
Brian
Helmut Wollmersdorfer
> DKleinecke wrote:
>> I found the following comment in a computer program
>>
>> /* setup handler list binary searchable array hash table (in
>> german, that'd be one word ;) */
> This does not make much sense to a programmer.
Most comments in programs do not make sense.
I always remove nearly all comments from programs, but choose better
(self-documenting) names for identifiers.
> "Binary searchable array" sounds odd too. Most
> programmers would call it a "sorted array".
A good identifier describes "what" and not "how",
e.g. 'setup_handler_parameters'
or - even better - the architecture or design provides methods
(functions) to manipulate the data, e.g.
set_setup_parameters
get_setup_parameters
or - like natural English
set (setup, 'user', 'John Doe');
user = get (setup, 'user');
Helmut Wollmersdorfer
LEE Sau Dan
Tak> DKleinecke wrote:
>> I found the following comment in a computer program
>>
>> /* setup handler list binary searchable array hash table (in
>> german, that'd be one word ;) */
Tak> This does not make much sense to a programmer.
I can't agree more!
Tak> List, arrays and hash tables are data structures that have
Tak> mutually exclusive characteristics, so treating triplet as a
Tak> hybrid does not make sense.
No... "List" could refer to an abstract data type, which is a container
holding items in a predictable order (e.g. insertion order). "Array" is
more concrete, and can be used to implement a "list". (Maybe, when you
see "list", you're thinking of "linked lists"?)
Anyway, a "binary-searchable array" and a "hash table" are mutually
exclusive. The former is another way to say "a sorted array". For
"hash tables", it is well known that one disadvantage of them is that
the items stored in them cannot be iterated in a particular, predictable
(unless the implementation is fixed and documented) order. One is
sorted and one is not sorted. They're mutually exclusive.
Tak> "Binary searchable array" sounds odd too. Most programmers
Tak> would call it a "sorted array".
It's odd, but maybe the author wants to emphasize that the array is
meant to be binary-searched.
Tak> The whole thing sounds like something made up by someone
Tak> familiar with (English) programmer jargon.
Yes!
--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦 ~{@nJX6X~}
E-mail: dan...@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee
Ekkehard Dengler
> On Jun 30, 10:52 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>> On Jun 30, 1:00 pm, DKleinecke <dkleine...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I found the following comment in a computer program
>>
>>> /* setup handler list binary searchable array hash table (in
>>> german, that'd be one word ;) */
>>
>>> Setup is a verb. The next seven words are an English compound noun.
>>> I leave it's substructure as an exercise for the reader.
>>> Theoretically these things can be infinitely long - but has anyone
>>> seen a longer one in the wild (meaning not concocted to prove such
>>> things are possible)?
>>
>>> And it is really one word in German?
>>
>> In English, setup is a noun; the verb would be set up. That appears
>> to be an expression in a computer language, rather than in English.
>
> Setup is a relatively common VERB among computer programmers. It might
> be spelled wrong - but I would spell it the same way the programmer
> did. I observe the Google groups spell checker rejects it.
And for good reason. How do you conjugate *"setup": "I setup, you setup,
he/she setsup"? "He/she setups"? "Setup" may be a relatively common
misspelling among computer programmers, but I don't think it qualifies as a
verb in its own right.
Regards,
Ekkehard
Christian Weisgerber
> > I found the following comment in a computer program
> >
> > /* setup handler list binary searchable array hash table (in
> > german, that'd be one word ;) */
>
> This does not make much sense to a programmer.
It _is_ an actual comment from actual code. It's in glib's
gobject/gsignal.c, g_signal_init(); line 773 in version 2.18.4.
(And "setup" is indeed misspelled and intended to be the verb "set
up".)
Peter T. Daniels
> On Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:46:38 -0700 (PDT), "Peter T. Daniels"
Is it really? Tak To showed that if that was the intent, it's
incoherent.
> >> g_handler_list_bsa_ht = g_hash_table_new (g_direct_hash, NULL);
> >> which is in a computer language (C to be exact). You can
> >> read it in the g_signal_init function in the GObject
> >> file in GLib which is available online.
> >> Probably you need to know that handler lists are being
> >> manipulated in order to make sense out it.
> >> Let's be open-minded about this. Open source computer
> >> programs are a form of literature. Don Knuth has urged
> >> that they be written as literature.
>
> Sensible fellow.
>
> >> In most open source programs there are only fragments of
> >> English writing in the comments.
> > I have seen travesties by Knuth in three areas:
> > calligraphy, typography, and biblical interpretation. If
> > there's anything he's good at, it's not anything he's
> > attempted to popularize.
>
> You're wrong, unless 'popularize' excludes serious
> textbooks.
Yes, it does. Borders doesn't stock "serious textbooks." The original
Barnes & Noble does, but it has no connection with the B&N chain other
than its advertising graphics. (There's a very large B&N chain store
about 2 1/2 blocks away.) "Serious textbooks" are a publishing
category entirely different from _haute vulgarisation_ (for which
there's no convenient English equivalent). "Serious textbooks" are
priced considerably higher than trade books, and their prices rarely
end in .95 or .00.
Harlan Messinger
> On Jun 30, 10:52 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>> On Jun 30, 1:00 pm, DKleinecke <dkleine...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I found the following comment in a computer program
>>> /* setup handler list binary searchable array hash table (in
>>> german, that'd be one word ;) */
>>> Setup is a verb. The next seven words are an English compound noun. I
>>> leave it's substructure as an exercise for the reader. Theoretically
>>> these things can be infinitely long - but has anyone seen a longer one
>>> in the wild (meaning not concocted to prove such things are possible)?
>>> And it is really one word in German?
>> In English, setup is a noun; the verb would be set up. That appears to
>> be an expression in a computer language, rather than in English.
>
> Setup is a relatively common VERB among computer programmers. It might
> be spelled wrong - but I would spell it the same way the programmer
> did. I observe the Google groups spell checker rejects it.
Until people start writing and saying "setuped" or "setupped" for the
past tense, "setup" for the verb is a misspelling. The same goes for
"login". To cast the situation otherwise is to argue, given the actual
past tenses of "he set up" and "he logged in", that English has acquired
the separable verb suffix.
Joachim Pense
> Tak To <ta...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>
>> > I found the following comment in a computer program
>> >
>> > /* setup handler list binary searchable array hash table (in
>> > german, that'd be one word ;) */
>>
>> This does not make much sense to a programmer.
>
> It _is_ an actual comment from actual code. It's in glib's
> gobject/gsignal.c, g_signal_init(); line 773 in version 2.18.4.
>
> (And "setup" is indeed misspelled and intended to be the verb "set
> up".)
And what is the contradictory "binary searchable array hash table" in the
program?
Joachim
Harlan Messinger
Also:
He plans to *setup the application.
*He plans to setup it.
The system wouldn't let the customer *login.
*The system wouldn't login the customer.
*The system wouldn't login him.
Tak To
>>>>>> "Tak" == Tak To <ta...@alum.mit.edu> writes:
>
> Tak> DKleinecke wrote:
> >> I found the following comment in a computer program
> >>
> >> /* setup handler list binary searchable array hash table (in
> >> german, that'd be one word ;) */
>
> Tak> This does not make much sense to a programmer.
>
> I can't agree more!
>
> Tak> List, arrays and hash tables are data structures that have
> Tak> mutually exclusive characteristics, so treating triplet as a
> Tak> hybrid does not make sense.
>
> No... "List" could refer to an abstract data type, which is a container
> holding items in a predictable order (e.g. insertion order). "Array" is
> more concrete, and can be used to implement a "list". (Maybe, when you
> see "list", you're thinking of "linked lists"?)
You are talking about characteristics as in abstract data types
(ADTs), whereas I include characteristics in "typical usage" as
well. Thus, a list typically does have a fixed length, and middle
elements can be easily inserted or deleted, etc. An array
typically has a fixed length, middle elements cannot be easily
inserted or deleted.
> Anyway, a "binary-searchable array" and a "hash table" are mutually
> exclusive. The former is another way to say "a sorted array". For
> "hash tables", it is well known that one disadvantage of them is that
> the items stored in them cannot be iterated in a particular, predictable
> (unless the implementation is fixed and documented) order. One is
> sorted and one is not sorted. They're mutually exclusive.
>
> Tak> "Binary searchable array" sounds odd too. Most programmers
> Tak> would call it a "sorted array".
>
> It's odd, but maybe the author wants to emphasize that the array is
> meant to be binary-searched.
>
> Tak> The whole thing sounds like something made up by someone
> Tak> familiar with (English) programmer jargon.
>
> Yes!
Tak
Christian Weisgerber
> And what is the contradictory "binary searchable array hash table" in the
> program?
There is no contradiction, these are nested data structures.
Adam Funk
> Let's be open-minded about this. Open source computer programs are a
> form of literature. Don Knuth has urged that they be written as
> literature.
OTOH, MIT has switched from Scheme to Python in the 1st-year EE & CS
curriculum:
In 1980, computer engineering was based on starting with
clearly-defined things (primitives or small programs) and using
them to build larger things that ended up being clearly-defined.
Composition of these fragments was the name of the game.
However, nowadays, a real engineer is given a big software library,
with a 300-page manual that’s full of errors. He’s also given a
robot, whose exact behavior is extremely hard to characterize (what
happens when a wheel slips?). The engineer must learn to perform
scientific experiments to find out how the software and hardware
actually work, at least enough to accomplish the job at hand.
http://danweinreb.org/blog/why-did-mit-switch-from-scheme-to-python
--
Leila: "I don't think he knows."
Agent Rogersz: "Increase the voltage."
Leila: "What if he's innocent?"
Agent Rogersz: "No one is innocent. Proceed" (Cox 1984)
Tak To
> Christian Weisgerber (in sci.lang):
>
>> Tak To <ta...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>>
>>>> I found the following comment in a computer program
>>>>
>>>> /* setup handler list binary searchable array hash table (in
>>>> german, that'd be one word ;) */
>>>
>>> This does not make much sense to a programmer.
>>> sounds plausible but not "hotel kitchen container
>>> box bottle".)
>>
>> gobject/gsignal.c, g_signal_init(); line 773 in version 2.18.4.
>>
>
> program?
I take a look at the source and implausible as it
seems, this is an actual cascade of superparts: i.e.,
a hash table (by object instance) of sorted arrays
(by signal id) of lists (by user specified order)
of signal handlers.
If I were the programmer I would probably adopt
an abstraction at the mid-level and call it the
Signal Vector Hash Table.
Tak To
> On 2009-07-01, DKleinecke wrote:
>
>> Let's be open-minded about this. Open source computer programs are a
>> form of literature. Don Knuth has urged that they be written as
>> literature.
That is not the meaning of "Literature Programming".
See, for example, the explanation in wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming
> OTOH, MIT has switched from Scheme to Python in the 1st-year EE & CS
> curriculum:
>
> In 1980, computer engineering was based on starting with
> clearly-defined things (primitives or small programs) and using
> them to build larger things that ended up being clearly-defined.
> Composition of these fragments was the name of the game.
>
> However, nowadays, a real engineer is given a big software library,
> with a 300-page manual that’s full of errors. He’s also given a
> robot, whose exact behavior is extremely hard to characterize (what
> happens when a wheel slips?). The engineer must learn to perform
> scientific experiments to find out how the software and hardware
> actually work, at least enough to accomplish the job at hand.
>
> http://danweinreb.org/blog/why-did-mit-switch-from-scheme-to-python
?? The decision has nothing to do with Literate Programming
or open sourcing.
Joachim Pense
> Joachim Pense <sn...@pense-mainz.eu> wrote:
>
>> And what is the contradictory "binary searchable array hash table" in the
>> program?
>
> There is no contradiction, these are nested data structures.
>
Oh, that was easy.
Joachim
Brian M. Scott
<gram...@verizon.net> wrote in
<news:58a314a4-6e5b-45ac...@h2g2000yqg.googlegroups.com>
in sci.lang:
> On Jul 1, 12:36�am, "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc...@csuohio.edu> wrote:
>> On Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:46:38 -0700 (PDT), "Peter T. Daniels"
>> <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote in
>> <news:b7f9c12b-15d3-4100...@t21g2000yqi.googlegroups.com>
>> in sci.lang:
[...]
>> It is in the English-language jargon of a particular field.
> Is it really?
Yes.
> Tak To showed that if that was the intent, it's
> incoherent.
No. See Christian's response to him and the following
comments.
[...]
>>> I have seen travesties by Knuth in three areas:
>>> calligraphy, typography, and biblical interpretation. If
>>> there's anything he's good at, it's not anything he's
>>> attempted to popularize.
>> You're wrong, unless 'popularize' excludes serious
>> textbooks.
> Yes, it does. Borders doesn't stock "serious textbooks."
The one that I most often patronize does indeed stock some
serious textbooks in mathematics and computer science. I've
seen the three published volumes of Knuth's _The Art of
Computer Programming_ there, and that's where I bought my
first copy of _Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for
Computer Science_ (written with Ronald Graham and Oren
Patashnik). _Concrete Mathematics_ is one of the best
mathematics textbooks around, one of the best two from which
I've actually taught.
Brian
Adam Funk
> I have seen travesties by Knuth in three areas: calligraphy,
> typography, and biblical interpretation. If there's anything he's good
> at, it's not anything he's attempted to popularize.
Your dubious personal prejudices do not constitute natural law (and
see <guruoe$243g$1...@lorvorc.mips.inka.de> for a recent goof on the
subject). You could certainly take a lesson from Knuth's total lack
of arrogance.
I'm not aware that he's written any "popular" works, unless you count
_3:16_ as a coffee-table book.
--
No right of private conversation was enumerated in the Constitution.
I don't suppose it occurred to anyone at the time that it could be
prevented. [Whitfield Diffie]
Peter T. Daniels
> On Wed, 1 Jul 2009 05:57:39 -0700 (PDT), "Peter T. Daniels"
> <news:58a314a4-6e5b-45ac...@h2g2000yqg.googlegroups.com>
> in sci.lang:
> > On Jul 1, 12:36 am, "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc...@csuohio.edu> wrote:
> >> On Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:46:38 -0700 (PDT), "Peter T. Daniels"
> >> <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote in
> >> <news:b7f9c12b-15d3-4100...@t21g2000yqi.googlegroups.com>
> >> in sci.lang:
>
> [...]
>
> >> It is in the English-language jargon of a particular field.
> > Is it really?
>
> Yes.
>
> > Tak To showed that if that was the intent, it's
> > incoherent.
>
> No. See Christian's response to him and the following
> comments.
LSD concurred with TT.
> [...]
>
> >>> I have seen travesties by Knuth in three areas:
> >>> calligraphy, typography, and biblical interpretation. If
> >>> there's anything he's good at, it's not anything he's
> >>> attempted to popularize.
> >> You're wrong, unless 'popularize' excludes serious
> >> textbooks.
> > Yes, it does. Borders doesn't stock "serious textbooks."
>
> The one that I most often patronize does indeed stock some
> serious textbooks in mathematics and computer science. I've
> seen the three published volumes of Knuth's _The Art of
> Computer Programming_ there, and that's where I bought my
> first copy of _Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for
> Computer Science_ (written with Ronald Graham and Oren
> Patashnik). _Concrete Mathematics_ is one of the best
> mathematics textbooks around, one of the best two from which
> I've actually taught.
You're lucky that B&N hasn't taken over your college bookstore (as it
has Chicago's and Columbia's and Penn's) and squeezed Borders out of
the neighborhood.
I occasionally glance at the math section at Borders (because it's
adjacent to Science) and it seems to be populated almost exclusively
by For Dummies books. Not even the Dovers that used to be ubiquitous.
Peter T. Daniels
> On 2009-07-01, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
> > I have seen travesties by Knuth in three areas: calligraphy,
> > typography, and biblical interpretation. If there's anything he's good
> > at, it's not anything he's attempted to popularize.
>
> Your dubious personal prejudices do not constitute natural law (and
> subject). You could certainly take a lesson from Knuth's total lack
> of arrogance.
>
> I'm not aware that he's written any "popular" works, unless you count
> _3:16_ as a coffee-table book.
There's another book of "theology" as well. *3:16* does double duty in
the calligraphy column. (I saw the exhibition of the orignal works at
the Wheaton College art gallery ca. 1994 and bought the poster.)
The typography travesty, of course, is TeX and LaTeX.
Nathan Sanders
<4c2f566c-da1c-4a08...@g19g2000yql.googlegroups.com>,
What don't you like about TeX? The page layout and paragraph breaking
routines are incredibly sophisticated. (Note that the Computer Modern
font, which I bet is what you're really talking about, is not TeX.)
Knuth did not create LaTeX. That was Leslie Lamport's creation.
Nathan
--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/
Brian M. Scott
<gram...@verizon.net> wrote in
<news:ae12577f-f0a6-4e42...@j32g2000yqh.googlegroups.com>
in sci.lang:
> On Jul 1, 4:07�pm, "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc...@csuohio.edu> wrote:
>> On Wed, 1 Jul 2009 05:57:39 -0700 (PDT), "Peter T. Daniels"
>> <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote in
>> <news:58a314a4-6e5b-45ac...@h2g2000yqg.googlegroups.com>
>> in sci.lang:
[...]
>>> Borders doesn't stock "serious textbooks."
>> The one that I most often patronize does indeed stock some
>> serious textbooks in mathematics and computer science. �I've
>> seen the three published volumes of Knuth's _The Art of
>> Computer Programming_ there, and that's where I bought my
>> first copy of _Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for
>> Computer Science_ (written with Ronald Graham and Oren
>> Patashnik). �_Concrete Mathematics_ is one of the best
>> mathematics textbooks around, one of the best two from which
>> I've actually taught.
> You're lucky that B&N hasn't taken over your college
> bookstore (as it has Chicago's and Columbia's and Penn's)
> and squeezed Borders out of the neighborhood.
There never was a Borders near my university. There are,
however, two within about five miles of where I live. Our
university bookstore was a B&N when I arrived in 1975 and
remained so until a few years ago; now it's just the CSU
Bookstore. It was always a poor excuse for an academic
bookstore, fairly useless for anything except assigned
textbooks.
> I occasionally glance at the math section at Borders
> (because it's adjacent to Science) and it seems to be
> populated almost exclusively by For Dummies books. Not
> even the Dovers that used to be ubiquitous.
My usual one still stocks a number of Dovers, though its
academic offerings in all fields have gone downhill over the
years.
Brian
LEE Sau Dan
Christian> Joachim Pense <sn...@pense-mainz.eu> wrote:
>> And what is the contradictory "binary searchable array hash
>> table" in the program?
Christian> There is no contradiction, these are nested data
Christian> structures.
If it's nested, it should be "a hash table of binary searchable arrays".
Peter T. Daniels
> In article
> <4c2f566c-da1c-4a08-9b92-18b180169...@g19g2000yql.googlegroups.com>,
> "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Jul 1, 4:25 pm, Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com> wrote:
> > > On 2009-07-01, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
> > > > I have seen travesties by Knuth in three areas: calligraphy,
> > > > typography, and biblical interpretation. If there's anything he's good
> > > > at, it's not anything he's attempted to popularize.
>
> > > Your dubious personal prejudices do not constitute natural law (and
> > > see <guruoe$243...@lorvorc.mips.inka.de> for a recent goof on the
> > > subject). You could certainly take a lesson from Knuth's total lack
> > > of arrogance.
>
> > > I'm not aware that he's written any "popular" works, unless you count
> > > _3:16_ as a coffee-table book.
>
> > There's another book of "theology" as well. *3:16* does double duty in
> > the calligraphy column. (I saw the exhibition of the orignal works at
> > the Wheaton College art gallery ca. 1994 and bought the poster.)
My calligraphy teacher did Genesis. He didn't like his assignment --
it's a very pedestrian verse.
One year his Christmas keepsake was the Babel story, which he wrote
out in a number of languages -- and he insisted on making the Lamed in
the Hebrew portion narrower than the other letters and refused to
accept that it was a mistake!
> > The typography travesty, of course, is TeX and LaTeX.
>
> What don't you like about TeX? The page layout and paragraph breaking
> routines are incredibly sophisticated.
And incredibly complicated to use. Something only a programmer could
love. (Jonathan Rodgers said that much of the delay in his translation
of Fischer's Arabic Grammar was due to the intricacies of the
programming. Nowadays it would be a cinch in Word. Soon I'll know
whether Arabic can be successfully poured into InDesign -- I've seen
claims that you need a special Middle East version for it to handle
right-to-left scripts.)
> (Note that the Computer Modern
> font, which I bet is what you're really talking about, is not TeX.)
That's "typography" -- type design. The default TeX font.
> Knuth did not create LaTeX. That was Leslie Lamport's creation.
And it gives you Computer Modern out of the box.
DKleinecke
Remember it wasn't MY comment (or code). I was startled when it
appeared. I usually make a mid-level abstraction when the compound
gets to be three words along. That is, I really only like two word
compounds at most.
I only mentioned Knuth to give some creditability to the idea that
code SHOULD be literate and readable. I think the implementation he
tried took a wrong turn very early in the game.
I have been investigating other ways of writing literate programs with
I think is some success. I have been using the Glib/Gtk family of code
as a test base for whether my ideas can be applied to real code (as
opposed to something I made up). I have reconstructed a lot of code so
far with only trivial difficulties.
The catch is that the result isn't very literate - even in terms of a
very restricted English. The reason it isn't literate is clearly the
fact that I do not understand the code properly. This leads me to
think I am on the right track because it suggests that the code is not
really comprehensible, as it stands, to anyone outside the tiny
community (a half dozen people I would suspect) who created it. The
techniques I am testing force the writer to explicate better.
And the VERB setup exists. It is used constantly in the corpus I am
working on. It cannot be written with a hyphen in C and that
restriction obviously impacts on the spelling the programmers use.
Equally a separable like "set ... up" (the best equivalent in standard
English) is alien to C. Sort of a Whorfian effect is going on and the
programmers use of C has an impact on their comments. Once they raise
their heads into the real world I imagine the C effect disappears.
John Atkinson
So what? Changing fonts is trivial.
I used to use LaTeX for all my lecture notes and journal papers (and just
about everything else) when I was still with the university teaching
engineering. I liked it, especially the page layout facilities. Nowadays I
don't write much mathematics, and I haven't even bothered to install LaTeX
on this computer. I use Word (or rather, Open Office, which is very similar
and IMO marginally better) for just about everything, just because it's
there, and a text editor for playing with html.
There's no doubt, however, that Word is _absolutely_hopeless_ for any sort
of mathematical work, and that it's still very primitive as far as page
layout etc is concerned compared with LaTeX. I don't doubt you it may well
be better for some of the tasks linguists might want to do. But for
engineers and mathematicians who want to write equations (and that's nearly
all of them), forget it.
John.
Nathan Sanders
<05b88efd-7205-4508...@h2g2000yqg.googlegroups.com>,
"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On Jul 1, 6:22�pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@williams.edu> wrote:
> > In article
> > <4c2f566c-da1c-4a08-9b92-18b180169...@g19g2000yql.googlegroups.com>,
> > �"Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> >
> > > The typography travesty, of course, is TeX and LaTeX.
> >
> > What don't you like about TeX? �The page layout and paragraph breaking
> > routines are incredibly sophisticated. �
>
> And incredibly complicated to use.
????
You type the text. TeX formats the pages and paragraphs
automatically, spacing characters, words, and lines in such a way to
take the look of the entire page into account, optimizing the whole
page (not just one line at a time) to avoid bad kinds of white space,
such as rivers. The user doesn't have to do anything special to make
that happen.
> > (Note that the Computer Modern
> > font, which I bet is what you're really talking about, is not TeX.)
>
> That's "typography" -- type design. The default TeX font.
Do you use the default font in Word? When you want to use a different
font, do you just throw up your hands and cry "But they gave me a
default, so I have to use it!"?
> > Knuth did not create LaTeX. �That was Leslie Lamport's creation.
>
> And it gives you Computer Modern out of the box.
And out of the box, Word gives you (among other terrible things)
woefully inadequate kerning and no fi/fl ligatures.
Take a wild guess which is easier to change: the font in (La)TeX, or
the kerning and ligatures in Word.
Brian M. Scott
<john...@bigpond.com> wrote in
<news:DjW2m.2153$ze1...@news-server.bigpond.net.au> in
sci.lang:
[...]
> Nowadays I don't write much mathematics, and I haven't
> even bothered to install LaTeX on this computer. I use
> Word (or rather, Open Office, which is very similar and
> IMO marginally better) for just about everything, just
> because it's there, and a text editor for playing with
> html.
I can even do all of the mathematics that I need for exams
and such in OO.o. I could probably do it in Word, too, but
I hate that stupid Equation Editor: I want to keep my
fingers on the keyboard. And I don't mind typing things
like this:
a_n = left lbrace matrix{alignl 2010 - n"," # "if"
0 <= n <= 2010 ## alignl 0"," # "if"n >= 2010}
right none
Brian
LEE Sau Dan
Nathan> And out of the box, Word gives you (among other terrible
Nathan> things) woefully inadequate kerning and no fi/fl ligatures.
And no hyphenation by default, generating lines with an insane lot of
space.
Nathan> Take a wild guess which is easier to change: the font in
Nathan> (La)TeX, or the kerning and ligatures in Word.
\usepackage{times}
That's just a few keystrokes in an editor, and requires no need to take
your hand off the keyboard to reach the mouse!
Helmut Wollmersdorfer
> On Jul 1, 6:22 pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@williams.edu> wrote:
>> What don't you like about TeX? The page layout and paragraph breaking
>> routines are incredibly sophisticated.
> And incredibly complicated to use. Something only a programmer could
> love. (Jonathan Rodgers said that much of the delay in his translation
> of Fischer's Arabic Grammar was due to the intricacies of the
> programming. Nowadays it would be a cinch in Word.
Forget Word if you need layout of medium or better quality.
> Soon I'll know
> whether Arabic can be successfully poured into InDesign --
AFAIK InDesign is the best choice for typesetting and layout. I did a
100 page book with ~70 illustrations in a weekend. I never used InDesign
before. It is very easy to learn and very flexible. I am not a friend of
Adobe, but that's a very good product.
But Scribus http://www.scribus.net/ is also worth a try.
> I've seen
> claims that you need a special Middle East version for it to handle
> right-to-left scripts.)
Hmmm ... most programs support right-to-left or BIDI (bidirectional
conforming to Unicode). This should be standard functionality of the
editor and the graphical rendering engine. But even if it is well
supported you can expect problems with the details of Arabic typography
(BTW: Do you know a good book - in English - about it?)
Helmut Wollmersdorfer
LEE Sau Dan
Helmut> Forget Word if you need layout of medium or better quality.
>> Soon I'll know whether Arabic can be successfully poured into
>> InDesign --
Helmut> AFAIK InDesign is the best choice for typesetting and
Helmut> layout. I did a 100 page book with ~70 illustrations in a
Helmut> weekend. I never used InDesign before. It is very easy to
Helmut> learn and very flexible. I am not a friend of Adobe, but
Helmut> that's a very good product.
Not surprising. Adobe has a very good track-record and expertise in
digital publishing. It knows both the professional needs and
state-of-the art technology very well (e.g. typesetting practices,
colour-calibration, etc.). So, it has the best softwares for publishing
and related workflow. e.g. Framemake, Acrobat, Illustrator. This is
because it has developed a solid building blocks to build applications
upon: Postscript and nowadays PDF.
Helmut> But Scribus http://www.scribus.net/ is also worth a try.
>> I've seen claims that you need a special Middle East version for
>> it to handle right-to-left scripts.)
Helmut> Hmmm ... most programs support right-to-left or BIDI
Helmut> (bidirectional conforming to Unicode).
Most don't. Many programs can handle Unicode nowadays, but few can do
bidi without modifications.
Helmut> This should be standard functionality of the editor and the
Helmut> graphical rendering engine. But even if it is well supported
Helmut> you can expect problems with the details of Arabic
Helmut> typography (BTW: Do you know a good book - in English -
Helmut> about it?)
Would you expect a naive typesetting program that doesn't do ligatures
(e.g. "fi", "fl") to handle the Arabic ligature "la" properly, let alone
stacking?
Helmut Wollmersdorfer
>>>>>> "Helmut" == Helmut Wollmersdorfer <hel...@wollmersdorfer.at> writes:
> Helmut> Hmmm ... most programs support right-to-left or BIDI
> Helmut> (bidirectional conforming to Unicode).
>
> Most don't. Many programs can handle Unicode nowadays, but few can do
> bidi without modifications.
Most Unicode programs I used can do BIDI confirming to
http://unicode.org/reports/tr9/
The problem is that you have to use 'BIDI control characters' in many
cases if you mix e.g. English and Arabic. Entering of such characters is
not supported in a convienent way.
Another problem I experienced with Unicode programs:
Many of them use 16 bit for the internal representation of a character.
This is not enough for the full range of Unicode.
But enough for nearly all 'real life' applications.
> Helmut> This should be standard functionality of the editor and the
> Helmut> graphical rendering engine. But even if it is well supported
> Helmut> you can expect problems with the details of Arabic
> Helmut> typography (BTW: Do you know a good book - in English -
> Helmut> about it?)
> Would you expect a naive typesetting program that doesn't do ligatures
> (e.g. "fi", "fl") to handle the Arabic ligature "la" properly, let alone
> stacking?
On which level? If I enter the appropriate Unicode character, e.g. the
Dutch
ij U+0133 LATIN SMALL LIGATURE IJ
and not the two characters 'ij' than I expect to get 'ij'. And it is one
character now in my newsreader, displayed with the width of one
character in a fixed-width font.
Font level? Ok, it is not easy to get Arabic fonts of high quality,
especially with full support of all languages (e.g. Persian, Dhivehi,
Kazakh) written in Arabic scripts (in the wide sense).
Helmut Wollmersdorfer
Peter T. Daniels
Obviously not, or we wouldn't be bombarded with crappy-looking books
by computer scientists pretending to do linguistics.
> I used to use LaTeX for all my lecture notes and journal papers (and just
> about everything else) when I was still with the university teaching
> engineering. I liked it, especially the page layout facilities. Nowadays I
> don't write much mathematics, and I haven't even bothered to install LaTeX
> on this computer. I use Word (or rather, Open Office, which is very similar
> and IMO marginally better) for just about everything, just because it's
> there, and a text editor for playing with html.
Note: engineering.
I had to use OpenOffice for several weeks while I was getting an
upgraded PC and found it utterly hopeless because of the impossibility
of adding keyboard shortcuts -- do you remember what you had to go
through to get small capitals?
> There's no doubt, however, that Word is _absolutely_hopeless_ for any sort
> of mathematical work, and that it's still very primitive as far as page
> layout etc is concerned compared with LaTeX. I don't doubt you it may well
> be better for some of the tasks linguists might want to do. But for
> engineers and mathematicians who want to write equations (and that's nearly
> all of them), forget it.
What's mathematcs to me, or me to mathematics?
No reason an efficient GUI couldn't have been devised for writing
mathematics. But I did manage to copy every formula in Chomsky 1951
using Word's Equations Field tool.
Peter T. Daniels
> On Thu, 02 Jul 2009 04:02:43 GMT, John Atkinson
Equation Editor is obsolete. (Typing Field formulas was much more
effective.) I don't know what the Word2007 replacement is.
And tnere's a guy who keeps advertising his MathType add-in on the
Word discussion group.
Peter T. Daniels
> "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
> > On Jul 1, 6:22 pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@williams.edu> wrote:
> > > In article
> > > <4c2f566c-da1c-4a08-9b92-18b180169...@g19g2000yql.googlegroups.com>,
> > > "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
> > > > The typography travesty, of course, is TeX and LaTeX.
>
> > > What don't you like about TeX? The page layout and paragraph breaking
> > > routines are incredibly sophisticated.
>
> > And incredibly complicated to use.
>
> ????
>
> You type the text. TeX formats the pages and paragraphs
> automatically, spacing characters, words, and lines in such a way to
> take the look of the entire page into account, optimizing the whole
> page (not just one line at a time) to avoid bad kinds of white space,
> such as rivers. The user doesn't have to do anything special to make
> that happen.
That's exactly the problem. You're using it "out of the box" -- and
are apparently blind to the crappiness of the result.
Even Word2003 out-of-the-box produced better results. (But then they
utterly screwed up the defaults in Word2007 -- fortunately there's a
button for "2003 defaults.)
> > > (Note that the Computer Modern
> > > font, which I bet is what you're really talking about, is not TeX.)
>
> > That's "typography" -- type design. The default TeX font.
>
> Do you use the default font in Word? When you want to use a different
> font, do you just throw up your hands and cry "But they gave me a
> default, so I have to use it!"?
Times New Roman is a hell of a lot better than Computer Modern. It's
now more than 80 years old, but it was designed by one of the most
brilliant typographic minds of all time.
(Calibri is not wonderful. None of the new "C" fonts that come with
Office2007 are, but the old standards still come with.)
> > > Knuth did not create LaTeX. That was Leslie Lamport's creation.
>
> > And it gives you Computer Modern out of the box.
>
> And out of the box, Word gives you (among other terrible things)
> woefully inadequate kerning and no fi/fl ligatures.
>
> Take a wild guess which is easier to change: the font in (La)TeX, or
> the kerning and ligatures in Word.
And letting people with no concept of print esthetics meddle with
kerning is a recipe for visual disaster.
(Though these days Word _can_ take into account the kerning pairs
built into the font by the designer.)
Peter T. Daniels
wrote:
> >>>>> "Nathan" == Nathan Sanders <nsand...@williams.edu> writes:
>
> Nathan> And out of the box, Word gives you (among other terrible
> Nathan> things) woefully inadequate kerning and no fi/fl ligatures.
>
> And no hyphenation by default, generating lines with an insane lot of
> space.
You don't know _what_ you're talking about. Did you never manage to
find the button that turns on hyphenation -- which you should never do
until you've finished writing your text and now need to shape it for
the publisher? (In the unfortunate event that you're preparing camera-
ready copy.)
> Nathan> Take a wild guess which is easier to change: the font in
> Nathan> (La)TeX, or the kerning and ligatures in Word.
>
> \usepackage{times}
>
> That's just a few keystrokes in an editor, and requires no need to take
> your hand off the keyboard to reach the mouse!
If you've never discovered Word's keyboard shortcuts, you've been
misusing the program.
Peter T. Daniels
wrote:
> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > On Jul 1, 6:22 pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@williams.edu> wrote:
> >> What don't you like about TeX? The page layout and paragraph breaking
> >> routines are incredibly sophisticated.
> > And incredibly complicated to use. Something only a programmer could
> > love. (Jonathan Rodgers said that much of the delay in his translation
> > of Fischer's Arabic Grammar was due to the intricacies of the
> > programming. Nowadays it would be a cinch in Word.
>
> Forget Word if you need layout of medium or better quality.
I have never used Word for camera-ready copy.
> > Soon I'll know
> > whether Arabic can be successfully poured into InDesign --
>
> AFAIK InDesign is the best choice for typesetting and layout. I did a
> 100 page book with ~70 illustrations in a weekend. I never used InDesign
> before. It is very easy to learn and very flexible. I am not a friend of
> Adobe, but that's a very good product.
Which version? I take it you didn't need cross references.
> But Scribushttp://www.scribus.net/is also worth a try.
>
> > I've seen
> > claims that you need a special Middle East version for it to handle
> > right-to-left scripts.)
>
> Hmmm ... most programs support right-to-left or BIDI (bidirectional
> conforming to Unicode). This should be standard functionality of the
> editor and the graphical rendering engine. But even if it is well
> supported you can expect problems with the details of Arabic typography
> (BTW: Do you know a good book - in English - about it?)
About what, exactly?
THere has never been a book in English on "exotic" type design.
Sometimes you'll see examples of layouts scattered in graphic design
collections, but that's about it. ("Exotic" means anything non-roman.)
Peter T. Daniels
wrote:
> >>>>> "Helmut" == Helmut Wollmersdorfer <hel...@wollmersdorfer.at> writes:
>
> Helmut> Forget Word if you need layout of medium or better quality.
>
> >> Soon I'll know whether Arabic can be successfully poured into
> >> InDesign --
>
> Helmut> AFAIK InDesign is the best choice for typesetting and
> Helmut> layout. I did a 100 page book with ~70 illustrations in a
> Helmut> weekend. I never used InDesign before. It is very easy to
> Helmut> learn and very flexible. I am not a friend of Adobe, but
> Helmut> that's a very good product.
>
> Not surprising. Adobe has a very good track-record and expertise in
> digital publishing. It knows both the professional needs and
> state-of-the art technology very well (e.g. typesetting practices,
> colour-calibration, etc.). So, it has the best softwares for publishing
> and related workflow. e.g. Framemake, Acrobat, Illustrator. This is
> because it has developed a solid building blocks to build applications
> upon: Postscript and nowadays PDF.
Adobe bought FrameMaker for the purpose of killing it off, because it
was so superior to Adobe PageMaker, which had long lost out to
QuarkExpress.
It didn't even make it Unicode-compatible until the latest version,
and it still can't do right-to-left.
> Helmut> But Scribushttp://www.scribus.net/is also worth a try.
>
> >> I've seen claims that you need a special Middle East version for
> >> it to handle right-to-left scripts.)
>
> Helmut> Hmmm ... most programs support right-to-left or BIDI
> Helmut> (bidirectional conforming to Unicode).
>
> Most don't. Many programs can handle Unicode nowadays, but few can do
> bidi without modifications.
>
> Helmut> This should be standard functionality of the editor and the
> Helmut> graphical rendering engine. But even if it is well supported
> Helmut> you can expect problems with the details of Arabic
> Helmut> typography (BTW: Do you know a good book - in English -
> Helmut> about it?)
>
> Would you expect a naive typesetting program that doesn't do ligatures
> (e.g. "fi", "fl") to handle the Arabic ligature "la" properly, let alone
> stacking?
Yet somehow Word is brilliant at Arabic but doesn't do ligatures.
John Atkinson
You don't have to be a computer scientist to write a crappy-looking book!
You just have to not care. (Whether computer scientists on average care
less about that sort of thing than other linguists, I've no idea.)
>> I used to use LaTeX for all my lecture notes and journal papers (and
>> just about everything else) when I was still with the university
>> teaching engineering. I liked it, especially the page layout
>> facilities. Nowadays I don't write much mathematics, and I haven't
>> even bothered to install LaTeX on this computer. I use Word (or
>> rather, Open Office, which is very similar and IMO marginally
>> better) for just about everything, just because it's there, and a
>> text editor for playing with html.
>
> Note: engineering.
>
> I had to use OpenOffice for several weeks while I was getting an
> upgraded PC and found it utterly hopeless because of the impossibility
> of adding keyboard shortcuts -- do you remember what you had to go
> through to get small capitals?
Sorry, I've don't think I've ever felt the urge to write anything in small
capitals. If I did, I'd just change the font size for the duration. I
agree that if I was interested in trying to write professional-looking
linguistics text involving lots of them small caps, it might well be more
convenient to do it via a "shortcut".
>> There's no doubt, however, that Word is _absolutely_hopeless_ for
>> any sort of mathematical work, and that it's still very primitive as
>> far as page layout etc is concerned compared with LaTeX. I don't
>> doubt you it may well be better for some of the tasks linguists
>> might want to do. But for engineers and mathematicians who want to
>> write equations (and that's nearly all of them), forget it.
>
> What's mathematcs to me, or me to mathematics?
>
> No reason an efficient GUI couldn't have been devised for writing
> mathematics. But I did manage to copy every formula in Chomsky 1951
> using Word's Equations Field tool.
"Copying" is one thing. Writing original text is quite another.
When I'm composing text involving mathematical formulas and equations, I
want to do it the same way whether I'm using a pencil and paper or LaTex --
and the same way as when I'm writing an English sentence -- I want to start
at the beginning and continue through to the end; and I want the program to
do all the fiddly layout stuff. Just like Brian does. I can't stand
having to "compose" the formula separately in some box, moving bits and
pieces of it around to get the layout more or less right, and then copy it
into where I want it. It completely disrupts one's train of thought.
John.
LEE Sau Dan
Peter> I had to use OpenOffice for several weeks while I was getting
Peter> an upgraded PC and found it utterly hopeless because of the
Peter> impossibility of adding keyboard shortcuts -- do you remember
Peter> what you had to go through to get small capitals?
In LaTeX: \textsc{This is text in Small Caps}.
Peter> No reason an efficient GUI couldn't have been devised for
Peter> writing mathematics.
Using LaTeX with 'preview-latex' is very efficient, IMO.
Peter> But I did manage to copy every formula in Chomsky 1951 using
Peter> Word's Equations Field tool.
The thing that generates ugly-looking stuffs?
LEE Sau Dan
Peter> (Though these days Word _can_ take into account the kerning
...................^^^^^^^^^^
Peter> pairs built into the font by the designer.)
TeX (and hence LaTeX) has been doing that FOR DECADES!
LEE Sau Dan
Peter> You don't know _what_ you're talking about. Did you never
Peter> manage to find the button that turns on hyphenation -- which
Peter> you should never do until you've finished writing your text
Peter> and now need to shape it for the publisher? (In the
Peter> unfortunate event that you're preparing camera- ready copy.)
Why should I have to bother with that button? LaTeX does that
automatically, even for the draft copies.
Why would you turn on hyphenation in Word ONLY for the camera-ready
copy? What's the reason behind that recommendation? Answer:
inefficient, poorly implemented hyphenation algorithm.
Peter> If you've never discovered Word's keyboard shortcuts, you've
Peter> been misusing the program.
If you've never discovered LaTeX, you've been misusing your computer as
just a "smarter typewriter".
LEE Sau Dan
>> Would you expect a naive typesetting program that doesn't do
>> ligatures (e.g. "fi", "fl") to handle the Arabic ligature "la"
>> properly, let alone stacking?
Peter> Yet somehow Word is brilliant at Arabic but doesn't do
Peter> ligatures.
How does it handle the "lA:" ligature?
Peter T. Daniels
wrote:
> >>>>> "Peter" == Peter T Daniels <gramma...@verizon.net> writes:
>
> Peter> I had to use OpenOffice for several weeks while I was getting
> Peter> an upgraded PC and found it utterly hopeless because of the
> Peter> impossibility of adding keyboard shortcuts -- do you remember
> Peter> what you had to go through to get small capitals?
>
> In LaTeX: \textsc{This is text in Small Caps}.
That appears to be 9 keystrokes (including the two braces). In Word,
it's 2 (Ctrl-Shift-K at the beginning and end of the passage) or 2
clicks on the SC button, or 1 (after selecting the text).
In OpenOffice, you actually have to mouse to a formatting menu and go
a couple of levels into dialogs.
All for "BCE" and "CE."
> Peter> No reason an efficient GUI couldn't have been devised for
> Peter> writing mathematics.
>
> Using LaTeX with 'preview-latex' is very efficient, IMO.
>
> Peter> But I did manage to copy every formula in Chomsky 1951 using
> Peter> Word's Equations Field tool.
>
> The thing that generates ugly-looking stuffs?
Anyone who uses LaTeX has no business calling Word equations "ugly."
And I don't find them ugly.
Peter T. Daniels
wrote:
> >>>>> "Peter" == Peter T Daniels <gramma...@verizon.net> writes:
>
> Peter> You don't know _what_ you're talking about. Did you never
> Peter> manage to find the button that turns on hyphenation -- which
> Peter> you should never do until you've finished writing your text
> Peter> and now need to shape it for the publisher? (In the
> Peter> unfortunate event that you're preparing camera- ready copy.)
>
> Why should I have to bother with that button? LaTeX does that
> automatically, even for the draft copies.
That is definitely a bug, not a feature.
And whose rules for hyphenation does it follow?
> Why would you turn on hyphenation in Word ONLY for the camera-ready
> copy? What's the reason behind that recommendation? Answer:
> inefficient, poorly implemented hyphenation algorithm.
Hyphenated text is an obstacle to clear writing and revising. And
there is no reason for it outside justified text, and justifying text
is a matter for a designer, not a writer. (Remember when your messages
appeared justified, in mono-spaced fonts, with wildly varying spacing
between words, because you were using a Chinese word processor for
writing English? It made your text quite difficult to read.)
> Peter> If you've never discovered Word's keyboard shortcuts, you've
> Peter> been misusing the program.
>
> If you've never discovered LaTeX, you've been misusing your computer as
> just a "smarter typewriter".
I'm still waiitng to hear of something it can do better or easier than
Word. (Other than mathematical equations, which are of no concern to
me or to 99.9995% of users. That's one in a million.)
Peter T. Daniels
wrote:
> >>>>> "Peter" == Peter T Daniels <gramma...@verizon.net> writes:
>
> Peter> (Though these days Word _can_ take into account the kerning
> ...................^^^^^^^^^^
> Peter> pairs built into the font by the designer.)
>
> TeX (and hence LaTeX) has been doing that FOR DECADES!
And that's why Word wasn't (and isn't) used for creating camera-ready
copy by proper publishers.
TeX and LaTeX may have been doing it, but it's been doing it with
extremely ugly results.
Peter T. Daniels
wrote:
> >>>>> "Peter" == Peter T Daniels <gramma...@verizon.net> writes:
>
> >> Would you expect a naive typesetting program that doesn't do
> >> ligatures (e.g. "fi", "fl") to handle the Arabic ligature "la"
> >> properly, let alone stacking?
>
> Peter> Yet somehow Word is brilliant at Arabic but doesn't do
> Peter> ligatures.
>
> How does it handle the "lA:" ligature?
The what? There's no ia ligature.
Joachim Pense
>>>>>> "Christian" == Christian Weisgerber <na...@mips.inka.de> writes:
>
> Christian> Joachim Pense <sn...@pense-mainz.eu> wrote:
> >> And what is the contradictory "binary searchable array hash
> >> table" in the program?
>
> Christian> There is no contradiction, these are nested data
> Christian> structures.
>
> If it's nested, it should be "a hash table of binary searchable arrays".
>
That would be another way to say the same thing - it's a bit more specific
because it qualifies the relation between "binary searchable array"
and "hash table". But I don't think the tatpurusha verson "binary
searchable array hash table" is not allowed in English.
Joachim
Helmut Wollmersdorfer
> On Jul 2, 3:28 am, Helmut Wollmersdorfer <hel...@wollmersdorfer.at>
> wrote:
>> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>>> On Jul 1, 6:22 pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@williams.edu> wrote:
>>>> What don't you like about TeX? The page layout and paragraph breaking
>>>> routines are incredibly sophisticated.
>>> And incredibly complicated to use. Something only a programmer could
>>> love. (Jonathan Rodgers said that much of the delay in his translation
>>> of Fischer's Arabic Grammar was due to the intricacies of the
>>> programming. Nowadays it would be a cinch in Word.
>> Forget Word if you need layout of medium or better quality.
>
> I have never used Word for camera-ready copy.
Hopefully your printer doesn't use use cameras any more;-)
Nowadays somebody or you yourself brings your content via InDesign or
Scribus into PDF/X-3 which is directly processed by 'computer to plate'
or 'computer to print'
> Which version?
March 2006, InDesign CS 2
> I take it you didn't need cross references.
No, it was not scientific, it was artwork - watercolor paintings with
some text around.
>> But even if it is well
>> supported you can expect problems with the details of Arabic typography
>> (BTW: Do you know a good book - in English - about it?)
> About what, exactly?
Arabic typography if this is comparable to German (European) typography.
> THere has never been a book in English on "exotic" type design.
> Sometimes you'll see examples of layouts scattered in graphic design
> collections, but that's about it. ("Exotic" means anything non-roman.)
Ok.
Helmut Wollmersdorfer
Nathan Sanders
<fbc5ce5c-1273-40ac...@d10g2000vbm.googlegroups.com>,
"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On Jul 2, 9:55�am, LEE Sau Dan <dan...@informatik.uni-freiburg.de>
> wrote:
> > >>>>> "Peter" == Peter T Daniels <gramma...@verizon.net> writes:
> >
> > � � Peter> You don't know _what_ you're talking about. Did you never
> > � � Peter> manage to find the button that turns on hyphenation -- which
> > � � Peter> you should never do until you've finished writing your text
> > � � Peter> and now need to shape it for the publisher? (In the
> > � � Peter> unfortunate event that you're preparing camera- ready copy.)
> >
> > Why �should �I �have �to �bother �with that �button? � LaTeX �does �that
> > automatically, even for the draft copies.
>
> That is definitely a bug, not a feature.
>
> And whose rules for hyphenation does it follow?
It depends on which language you're using. \usepackage[french]{babel}
will get you French hyphenation. (And yes, you can use multiple
languages' hyphenation patterns in the same document.)
And if the rules for that language get a particular word wrong, you
can always set the allowable hyphenation for individual words, which
is especially helpful for proper names and newer words. For example,
\hyphenation{fortran} will prevent "fortran" from ever being
hyphenated anywhere, while \hyphenation{mondegreen} will guarantee
that "mondegreen" can be hyphenated, but only as "monde-green",
blocking "mon-degreen".
> I'm still waiitng to hear of something it can do better or easier than
> Word. (Other than mathematical equations, which are of no concern to
> me or to 99.9995% of users. That's one in a million.)
As I've already mentioned, ligatures, kerning, and whole-page
hyphenation algorithms.
In addition:
Handling of floats.
Counters: tables, figures, equation, etc. are number automatically,
with their own separate counters.
Smart cross-referencing: you can have ordinary numerical
cross-references like "on page 213", but if you want, you can have
them automatically come out as relative references like "on the
previous page" or "on the next page". If your content changes the
relationship, the cross-references will automatically change
appropriately.
Proper small caps (when they're available in the font): Word scales
down capital letters rather than using the true small caps, resulting
in wispy small caps that don't fit in with the rest of the text.
Automatic proper spacing after sentence-final periods. No need to do
a search-and-replace to change the occasional double space into a
single space (which is still wrong anyway: the spacing is supposed to
be 1.5 spaces, which can't be done easily in Word).
User-defined macros.
Multiple accent marks on the same character (e.g., acute over macron).
Language-specific hyphenation and ligatures.
Cost and portability: (La)TeX is free and the source files are written
in plain text, so anyone can read your document without having to buy
proprietary software, without cross-platform conversion issues, and
without legacy version issues.
Handling of large-documents: Word often crashes unpredictably on
large, complex documents, but (La)TeX doesn't; a 1000-page document is
just as stable as a 1-page document. Furthermore, selectively editing
arbitrary chunks of a (La)TeX document without having to process the
rest is trivial; not so in Word.
Nathan Sanders
<4659ef11-0e25-48d8...@r25g2000vbn.googlegroups.com>,
"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On Jul 2, 9:50�am, LEE Sau Dan <dan...@informatik.uni-freiburg.de>
> wrote:
> > >>>>> "Peter" == Peter T Daniels <gramma...@verizon.net> writes:
> >
> > � � Peter> I had to use OpenOffice for several weeks while I was getting
> > � � Peter> an upgraded PC and found it utterly hopeless because of the
> > � � Peter> impossibility of adding keyboard shortcuts -- do you remember
> > � � Peter> what you had to go through to get small capitals?
> >
> > In LaTeX: �\textsc{This is text in Small Caps}.
>
> That appears to be 9 keystrokes (including the two braces). In Word,
> it's 2 (Ctrl-Shift-K at the beginning and end of the passage) or 2
> clicks on the SC button, or 1 (after selecting the text).
>
> In OpenOffice, you actually have to mouse to a formatting menu and go
> a couple of levels into dialogs.
>
> All for "BCE" and "CE."
For that, I'd just use \BCE and \CE, which I would have previously
defined as macros to be in small caps.
Nathan Sanders
<0b8c7923-4421-4c3c...@24g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>,
"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On Jul 2, 12:30�am, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@williams.edu> wrote:
> > In article
> > <05b88efd-7205-4508-a4a7-2170a4432...@h2g2000yqg.googlegroups.com>,
> > �"Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> >
> > > On Jul 1, 6:22�pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@williams.edu> wrote:
> > > > In article
> > > > <4c2f566c-da1c-4a08-9b92-18b180169...@g19g2000yql.googlegroups.com>,
> > > > �"Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> >
> > > > > The typography travesty, of course, is TeX and LaTeX.
> >
> > > > What don't you like about TeX? �The page layout and paragraph breaking
> > > > routines are incredibly sophisticated. �
> >
> > > And incredibly complicated to use.
> >
> > ????
> >
> > You type the text. �TeX formats the pages and paragraphs
> > automatically, spacing characters, words, and lines in such a way to
> > take the look of the entire page into account, optimizing the whole
> > page (not just one line at a time) to avoid bad kinds of white space,
> > such as rivers. �The user doesn't have to do anything special to make
> > that happen.
>
> That's exactly the problem. You're using it "out of the box" -- and
> are apparently blind to the crappiness of the result.
What's "crappy" about having uniform page color? Rivers of whitespace
are considered by typography, and Word does nothing to prevent them,
because it lays out each line independently, without concern for the
overall page layout (exactly the opposite of what TeX does).
> > > > (Note that the Computer Modern
> > > > font, which I bet is what you're really talking about, is not TeX.)
> >
> > > That's "typography" -- type design. The default TeX font.
> >
> > Do you use the default font in Word? �When you want to use a different
> > font, do you just throw up your hands and cry "But they gave me a
> > default, so I have to use it!"?
>
> Times New Roman is a hell of a lot better than Computer Modern.
Computer Modern is not TeX. The longer you keep conflating the two
and pretending that default fonts can't be changed, the more it
becomes clear that you really don't know what you're talking about.
> (Calibri is not wonderful. None of the new "C" fonts that come with
> Office2007 are, but the old standards still come with.)
So if you're unhappy with Calibri as the default font, what on earth
are you supposed to do?
> > > > Knuth did not create LaTeX. �That was Leslie Lamport's creation.
> >
> > > And it gives you Computer Modern out of the box.
> >
> > And out of the box, Word gives you (among other terrible things)
> > woefully inadequate kerning and no fi/fl ligatures.
> >
> > Take a wild guess which is easier to change: the font in (La)TeX, or
> > the kerning and ligatures in Word.
>
> And letting people with no concept of print esthetics meddle with
> kerning is a recipe for visual disaster.
In the vast majority of cases, you don't need to mess with kerning in
TeX. Out of the box, it automatically uses the appropriate kerning
that's embedded in the font. Assuming the font was designed by
someone who knew what they were doing, the end user won't have to do
anything special.
Word does not access the font's internal kerning by default (requiring
the user to (a) know that it needs to be turned on and (b) turn it
one), and once it's on, there are still problems with it.
TeX has been doing kerning properly since the beginning.
There are also serious problems with Word's handling of leading.
Insert an ordinary sub- or superscript in a line, and the leading gets
visually thrown out of whack. Not so in TeX.
Brian M. Scott
<gram...@verizon.net> wrote in
<news:6c3566bd-0e0b-454a...@b15g2000yqd.googlegroups.com>
in sci.lang:
> On Jul 2, 1:08�am, "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc...@csuohio.edu> wrote:
[...]
>> I can even do all of the mathematics that I need for exams
>> and such in OO.o. �I could probably do it in Word, too, but
>> I hate that stupid Equation Editor: I want to keep my
>> fingers on the keyboard. �And I don't mind typing things
>> like this:
>> � �a_n = left lbrace matrix{alignl 2010 - n"," # "if"
>> � �0 <= n <= 2010 ## alignl 0"," # "if"n >= 2010}
>> � �right none
> Equation Editor is obsolete.
Not really, when you consider how many copies of earlier
versions of MS Office are still in use, both by individuals
and by (sometimes large) institutions.
> (Typing Field formulas was much more effective.) I don't
> know what the Word2007 replacement is.
Apparently something more like the OO.o version.
> And tnere's a guy who keeps advertising his MathType
> add-in on the Word discussion group.
The MS Office Equation Editor is a simplified version of
MathType, designed by the same people.
Brian
Brian M. Scott
<gram...@verizon.net> wrote in
<news:4659ef11-0e25-48d8...@r25g2000vbn.googlegroups.com>
in sci.lang:
> On Jul 2, 9:50�am, LEE Sau Dan <dan...@informatik.uni-freiburg.de>
> wrote:
>>>>>>> "Peter" == Peter T Daniels <gramma...@verizon.net> writes:
>> � � Peter> I had to use OpenOffice for several weeks while I was getting
>> � � Peter> an upgraded PC and found it utterly hopeless because of the
>> � � Peter> impossibility of adding keyboard shortcuts -- do you remember
>> � � Peter> what you had to go through to get small capitals?
>> In LaTeX: �\textsc{This is text in Small Caps}.
> That appears to be 9 keystrokes (including the two braces). In Word,
> it's 2 (Ctrl-Shift-K at the beginning and end of the passage) or 2
> clicks on the SC button, or 1 (after selecting the text).
> In OpenOffice, you actually have to mouse to a formatting menu and go
> a couple of levels into dialogs.
You don't need to use the mouse, and you can avoid most of
this by setting up a keyboard shortcut for font size. (Yes,
you *can* add keyboard shortcuts in OO.o.) I suspect that
you could also record a macro to do the dirty work, but I've
never had reason to try.
[...]
Brian
Brian M. Scott
<nsan...@williams.edu> wrote in
<news:nsanders-736B2A...@news.newsguy.com> in
sci.lang:
[...]
> Automatic proper spacing after sentence-final periods. No
> need to do a search-and-replace to change the occasional
> double space into a single space
Ow! That's just backwards.
> (which is still wrong anyway: the spacing is supposed to
> be 1.5 spaces, which can't be done easily in Word).
[...]
Brian
Nathan Sanders
"Brian M. Scott" <b.s...@csuohio.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:08:37 -0400, Nathan Sanders
> <nsan...@williams.edu> wrote in
> <news:nsanders-736B2A...@news.newsguy.com> in
> sci.lang:
>
> > Automatic proper spacing after sentence-final periods. No
> > need to do a search-and-replace to change the occasional
> > double space into a single space
>
> Ow! That's just backwards.
I agree. I prefer a double space to a single space (and the proper
1.5 space to double).
I don't know why there is such a strong movement to banish the double
space, but it is very real.
Ruud Harmsen
<gram...@verizon.net>: in sci.lang:
>Hyphenated text is an obstacle to clear writing and revising.
I agree!
I never hyphenate, except when there's a really annoying amount of
white space, then I very sparingly add an optional hyphen (html
­). And always between morphologic parts, preferrably parts of a
composite word. Not just by any syllable.
--
Ruud Harmsen, http://rudhar.com
Ruud Harmsen
<nsan...@williams.edu>: in sci.lang:
>> I'm still waiitng to hear of something it can do better or easier than
>> Word. (Other than mathematical equations, which are of no concern to
>> me or to 99.9995% of users. That's one in a million.)
>
>As I've already mentioned, ligatures, kerning, and whole-page
>hyphenation algorithms.
Word (and TrueType in general) does ligatures and kerning too.
>Multiple accent marks on the same character (e.g., acute over macron).
Possible in any system that supports Unicode.
>Language-specific hyphenation and ligatures.
Hyphenation is language-specific in Word too. Moreover, as I said, I
never use hyphenation.
>Cost and portability: (La)TeX is free and the source files are written
>in plain text, so anyone can read your document without having to buy
>proprietary software, without cross-platform conversion issues, and
>without legacy version issues.
Word doesn't have these either.
>Handling of large-documents: Word often crashes unpredictably on
>large, complex documents,
After so many years of using several versions (6, 97, 2007), I can
hardly remember such events. Word 2000 was very buggy, yes, that's
true.
>ut (La)TeX doesn't; a 1000-page document is
>just as stable as a 1-page document.
Why not split that into chapters?
>Furthermore, selectively editing arbitrary chunks of a (La)TeX
>document without having to process the rest is trivial; not so in Word.
I don't understand. If by editing you mean search&replace: that can be
done selectively in Word too.
Ruud Harmsen
<nsan...@williams.edu>: in sci.lang:
>In the vast majority of cases, you don't need to mess with kerning in
>TeX. Out of the box, it automatically uses the appropriate kerning
>that's embedded in the font. Assuming the font was designed by
>someone who knew what they were doing, the end user won't have to do
>anything special.
>
>Word does not access the font's internal kerning by default (requiring
>the user to (a) know that it needs to be turned on
This is new to me.
>and (b) turn it
>one), and once it's on, there are still problems with it.
Such as?
>TeX has been doing kerning properly since the beginning.
So does Word, after 1994 or so.
Nathan Sanders
Ruud Harmsen <zb...@rudhar.eu> wrote:
> Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:08:37 -0400: Nathan Sanders
> <nsan...@williams.edu>: in sci.lang:
>
> >> I'm still waiitng to hear of something it can do better or easier than
> >> Word. (Other than mathematical equations, which are of no concern to
> >> me or to 99.9995% of users. That's one in a million.)
> >
> >As I've already mentioned, ligatures, kerning, and whole-page
> >hyphenation algorithms.
>
> Word (and TrueType in general) does ligatures and kerning too.
I just tested these in Word 2008, out of the box:
No ligatures for fi, fl, ff, ffi, or ffl.
Kerning is terrible. "Table" has the wrong spacing between T and a,
and tall italics characters inside parentheses bump into the
right-hand parenthesis.
Hunting around the menus, I managed to find something called "kerning
for fonts" and turned it on. "Table" and tall italics inside
parentheses are still incorrectly kerned.
I haven't yet found how to get ligatures.
> >Multiple accent marks on the same character (e.g., acute over macron).
>
> Possible in any system that supports Unicode.
TeX was able to handle this easily before Unicode. It still handles
it easily: \'\=a puts an acute over a macron over "a". I know how to
get an acute accent over "a" in Word, and I've modified my keyboard to
allow me to get a macron (this is not an out-of-the-box ability!), but
I don't know of a simple way to get both accents on the same character
in Word.
I just put an acute accent over an "m" in Word, and it changed the
font from Cambria to MS Reference Sans Serif, and now, everything I
type after that is in the new font!
If the accented character is not a pre-composed character in the font
(as acute-m is not in Cambria), TeX will compose the accented
character on the fly. There is no font change for either that
character or the following ones.
> >Language-specific hyphenation and ligatures.
>
> Hyphenation is language-specific in Word too.
Can Word handle multiple languages within the same document? In
LaTeX, it's as easy as:
\usepackage[french,german,english]{babel}
...
\selectlanguage{german}
...
\selectlanguage{french}
...
\selectlanguage{german}
...
\selectlanguage{english}
> >Cost and portability: (La)TeX is free and the source files are written
> >in plain text, so anyone can read your document without having to buy
> >proprietary software, without cross-platform conversion issues, and
> >without legacy version issues.
>
> Word doesn't have these either.
Since when is Word free?!? Last I checked, the latest version of
Office was on the order of $300 to buy it new, or about $200 to
upgrade from a previous version.
Can you send a Word file to a colleague who doesn't own the same
version of Word as you (or no version at all!), and/or is working on a
a different OS than you (Mac versus PC... god forbid he's on Linux!),
and he'll be able to open your file and it will look the same as on
your machine? As recently as last year, that wasn't true for me when
I was collaborating with a colleague. Random symbols were missing,
pagination was different, and even the fonts weren't consistent.
How about a Word file from 10 years ago? If you open it on a modern
machine running the latest version of Word, will it have the same
layout as it originally did? Will you even be able to open the file
at all?
None of these are problems with TeX, because TeX source files are all
plain text files, the most basic text file you can possibly have, free
and common to every computer system, every operating system, and every
time period.
> >Handling of large-documents: Word often crashes unpredictably on
> >large, complex documents,
>
> After so many years of using several versions (6, 97, 2007), I can
> hardly remember such events. Word 2000 was very buggy, yes, that's
> true.
It's gotten better, but it's still buggy.
> >ut (La)TeX doesn't; a 1000-page document is
> >just as stable as a 1-page document.
>
> Why not split that into chapters?
I'm counting the entire finished product as a "document". Of course
it should consist of multiple individual files if it's large enough.
Doing this in TeX is trivial, and the resulting document is just as
stable as a 1-page document.
My experience with the "master document" functionality in Word is that
it is cumbersome (difficult to initiate, difficult to change,
difficult to work on individual pieces) and unreliable (formatting and
styles between subparts gets broken, files are prone to corruption,
etc.).
Perhaps that's changed in the past few years since I worked with it,
but this aspect of TeX has always been straightforward and stable.
Nathan Sanders
Ruud Harmsen <zb...@rudhar.eu> wrote:
> Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:51:33 -0400: Nathan Sanders
> <nsan...@williams.edu>: in sci.lang:
>
> >In the vast majority of cases, you don't need to mess with kerning in
> >TeX. Out of the box, it automatically uses the appropriate kerning
> >that's embedded in the font. Assuming the font was designed by
> >someone who knew what they were doing, the end user won't have to do
> >anything special.
> >
> >Word does not access the font's internal kerning by default (requiring
> >the user to (a) know that it needs to be turned on
>
> This is new to me.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/files/linuxjournal.com/linuxjournal/article
s/090/9085/9085f1.png
http://www.linuxjournal.com/files/linuxjournal.com/linuxjournal/article
s/090/9085/9085f2.png
The first was generated in Word, the second in LaTeX. The second is
properly kerned, with the space between "T" and "a" reduced.
> >and (b) turn it
> >one), and once it's on, there are still problems with it.
>
> Such as?
It doesn't work! I just tried it. Turned it on, turned it off,
opened a new file, quit the program, etc. etc. Nothing. "Table"
comes out looking just as bad as always.
> >TeX has been doing kerning properly since the beginning.
>
> So does Word, after 1994 or so.
No, it has not. I have never seen fi, fl, ff, ffi, or ffl ever come
out as ligatures in Word, not with any magic hidden preference, and
certainly not "out of the box".
Some googling reveals that in fact, Word has not been doing ligatures
until Word 2007, and that even then, the ligatures are all or nothing:
either every ligature is used throughout the document, or none of them
are! Which means a phrase like "a shelfful of puffy toys" will not
look correct in Word.
I finally found out how to do ligatures. It still doesn't work (same
problem as with kerning).
Tak To
> On Jul 1, 11:12 am, Tak To <ta...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>> Joachim Pense wrote:
>>> Christian Weisgerber (in sci.lang):
>>>> Tak To <ta...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>>>>> DKleinecke wrote:
>>>>>> I found the following comment in a computer program
>>>>>> /* setup handler list binary searchable array hash table (in
>>>>>> german, that'd be one word ;) */
>>>>>
>>>>> This does not make much sense to a programmer.
>>>>> [...] they are too generic to be a cascade of
>>>>> subparts. (E.g "hotel kitchen cabinet door lock"
>>>>> sounds plausible but not "hotel kitchen container
>>>>> box bottle".)
>>>>
>>>> It _is_ an actual comment from actual code. It's in glib's
>>>> gobject/gsignal.c, g_signal_init(); line 773 in version 2.18.4.
>>>
>>> And what is the contradictory "binary searchable array hash
>>> table" in the program?
>>
>> seems, this is an actual cascade of superparts: i.e.,
>> a hash table (by object instance) of sorted arrays
>> (by signal id) of lists (by user specified order)
>> of signal handlers.
>>
>> If I were the programmer I would probably adopt
>> an abstraction at the mid-level and call it the
>> Signal Vector Hash Table.
>
> Remember it wasn't MY comment (or code). I was startled when it
> appeared.
I know. I did not say it was yours.
> I usually make a mid-level abstraction when the compound
> gets to be three words along. That is, I really only like
> two word compounds at most.
Very reasonable.
> I only mentioned Knuth to give some creditability to the
> idea that code SHOULD be literate and readable. I think
> the implementation he tried took a wrong turn very early
> in the game.
I did not follow the history of LP that closely, but
I never bought into the belief that natural language
offers a good model of information organization. In
other words, readability is not the same as understand-
ability. The foremost factor in understandability
is the clarity of organization and that's what programmers
should strife for. "Readability" is useful only within
one level of abstraction, when ideas can be presented
sequentially.
Thus, the aim of a literate program that is like a
natural language document is fundamentally flawed.
Instead, the goal should be to popularize a set of
universal information organization primitives or
templates and get people to understand them by
using them.
> I have been investigating other ways of writing literate programs with
> I think is some success. I have been using the Glib/Gtk family of code
> as a test base for whether my ideas can be applied to real code (as
> opposed to something I made up). I have reconstructed a lot of code so
> far with only trivial difficulties.
>
> The catch is that the result isn't very literate - even in terms of a
> very restricted English. The reason it isn't literate is clearly the
> fact that I do not understand the code properly. This leads me to
> think I am on the right track because it suggests that the code is not
> really comprehensible, as it stands, to anyone outside the tiny
> community (a half dozen people I would suspect) who created it. The
> techniques I am testing force the writer to explicate better.
Well, a program, even a literate one, is never a
substitution for background reading.
> And the VERB setup exists. It is used constantly in the corpus I am
> working on. It cannot be written with a hyphen in C and that
> restriction obviously impacts on the spelling the programmers use.
> Equally a separable like "set ... up" (the best equivalent in standard
> English) is alien to C. Sort of a Whorfian effect is going on and the
> programmers use of C has an impact on their comments. Once they raise
> their heads into the real world I imagine the C effect disappears.
I have always used the two word form for verb in
English. Combining an English verb and a preposition
to form a C-verb is nothing new of course.
Tak
--
----------------------------------------------------------------+-----
Tak To ta...@alum.mit.eduxx
--------------------------------------------------------------------^^
[taode takto ~{LU5B~}] NB: trim the xx to get my real email addr
Joe Fineman
> LEE Sau Dan (in sci.lang):
>> If it's nested, it should be "a hash table of binary searchable
>> arrays".
>
> That would be another way to say the same thing - it's a bit more
> specific because it qualifies the relation between "binary
> searchable array" and "hash table". But I don't think the tatpurusha
> verson "binary searchable array hash table" is not allowed in
> English.
It's what copyeditors call a freighttrain (you can parse it once the
caboose has gone by). I have a wonderful collection of them, mostly
produced by engineers. As a copyeditor I would change the MS to Lee's
wording if I could get away with it. A pedantic old-fashioned
copyeditor, brought up on Fowler & forbidden to change the word order,
might make it "binary-searchable-array hash table".
--
--- Joe Fineman jo...@verizon.net
||: Liberty subverts equality & fraternity, because its costs :||
||: are largely borne by the weak. :||
Peter T. Daniels
wrote:
> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > On Jul 2, 3:28 am, Helmut Wollmersdorfer <hel...@wollmersdorfer.at>
> > wrote:
> >> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> >>> On Jul 1, 6:22 pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@williams.edu> wrote:
> >>>> What don't you like about TeX? The page layout and paragraph breaking
> >>>> routines are incredibly sophisticated.
> >>> And incredibly complicated to use. Something only a programmer could
> >>> love. (Jonathan Rodgers said that much of the delay in his translation
> >>> of Fischer's Arabic Grammar was due to the intricacies of the
> >>> programming. Nowadays it would be a cinch in Word.
> >> Forget Word if you need layout of medium or better quality.
>
> > I have never used Word for camera-ready copy.
>
> Hopefully your printer doesn't use use cameras any more;-)
That, however, is what, e.g., pdfs are still called.
> Nowadays somebody or you yourself brings your content via InDesign or
> Scribus into PDF/X-3 which is directly processed by 'computer to plate'
> or 'computer to print'
>
> > Which version?
>
> March 2006, InDesign CS 2
That query must have related to something you snipped ... I'm starting
with CS4, which does do cross references.
> > I take it you didn't need cross references.
>
> No, it was not scientific, it was artwork - watercolor paintings with
> some text around.
>
> >> But even if it is well
> >> supported you can expect problems with the details of Arabic typography
> >> (BTW: Do you know a good book - in English - about it?)
> > About what, exactly?
>
> Arabic typography if this is comparable to German (European) typography.
Arabic wasn't printed in Islamic countries until the late 19th
century. There were (Western-run) presses in Istanbul and maybe a few
other major cities, but they mostly produced pedagogical materials and
missionary publications.
The first Islamic press was in Bulaq (Cairo), and the type design was
so fine that the output could at first glance be mistaken for a
manuscript (which, after all, is how Gutenberg got started). To this
day, the truly devout will not countenance a printed Qur'an.
> > THere has never been a book in English on "exotic" type design.
> > Sometimes you'll see examples of layouts scattered in graphic design
> > collections, but that's about it. ("Exotic" means anything non-roman.)
>
> Ok.
The best historical summary (unillustrated) I've come across is in
the 1911 Britannica, s.v. Typography.
Peter T. Daniels
> In article
> <fbc5ce5c-1273-40ac-be9e-11d1e3213...@d10g2000vbm.googlegroups.com>,
> "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Jul 2, 9:55 am, LEE Sau Dan <dan...@informatik.uni-freiburg.de>
> > wrote:
> > > >>>>> "Peter" == Peter T Daniels <gramma...@verizon.net> writes:
>
> > > Peter> You don't know _what_ you're talking about. Did you never
> > > Peter> manage to find the button that turns on hyphenation -- which
> > > Peter> you should never do until you've finished writing your text
> > > Peter> and now need to shape it for the publisher? (In the
> > > Peter> unfortunate event that you're preparing camera- ready copy.)
>
> > > Why should I have to bother with that button? LaTeX does that
> > > automatically, even for the draft copies.
>
> > That is definitely a bug, not a feature.
>
> > And whose rules for hyphenation does it follow?
>
> It depends on which language you're using. \usepackage[french]{babel}
> will get you French hyphenation. (And yes, you can use multiple
> languages' hyphenation patterns in the same document.)
>
> And if the rules for that language get a particular word wrong, you
> can always set the allowable hyphenation for individual words, which
> is especially helpful for proper names and newer words. For example,
> \hyphenation{fortran} will prevent "fortran" from ever being
> hyphenated anywhere, while \hyphenation{mondegreen} will guarantee
> that "mondegreen" can be hyphenated, but only as "monde-green",
> blocking "mon-degreen".
Just like Word!
> > I'm still waiitng to hear of something it can do better or easier than
> > Word. (Other than mathematical equations, which are of no concern to
> > me or to 99.9995% of users. That's one in a million.)
>
> As I've already mentioned, ligatures, kerning, and whole-page
> hyphenation algorithms.
FrameMaker did, and InDesign does, ligaturing. Word, as I said, is not
a CRC program.
> In addition:
>
> Handling of floats.
Evidently a technical term in TeX.
> Counters: tables, figures, equation, etc. are number automatically,
> with their own separate counters.
Just like Word!
> Smart cross-referencing: you can have ordinary numerical
> cross-references like "on page 213", but if you want, you can have
> them automatically come out as relative references like "on the
> previous page" or "on the next page". If your content changes the
> relationship, the cross-references will automatically change
> appropriately.
Just like Word!
> Proper small caps (when they're available in the font): Word scales
> down capital letters rather than using the true small caps, resulting
> in wispy small caps that don't fit in with the rest of the text.
How many decades ago did you last look at Word? If they're in a font,
Word can use them.
> Automatic proper spacing after sentence-final periods. No need to do
> a search-and-replace to change the occasional double space into a
> single space (which is still wrong anyway: the spacing is supposed to
> be 1.5 spaces, which can't be done easily in Word).
Where did "1.5 spaces" come from? Is that something Knuth invented
because he didn't quite want to abandon the typewriter?
> User-defined macros.
Just like Word!
> Multiple accent marks on the same character (e.g., acute over macron).
Just like Word! (Inmcluding for combinations that are not pre-defined
in Unicode.)
> Language-specific hyphenation and ligatures.
Just like Word!
> Cost and portability: (La)TeX is free and the source files are written
> in plain text, so anyone can read your document without having to buy
> proprietary software, without cross-platform conversion issues, and
> without legacy version issues.
Word has no cross-platform conversion issues, and the only "legacy
version issues" are because Word2007 uses a new, much compacter format
and you can download a free Compatibility Pack for your earlier
version of Word so it can open the new format (or you can save from
2007 in the earlier format).
> Handling of large-documents: Word often crashes unpredictably on
> large, complex documents,
Define "often"; and in what decade did you last use Word? The
suggested upper bound on size of a single Word file is 32Mb _of text_,
not counting graphics in that measure.
> but (La)TeX doesn't; a 1000-page document is
> just as stable as a 1-page document. Furthermore, selectively editing
> arbitrary chunks of a (La)TeX document without having to process the
> rest is trivial; not so in Word.
No idea what that refers to, nor what's not so in Word.
Peter T. Daniels
> "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Jul 2, 9:50 am, LEE Sau Dan <dan...@informatik.uni-freiburg.de>
> > wrote:
> > > >>>>> "Peter" == Peter T Daniels <gramma...@verizon.net> writes:
>
> > > Peter> I had to use OpenOffice for several weeks while I was getting
> > > Peter> an upgraded PC and found it utterly hopeless because of the
> > > Peter> impossibility of adding keyboard shortcuts -- do you remember
> > > Peter> what you had to go through to get small capitals?
>
> > > In LaTeX: \textsc{This is text in Small Caps}.
>
> > That appears to be 9 keystrokes (including the two braces). In Word,
> > it's 2 (Ctrl-Shift-K at the beginning and end of the passage) or 2
> > clicks on the SC button, or 1 (after selecting the text).
>
> > In OpenOffice, you actually have to mouse to a formatting menu and go
> > a couple of levels into dialogs.
>
> > All for "BCE" and "CE."
>
> For that, I'd just use \BCE and \CE, which I would have previously
> defined as macros to be in small caps.
What if each new technical term is to be in small caps? or each
morpheme-label in a displayed example with morphemic glosses?
Peter T. Daniels
Then you are consuming considerable amounts of computing power on
something for which there is no need at all until after the text is
finalized. Both the InDesign manual and all the aftermarket books
strongly recommend turning off the feature that does the typographic
niceties while you're working on your text precisely because it takes
a noticeable amount of time for the display to refresh, and since it
has to do it after every line -- after almost every word -- it will
considerably slow you down. (Though I suppose Knuth only had
mainframes in his day, so that wasn't a concern.)
> > > > > (Note that the Computer Modern
> > > > > font, which I bet is what you're really talking about, is not TeX.)
>
> > > > That's "typography" -- type design. The default TeX font.
>
> > > Do you use the default font in Word? When you want to use a different
> > > font, do you just throw up your hands and cry "But they gave me a
> > > default, so I have to use it!"?
>
> > Times New Roman is a hell of a lot better than Computer Modern.
>
> Computer Modern is not TeX. The longer you keep conflating the two
> and pretending that default fonts can't be changed, the more it
> becomes clear that you really don't know what you're talking about.
>
> > (Calibri is not wonderful. None of the new "C" fonts that come with
> > Office2007 are, but the old standards still come with.)
>
> So if you're unhappy with Calibri as the default font, what on earth
> are you supposed to do?
Use Times New Roman instead. Did you miss the part where I said "the
old standards still come with" and a single click changes your
defaults to "2003 defaults"?
> > > > > Knuth did not create LaTeX. That was Leslie Lamport's creation.
>
> > > > And it gives you Computer Modern out of the box.
>
> > > And out of the box, Word gives you (among other terrible things)
> > > woefully inadequate kerning and no fi/fl ligatures.
>
> > > Take a wild guess which is easier to change: the font in (La)TeX, or
> > > the kerning and ligatures in Word.
>
> > And letting people with no concept of print esthetics meddle with
> > kerning is a recipe for visual disaster.
>
> In the vast majority of cases, you don't need to mess with kerning in
> TeX. Out of the box, it automatically uses the appropriate kerning
> that's embedded in the font. Assuming the font was designed by
> someone who knew what they were doing, the end user won't have to do
> anything special.
>
> Word does not access the font's internal kerning by default (requiring
> the user to (a) know that it needs to be turned on and (b) turn it
> one), and once it's on, there are still problems with it.
>
> TeX has been doing kerning properly since the beginning.
>
> There are also serious problems with Word's handling of leading.
> Insert an ordinary sub- or superscript in a line, and the leading gets
> visually thrown out of whack. Not so in TeX.
_Which_ decade did you last deal with Word?
Actually it's probably had "Exactly" line spacing from the very
beginning.
Peter T. Daniels
> On Thu, 2 Jul 2009 08:56:44 -0700 (PDT), "Peter T. Daniels"
Well if you can, it isn't mentioned anywhere either in the Help or in
the printed Manual.
Peter T. Daniels
> In article <119kzsnhjj4su$.1mozg6kqnpdfa$....@40tude.net>,
> "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc...@csuohio.edu> wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:08:37 -0400, Nathan Sanders
> > <news:nsanders-736B2A...@news.newsguy.com> in
> > sci.lang:
>
> > > Automatic proper spacing after sentence-final periods. No
> > > need to do a search-and-replace to change the occasional
> > > double space into a single space
>
> > Ow! That's just backwards.
>
> I agree. I prefer a double space to a single space (and the proper
> 1.5 space to double).
>
> I don't know why there is such a strong movement to banish the double
> space, but it is very real.
"Double space after a period" was invented when all there was was
typewriters and all characters were the same width (Courier is an
imitation of a typewriter font). It was never part of typesetting.
Peter T. Daniels
> Thu, 2 Jul 2009 09:01:37 -0700 (PDT): "Peter T. Daniels"
>
> >Hyphenated text is an obstacle to clear writing and revising.
>
> I agree!
>
> I never hyphenate, except when there's a really annoying amount of
> white space, then I very sparingly add an optional hyphen (html
> ­). And always between morphologic parts, preferrably parts of a
> composite word. Not just by any syllable.
There are different principles for English hyphenation. American
guides prefer to acknowledge morpheme boundaries when possible,
British are more likely to go purely by syllable.
But the _author_ should never insert hyphens into the text unless they
are part of the orthography. Hyphenation is the province of the
typesetter.
Brian M. Scott
<gram...@verizon.net> wrote in
<news:a23c9534-e395-40a7...@i6g2000yqj.googlegroups.com>
in sci.lang:
> On Jul 2, 3:38�pm, "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc...@csuohio.edu> wrote:
[...]
>> I suspect that you could also record a macro to do the
>> dirty work, but I've never had reason to try.
> Well if you can, it isn't mentioned anywhere either in the
> Help or in the printed Manual.
Recording of macros is treated in the Help.
Brian
Peter T. Daniels
> In article <7a4q45pm47b2nq4qm0ga2m9fuut0l27...@4ax.com>,> > <nsand...@williams.edu>: in sci.lang:
>
> > >> I'm still waiitng to hear of something it can do better or easier than
> > >> Word. (Other than mathematical equations, which are of no concern to
> > >> me or to 99.9995% of users. That's one in a million.)
>
> > >As I've already mentioned, ligatures, kerning, and whole-page
> > >hyphenation algorithms.
>
> > Word (and TrueType in general) does ligatures and kerning too.
>
> I just tested these in Word 2008, out of the box:
_One_ query to the Word newsgroup, just in the last few days, suggests
that Word2008 (the Mac version of 2007) has introduced some DTP
features that are not in 2007 (including "master pages" -- bizarre,
since Word doesn't think by pages -- and guides). So maybe you can
find such things by studying your manual.
> No ligatures for fi, fl, ff, ffi, or ffl.
>
> Kerning is terrible. "Table" has the wrong spacing between T and a,
> and tall italics characters inside parentheses bump into the
> right-hand parenthesis.
>
> Hunting around the menus, I managed to find something called "kerning
> for fonts" and turned it on. "Table" and tall italics inside
> parentheses are still incorrectly kerned.
>
> I haven't yet found how to get ligatures.
>
> > >Multiple accent marks on the same character (e.g., acute over macron).
>
> > Possible in any system that supports Unicode.
>
> TeX was able to handle this easily before Unicode.
Uh, so what? This is 2009.
> It still handles
> it easily: \'\=a puts an acute over a macron over "a". I know how to
> get an acute accent over "a" in Word, and I've modified my keyboard to
> allow me to get a macron (this is not an out-of-the-box ability!), but
> I don't know of a simple way to get both accents on the same character
> in Word.
Have you not discovered the Insert Symbol button? Have you not
realized that you can assign a keyboard shortcut to every character in
Unicode, if you so choose? I've done a wonderfully mnemonic and
efficient set of shortcuts for just about every diacriticized letter I
ever want.
And if you haven't even discovered the Combining Diacritical Marks
range of Unicode, you have very, very little business criticizing its
linguistic abilities.
> I just put an acute accent over an "m" in Word, and it changed the
> font from Cambria to MS Reference Sans Serif, and now, everything I
> type after that is in the new font!
Then you should learn how to use Word properly. And you shouldn't be
using a font that doesn't have the additional character ranges for
doing linguistics.
> If the accented character is not a pre-composed character in the font
> (as acute-m is not in Cambria), TeX will compose the accented
> character on the fly. There is no font change for either that
> character or the following ones.
Just like Word!
> > >Language-specific hyphenation and ligatures.
>
> > Hyphenation is language-specific in Word too.
>
> Can Word handle multiple languages within the same document?
Of course!
> In
> LaTeX, it's as easy as:
>
> \usepackage[french,german,english]{babel}
> ...
> \selectlanguage{german}
> ...
> \selectlanguage{french}
> ...
> \selectlanguage{german}
> ...
> \selectlanguage{english}
It's a hell of a lot easier than that in Word.
> > >Cost and portability: (La)TeX is free and the source files are written
> > >in plain text, so anyone can read your document without having to buy
> > >proprietary software, without cross-platform conversion issues, and
> > >without legacy version issues.
>
> > Word doesn't have these either.
>
> Since when is Word free?!? Last I checked, the latest version of
> Office was on the order of $300 to buy it new, or about $200 to
> upgrade from a previous version.
You get what you pay for.
Someone, obviously, is subsidizing LaTeX.
> Can you send a Word file to a colleague who doesn't own the same
> version of Word as you (or no version at all!), and/or is working on a
> a different OS than you (Mac versus PC... god forbid he's on Linux!),
> and he'll be able to open your file and it will look the same as on
> your machine? As recently as last year, that wasn't true for me when
> I was collaborating with a colleague. Random symbols were missing,
> pagination was different, and even the fonts weren't consistent.
If the same fonts were installed on both computers, the fonts were not
a problem. If the document was assigned to the same printer driver on
the different computers, there would be no formatting problem.
> How about a Word file from 10 years ago? If you open it on a modern
> machine running the latest version of Word, will it have the same
> layout as it originally did? Will you even be able to open the file
> at all?
I think you need to change a Registry entry in order to open a
document in a pre-97 format. That was apparently a security measure
introduced with 2007.
> None of these are problems with TeX, because TeX source files are all
> plain text files, the most basic text file you can possibly have, free
> and common to every computer system, every operating system, and every
> time period.
And therefore consuming lots of extra computing power every time
they're opened.
> > >Handling of large-documents: Word often crashes unpredictably on
> > >large, complex documents,
>
> > After so many years of using several versions (6, 97, 2007), I can
> > hardly remember such events. Word 2000 was very buggy, yes, that's
> > true.
>
> It's gotten better, but it's still buggy.
Evidence?
> > >ut (La)TeX doesn't; a 1000-page document is
> > >just as stable as a 1-page document.
>
> > Why not split that into chapters?
>
> I'm counting the entire finished product as a "document". Of course
> it should consist of multiple individual files if it's large enough.
> Doing this in TeX is trivial, and the resulting document is just as
> stable as a 1-page document.
>
> My experience with the "master document" functionality in Word is that
> it is cumbersome (difficult to initiate, difficult to change,
> difficult to work on individual pieces) and unreliable (formatting and
> styles between subparts gets broken, files are prone to corruption,
> etc.).
DO NOT EVER try to use "Master Documents" in Word. They never worked
correctly, they are not explicated in Help, and they corrupt
immediately.
Instead, use RD fields, or simply make a really big file. Word can
handle it.
> Perhaps that's changed in the past few years since I worked with it,
> but this aspect of TeX has always been straightforward and stable.
I wish you hadn't been making me defend Word so much (I'd much prefer
to be able to continue with FrameMaker), but from everything you've
said, it is considerably superior to (La)TeX.
Peter T. Daniels
> On Thu, 2 Jul 2009 15:11:51 -0700 (PDT), "Peter T. Daniels"
> <news:a23c9534-e395-40a7...@i6g2000yqj.googlegroups.com>
> in sci.lang:
>
> > On Jul 2, 3:38 pm, "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc...@csuohio.edu> wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> >> I suspect that you could also record a macro to do the
> >> dirty work, but I've never had reason to try.
> > Well if you can, it isn't mentioned anywhere either in the
> > Help or in the printed Manual.
>
> Recording of macros is treated in the Help.
Why would I want a macro to do the work of a keyboard shortcut?
Brian M. Scott
<gram...@verizon.net> wrote in
<news:19b21156-d645-4fb1...@i6g2000yqj.googlegroups.com>
in sci.lang:
[...]
> But the _author_ should never insert hyphens into the text
> unless they are part of the orthography. Hyphenation is
> the province of the typesetter.
Who nowadays may be the author.
Brian
Brian M. Scott
<gram...@verizon.net> wrote in
<news:d42a8d50-9122-4311...@o6g2000yqj.googlegroups.com>
in sci.lang:
> On Jul 2, 6:27�pm, "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc...@csuohio.edu> wrote:
>> On Thu, 2 Jul 2009 15:11:51 -0700 (PDT), "Peter T. Daniels"
>> <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote in
>> <news:a23c9534-e395-40a7...@i6g2000yqj.googlegroups.com>
>> in sci.lang:
>>> On Jul 2, 3:38�pm, "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc...@csuohio.edu> wrote:
>> [...]
>>>> I suspect that you could also record a macro to do the
>>>> dirty work, but I've never had reason to try.
>>> Well if you can, it isn't mentioned anywhere either in the
>>> Help or in the printed Manual.
>> Recording of macros is treated in the Help.
> Why would I want a macro to do the work of a keyboard shortcut?
Because any macro can be assigned a keyboard shortcut, of
course.
Brian
Nathan Sanders
<3598a0f9-7f6d-43ac...@j32g2000yqh.googlegroups.com>,
The point is that the way TeX does it doesn't require Unicode, doesn't
require the Combining Diacritical Marks range, doesn't require
assigning keyboard shortcuts, or any of that other fancy stuff. It
works and has always worked directly "out of box", in a simple
straightforward manner.
> > It still handles
> > it easily: \'\=a puts an acute over a macron over "a". �I know how to
> > get an acute accent over "a" in Word, and I've modified my keyboard to
> > allow me to get a macron (this is not an out-of-the-box ability!), but
> > I don't know of a simple way to get both accents on the same character
> > in Word.
>
> Have you not discovered the Insert Symbol button?
What's the keyboard shortcut for that?
> Have you not
> realized that you can assign a keyboard shortcut to every character in
> Unicode, if you so choose?
*Every* character? That would take quite a while to assign all those
shortcuts!
> And if you haven't even discovered the Combining Diacritical Marks
> range of Unicode, you have very, very little business criticizing its
> linguistic abilities.
Oh, I know where it is. Unfortunately, they don't all combine
properly in Word. I just tried "a" + combining macron + combining
acute and got a misaligned macron and a misaligned acute superimposed
on each other (rather than stacked and properly centered, as occurs in
TeX).
> > I just put an acute accent over an "m" in Word, and it changed the
> > font from Cambria to MS Reference Sans Serif, and now, everything I
> > type after that is in the new font!
>
> Then you should learn how to use Word properly.
Praytell, how do you prevent the font from switching when the accented
character try to type doesn't exist in the font? How do you know, a
proiri, whether any particular accent+character combination is missing?
When TeX can't find the combination, it creates it from scratch, and
the result looks like it belongs with the rest of the text. When Word
can't find it, it changes the font.
TeX's behavior is far more desirable.
> And you shouldn't be
> using a font that doesn't have the additional character ranges for
> doing linguistics.
I was using the default font! You can complain about TeX's default
font, so why can't I complain about Word's?
> > If the accented character is not a pre-composed character in the font
> > (as acute-m is not in Cambria), TeX will compose the accented
> > character on the fly. �There is no font change for either that
> > character or the following ones.
>
> Just like Word!
Nonsense. I just say the font-changing behavior in Word.
> > Can you send a Word file to a colleague who doesn't own the same
> > version of Word as you (or no version at all!), and/or is working on a
> > a different OS than you (Mac versus PC... god forbid he's on Linux!),
> > and he'll be able to open your file and it will look the same as on
> > your machine? �As recently as last year, that wasn't true for me when
> > I was collaborating with a colleague. �Random symbols were missing,
> > pagination was different, and even the fonts weren't consistent.
>
> If the same fonts were installed on both computers, the fonts were not
> a problem. If the document was assigned to the same printer driver on
> the different computers, there would be no formatting problem.
We had the same fonts. The "Insert symbol" function is/was broken.
If the inserted symbol was done on a PC, it showed up as a box on a
Mac.
>
> > How about a Word file from 10 years ago? �If you open it on a modern
> > machine running the latest version of Word, will it have the same
> > layout as it originally did? �Will you even be able to open the file
> > at all?
>
> I think you need to change a Registry entry in order to open a
> document in a pre-97 format. That was apparently a security measure
> introduced with 2007.
No such arcane magic is necessary to open a decade-old TeX file. You
just, well, open it. And it opens. And you can read it. On any
computer, running any operating system, with any fonts, with any
printer drivers, without having spend hundreds of dollars on
proprietary file formats.
> > None of these are problems with TeX, because TeX source files are all
> > plain text files, the most basic text file you can possibly have, free
> > and common to every computer system, every operating system, and every
> > time period.
>
> And therefore consuming lots of extra computing power every time
> they're opened.
?!?! Plain text files are the easiest files for a computer to open!
> > > >Handling of large-documents: Word often crashes unpredictably on
> > > >large, complex documents,
> >
> > > After so many years of using several versions (6, 97, 2007), I can
> > > hardly remember such events. Word 2000 was very buggy, yes, that's
> > > true.
> >
> > It's gotten better, but it's still buggy.
>
> Evidence?
See below.
> > > >ut (La)TeX doesn't; a 1000-page document is
> > > >just as stable as a 1-page document. �
> >
> > > Why not split that into chapters?
> >
> > I'm counting the entire finished product as a "document". �Of course
> > it should consist of multiple individual files if it's large enough. �
> > Doing this in TeX is trivial, and the resulting document is just as
> > stable as a 1-page document.
> >
> > My experience with the "master document" functionality in Word is that
> > it is cumbersome (difficult to initiate, difficult to change,
> > difficult to work on individual pieces) and unreliable (formatting and
> > styles between subparts gets broken, files are prone to corruption,
> > etc.).
>
> DO NOT EVER try to use "Master Documents" in Word. They never worked
> correctly, they are not explicated in Help, and they corrupt
> immediately.
Right above is the evidence you asked about.
> Instead, use RD fields, or simply make a really big file. Word can
> handle it.
Oh, great. Open up a 1000-page document every time I need to make a
single isolated change!
> > Perhaps that's changed in the past few years since I worked with it,
> > but this aspect of TeX has always been straightforward and stable.
>
> I wish you hadn't been making me defend Word so much (I'd much prefer
> to be able to continue with FrameMaker), but from everything you've
> said, it is considerably superior to (La)TeX.
If that's what you think, then you have the reading comprehension of a
pumpkin.
Nathan Sanders
<d476aa79-ab49-4863...@c36g2000yqn.googlegroups.com>,
"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:
Did you miss where I said that 1.5 spacing is proper?
Word doesn't do 1.5 spacing. TeX does.
Nathan Sanders
<1cd079f2-c60c-44f3...@e21g2000yqb.googlegroups.com>,
"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:
I'd create a macro, probably named something sensible like \morph{...}.
If I decide later that I want morphemes to be bold-faced, I only have
to change the macro's definition in one place.
Nathan Sanders
<1308b662-1a99-44b5...@k8g2000yqn.googlegroups.com>,
"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On Jul 2, 2:51�pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@williams.edu> wrote:
>
> > What's "crappy" about having uniform page color? �Rivers of whitespace
> > are considered by typography, and Word does nothing to prevent them,
[oops, that should be "bad typography"]
> > because it lays out each line independently, without concern for the
> > overall page layout (exactly the opposite of what TeX does).
>
> Then you are consuming considerable amounts of computing power
Nonsense. You vastly over-estimate the "computing power" required by
TeX.
> on
> something for which there is no need at all until after the text is
> finalized. Both the InDesign manual and all the aftermarket books
> strongly recommend turning off the feature that does the typographic
> niceties while you're working on your text precisely because it takes
> a noticeable amount of time for the display to refresh, and since it
> has to do it after every line -- after almost every word -- it will
> considerably slow you down. (Though I suppose Knuth only had
> mainframes in his day, so that wasn't a concern.)
TeX doesn't do it "after every line". It does it when you want it to
do it. You can happily input your source text without formatting it,
for as long as you want.
> > > > > > (Note that the Computer Modern
> > > > > > font, which I bet is what you're really talking about, is not TeX.)
> >
> > > > > That's "typography" -- type design. The default TeX font.
> >
> > > > Do you use the default font in Word? �When you want to use a different
> > > > font, do you just throw up your hands and cry "But they gave me a
> > > > default, so I have to use it!"?
> >
> > > Times New Roman is a hell of a lot better than Computer Modern.
> >
> > Computer Modern is not TeX. �The longer you keep conflating the two
> > and pretending that default fonts can't be changed, the more it
> > becomes clear that you really don't know what you're talking about.
> >
> > > (Calibri is not wonderful. None of the new "C" fonts that come with
> > > Office2007 are, but the old standards still come with.)
> >
> > So if you're unhappy with Calibri as the default font, what on earth
> > are you supposed to do?
>
> Use Times New Roman instead.
Bingo. You change the default font if you don't like it.
So why do you keep needlessly bitching about the default font in TeX,
since it can be changed?
> > In the vast majority of cases, you don't need to mess with kerning in
> > TeX. �Out of the box, it automatically uses the appropriate kerning
> > that's embedded in the font. �Assuming the font was designed by
> > someone who knew what they were doing, the end user won't have to do
> > anything special.
> >
> > Word does not access the font's internal kerning by default (requiring
> > the user to (a) know that it needs to be turned on and (b) turn it
> > one), and once it's on, there are still problems with it.
> >
> > TeX has been doing kerning properly since the beginning.
> >
> > There are also serious problems with Word's handling of leading. �
> > Insert an ordinary sub- or superscript in a line, and the leading gets
> > visually thrown out of whack. �Not so in TeX.
>
> _Which_ decade did you last deal with Word?
The aughts.
> Actually it's probably had "Exactly" line spacing from the very
> beginning.
The "exactly" line spacing is just as bad, because it allows no leeway
in the leading at all. It's either-or in Word: bad leading, or no
leading.
TeX does good leading.
Nathan Sanders
<34d4d603-60dc-4834...@n11g2000yqb.googlegroups.com>,
"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On Jul 2, 1:08�pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@williams.edu> wrote:
> > In article
> > <fbc5ce5c-1273-40ac-be9e-11d1e3213...@d10g2000vbm.googlegroups.com>,
> > �"Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> >
> > > I'm still waiitng to hear of something it can do better or easier than
> > > Word. (Other than mathematical equations, which are of no concern to
> > > me or to 99.9995% of users. That's one in a million.)
> >
> > As I've already mentioned, ligatures, kerning, and whole-page
> > hyphenation algorithms.
>
> FrameMaker did, and InDesign does, ligaturing. Word, as I said, is not
> a CRC program.
FrameMaker is extinct. InDesign costs even more than Word.
Why should I pay over $600 to get ligatures, kerning, and whole-page
hyphenation, when I can get it for free?
> > In addition:
> >
> > Handling of floats.
>
> Evidently a technical term in TeX.
Floats are tables and figures that "float" within the text, to the
most visually optimal spot (for example, keeping the text/nontext
ratio at acceptable levels).
> > Counters: tables, figures, equation, etc. are number automatically,
> > with their own separate counters.
>
> Just like Word!
When I insert a table in Word, it has no numbering.
When I do \begin{table}...\end{table}, it automatically numbered
behind the scenes for me.
> > Smart cross-referencing: you can have ordinary numerical
> > cross-references like "on page 213", but if you want, you can have
> > them automatically come out as relative references like "on the
> > previous page" or "on the next page". �If your content changes the
> > relationship, the cross-references will automatically change
> > appropriately.
>
> Just like Word!
I don't believe you. Where are smart page references documented? How
are the inserted?
In LaTeX, they are just "v"ariant references, so they are inserted
quite easily, with \vref{...} and \vpageref{...}.
> > Proper small caps (when they're available in the font): Word scales
> > down capital letters rather than using the true small caps, resulting
> > in wispy small caps that don't fit in with the rest of the text.
>
> How many decades ago did you last look at Word? If they're in a font,
> Word can use them.
I just tested it. The small capitals for Times New Roman are faked in
word: they are 80% scaled down version of the regular capitals.
In LaTeX, the small capitals are true small caps.
> > Automatic proper spacing after sentence-final periods. �No need to do
> > a search-and-replace to change the occasional double space into a
> > single space (which is still wrong anyway: the spacing is supposed to
> > be 1.5 spaces, which can't be done easily in Word).
>
> Where did "1.5 spaces" come from? Is that something Knuth invented
> because he didn't quite want to abandon the typewriter?
Technically, the actual spacing is 1em, which is about 1.5 regular
spaces.
I'm surprised you don't know this.
(Because of an increase in adamant "one-spacers" and the use of poor
typesetting software like Word, more and more printed books use one
space instead of the proper 1.5 space. The first book I found with
the proper spacing after going through half a dozen on my shelf was
printed in 1989.)
> > Multiple accent marks on the same character (e.g., acute over macron).
>
> Just like Word! (Inmcluding for combinations that are not pre-defined
> in Unicode.)
I tried. It doesn't work.
> > Language-specific hyphenation and ligatures.
>
> Just like Word!
If you want "fortran" to remain un-hyphenated every time it appears,
how many times do you have to specify that in the file?
In LaTeX, you just do it once.
If you change your mind later, how difficult is it to undo that change
for every instance of "fortran"?
In LaTeX, you just do it once.
> > Cost and portability: (La)TeX is free and the source files are written
> > in plain text, so anyone can read your document without having to buy
> > proprietary software, without cross-platform conversion issues, and
> > without legacy version issues.
>
> Word has no cross-platform conversion issues,
You are lying. I have witnessed them first-hand. I have received
files created on PCs, opened them on my Mac, and found them not to
look like the original (I always ask the sender to send a PDF too, so
I can see what he intended the layout to look like).
> and the only "legacy
> version issues" are because Word2007 uses a new, much compacter format
> and you can download a free Compatibility Pack for your earlier
> version of Word so it can open the new format (or you can save from
> 2007 in the earlier format).
How swell of them to offer a special downloadable "compatibility pack"!
I've never needed any sort of "compatibility pack" to open a plain
text file.
DKleinecke
Mathematical Society (from the Letter from the Editor):
"Articles that appear in the Notices are prepared for production by
Notices staff who design layout, figure placement, column and page
breaks and so on ... Nonetheless most of the articles you read in the
Notices are submitted in TEX files ..."
He omits saying what tools the staff uses.
On the whole I think the only thing keeping TEX alive is the
commitment to beautiful equations and here we have a tacit admission
that TEX, at least as used by amateurs, isn't good enough for serious
publication.
Another thing to bear in mind is that the committee that created SGML
considered TEX and rejected it. There was doubtless some NIH involved
(they probably consider Knuth a brash outsider) but these were people
interested in real printed text.
On the whole I consider both sides of this argument somewhat
misguided. The future is not about book publishing. The book is going
to fade away (not so rapidly that Peter's livlihood in endangered).
More and more texts are going to exist primarily on a computer screen.
For a while, until the existing hardware wears out, it will be
possible to print them to paper. But they won't look beautiful because
they are texts designed for the screen.
There is plenty of work to be done out there. The world is filled with
hideous web pages. Let's work on ways of making them less hideous. For
one thing the screen can give us color. Why use small caps? Color the
text green instead. (I know about color blindness - we need better
ways to cope with it).
It will be VERY HARD to get the mathematicians and their fellow
travelers to stop using TEX. But I think economics ultimately will
force the change. But Word is not the answer either. It is just as
print-bound as Tex. Ditto Open Office and every other editor I have
ever used (I used to be big on Ami Pro).
As to kerning and ligatures - who needs them? Give up the button hook
and change to a font that makes sense. Ever see Greek text written
with all of its Byzantine ligatures? Nowadays, as far as I know,
everybody used nice readable uncials.
Peter T. Daniels
Whereas in Word, you'd create a character style. No programming.
Peter T. Daniels
> On Thu, 2 Jul 2009 15:32:33 -0700 (PDT), "Peter T. Daniels"
But why did they make it so difficult to apply small caps?
Peter T. Daniels
> "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Jul 2, 3:53 pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@williams.edu> wrote:
> > > In article <119kzsnhjj4su$.1mozg6kqnpdfa$....@40tude.net>,
> > > "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc...@csuohio.edu> wrote:
>
> > > > On Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:08:37 -0400, Nathan Sanders
> > > > <nsand...@williams.edu> wrote in
> > > > <news:nsanders-736B2A...@news.newsguy.com> in
> > > > sci.lang:
>
> > > > > Automatic proper spacing after sentence-final periods. No
> > > > > need to do a search-and-replace to change the occasional
> > > > > double space into a single space
>
> > > > Ow! That's just backwards.
>
> > > I agree. I prefer a double space to a single space (and the proper
> > > 1.5 space to double).
>
> > > I don't know why there is such a strong movement to banish the double
> > > space, but it is very real.
>
> > "Double space after a period" was invented when all there was was
> > typewriters and all characters were the same width (Courier is an
> > imitation of a typewriter font). It was never part of typesetting.
>
> Did you miss where I said that 1.5 spacing is proper?
So you have no basis for that statement but your own authority?????
> Word doesn't do 1.5 spacing. TeX does.
Yet another point in Word's favor.
Nathan Sanders
<8d4bee94-771b-43f3...@q11g2000yqi.googlegroups.com>,
"Peter T. Daniels" <gram...@verizon.net> wrote:
It's the same thing. One is immediately visible, the other is hidden
behind over-simplified, pre-packaged menu options.
Peter T. Daniels
Except that it's utterly incompatible with any user who doesn't happen
to have TeX.
A text in Unicode can be read in any current word processor (except
yours).
> > > It still handles
> > > it easily: \'\=a puts an acute over a macron over "a". I know how to
> > > get an acute accent over "a" in Word, and I've modified my keyboard to
> > > allow me to get a macron (this is not an out-of-the-box ability!), but
> > > I don't know of a simple way to get both accents on the same character
> > > in Word.
>
> > Have you not discovered the Insert Symbol button?
>
> What's the keyboard shortcut for that?
Because it can be added to the QAT (Quick Access Toolbar), you can
assign any shortcut you want to it. I've seen no reason to do so
because it's a GUI, so the mouse is involved anyway.
Presumably you could also assign a keyboard shortcut to it in Word2003
as well, but I'm not about to wake 2003 up to check.
> > Have you not
> > realized that you can assign a keyboard shortcut to every character in
> > Unicode, if you so choose?
>
> *Every* character? That would take quite a while to assign all those
> shortcuts!
If you're going to type in some language a lot, you should activate
the IME for that language, and its keyboard will be one click away.
(Or you can assign a limited group of keybaord shortcuts to up to ten
IMEs.)
> > And if you haven't even discovered the Combining Diacritical Marks
> > range of Unicode, you have very, very little business criticizing its
> > linguistic abilities.
>
> Oh, I know where it is. Unfortunately, they don't all combine
> properly in Word. I just tried "a" + combining macron + combining
> acute and got a misaligned macron and a misaligned acute superimposed
> on each other (rather than stacked and properly centered, as occurs in
> TeX).
That's not Word's fault, it's the font's fault. Times New Roman has
never failed me in adding a diacritic to a letter (it even knows to
raise them above caps and tall letters.)
> > > I just put an acute accent over an "m" in Word, and it changed the
> > > font from Cambria to MS Reference Sans Serif, and now, everything I
> > > type after that is in the new font!
>
> > Then you should learn how to use Word properly.
>
> Praytell, how do you prevent the font from switching when the accented
> character try to type doesn't exist in the font? How do you know, a
> proiri, whether any particular accent+character combination is missing?
You could look in Character Map. (Or, of course, in Insert Symbol.)
That shortcoming has nothing to do with Word.
If you don't like Times New Roman, you could try the Lucida family,
which was designed by Chuck Bigelow in consultation with Bill Bright.
> When TeX can't find the combination, it creates it from scratch, and
> the result looks like it belongs with the rest of the text. When Word
> can't find it, it changes the font.
Considering Knuth's talent for typography, I think we can consider
that yet another win for Word. It's its way of telling you you need a
better-supplied font. But it only does that for precomposed characters
(i.e. with Unicode assignment) that are missing from the font in
question.
> TeX's behavior is far more desirable.
Not to people who care what their output looks like.
> > And you shouldn't be
> > using a font that doesn't have the additional character ranges for
> > doing linguistics.
>
> I was using the default font! You can complain about TeX's default
> font, so why can't I complain about Word's?
I have never even considered using the 2007 default font because it's
so unattractive, so it's never occurred to me to find what isn't in
it.
> > > If the accented character is not a pre-composed character in the font
> > > (as acute-m is not in Cambria), TeX will compose the accented
> > > character on the fly. There is no font change for either that
> > > character or the following ones.
>
> > Just like Word!
>
> Nonsense. I just say the font-changing behavior in Word.
If m-acute is a Unicode character, then it's telling you you can't
have that character in that font.
> > > Can you send a Word file to a colleague who doesn't own the same
> > > version of Word as you (or no version at all!), and/or is working on a
> > > a different OS than you (Mac versus PC... god forbid he's on Linux!),
> > > and he'll be able to open your file and it will look the same as on
> > > your machine? As recently as last year, that wasn't true for me when
> > > I was collaborating with a colleague. Random symbols were missing,
> > > pagination was different, and even the fonts weren't consistent.
>
> > If the same fonts were installed on both computers, the fonts were not
> > a problem. If the document was assigned to the same printer driver on
> > the different computers, there would be no formatting problem.
>
> We had the same fonts. The "Insert symbol" function is/was broken.
> If the inserted symbol was done on a PC, it showed up as a box on a
> Mac.
You failed to mention that you were using obsolete, pre-Unicode fonts.
Unicode is Unicode, whether Mac or PC; only the assignment of glyphs
in the "ASCII" range 128-255 was different in Mac vs. PC PostScript.
And the legacy Symbol font is not Unicode-compatible, but Equation
Editor requires it or the Greek letters don't work.
> > > How about a Word file from 10 years ago? If you open it on a modern
> > > machine running the latest version of Word, will it have the same
> > > layout as it originally did? Will you even be able to open the file
> > > at all?
>
> > I think you need to change a Registry entry in order to open a
> > document in a pre-97 format. That was apparently a security measure
> > introduced with 2007.
>
> No such arcane magic is necessary to open a decade-old TeX file. You
> just, well, open it. And it opens. And you can read it. On any
> computer, running any operating system, with any fonts, with any
> printer drivers, without having spend hundreds of dollars on
> proprietary file formats.
The Microsoft people are just a teensy bit worried about viruses and
such.
> > > None of these are problems with TeX, because TeX source files are all
> > > plain text files, the most basic text file you can possibly have, free
> > > and common to every computer system, every operating system, and every
> > > time period.
>
> > And therefore consuming lots of extra computing power every time
> > they're opened.
>
> ?!?! Plain text files are the easiest files for a computer to open!
But they will be gibberish anywhere else, since they have all those
thousands of coding characters (sort of like WordPerfect in its pre-
WYSIWYG days, but with much more code).
So why didn't you finish your chapters before you assembled your
magnum opus?
Or are you saying that in _your_ system it takes a very long time to
open a file with many pages?
> > > Perhaps that's changed in the past few years since I worked with it,
> > > but this aspect of TeX has always been straightforward and stable.
>
> > I wish you hadn't been making me defend Word so much (I'd much prefer
> > to be able to continue with FrameMaker), but from everything you've
> > said, it is considerably superior to (La)TeX.
>
> If that's what you think, then you have the reading comprehension of a
> pumpkin.
I rebutted every one of your points.
LEE Sau Dan
>> In LaTeX: \textsc{This is text in Small Caps}.
Peter> That appears to be 9 keystrokes (including the two
Peter> braces). In Word, it's 2 (Ctrl-Shift-K at the beginning and
Peter> end of the passage) or 2 clicks on the SC button, or 1 (after
Peter> selecting the text).
Which is easier to remember?
Peter> Anyone who uses LaTeX has no business calling Word equations
Peter> "ugly." And I don't find them ugly.
Because you've been so accustomed to ugliness.
--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦 ~{@nJX6X~}
E-mail: dan...@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee
LEE Sau Dan
PTD> What if each new technical term is to be in small caps? or
PTD> each morpheme-label in a displayed example with morphemic
PTD> glosses?
Nathan> I'd create a macro, probably named something sensible like
Nathan> \morph{...}.
Nathan> If I decide later that I want morphemes to be bold-faced, I
Nathan> only have to change the macro's definition in one place.
Yeah! That's the power of LaTeX/TeX. You can define your own macros,
effecting a layer abstraction you have in mind. The general preference
of competent LaTeX users is to define/use macros to mark up text based
on *semantics*, not presentation. This helps separating presentation
management from content management.
PTD> Whereas in Word, you'd create a character style. No
PTD> programming.
And no flexibility.
Nathan> It's the same thing. One is immediately visible, the other
Nathan> is hidden behind over-simplified, pre-packaged menu options.
Not the same thing. Macros are more flexible. They can even take
arguments. Macros are much more powerful and expressive.
Peter T. Daniels
> "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> > On Jul 2, 1:08 pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@williams.edu> wrote:
> > > In article
> > > <fbc5ce5c-1273-40ac-be9e-11d1e3213...@d10g2000vbm.googlegroups.com>,
> > > "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
> > > > I'm still waiitng to hear of something it can do better or easier than
> > > > Word. (Other than mathematical equations, which are of no concern to
> > > > me or to 99.9995% of users. That's one in a million.)
>
> > > As I've already mentioned, ligatures, kerning, and whole-page
> > > hyphenation algorithms.
>
> > FrameMaker did, and InDesign does, ligaturing. Word, as I said, is not
> > a CRC program.
>
> FrameMaker is extinct. InDesign costs even more than Word.
A new version of FrameMaker was just released (and it's Unicode-
compliant!). It hasn't gotten right-to-left back yet, though.
Neither FrameMaker nor InDesign is meant for writers. They are
publishing programs, not word processing programs (though Frame
happens to be a better one than Word is; InDesign isn't, and
recommends using Word for your keyboarding.)
> Why should I pay over $600 to get ligatures, kerning, and whole-page
> hyphenation, when I can get it for free?
You shouldn't. None of those are the business of the writer.
> > > In addition:
>
> > > Handling of floats.
>
> > Evidently a technical term in TeX.
>
> Floats are tables and figures that "float" within the text, to the
> most visually optimal spot (for example, keeping the text/nontext
> ratio at acceptable levels).
Oh, so now Mr. Knuth is imposing his esthetic judgments on you?
FrameMaker handles "floats" brilliantly. InDesign uses layers, so you
position the graphics where you want them and the text flows around
them, or you anchor them in the text (which is how Word does it).
> > > Counters: tables, figures, equation, etc. are number automatically,
> > > with their own separate counters.
>
> > Just like Word!
>
> When I insert a table in Word, it has no numbering.
That's why there's an Insert Caption button. Believe it or not,
sometimes tables are not numbered. (The same butten adds Figure
legends and a bunch of other numbered items, and of course it knows
whether it's adding them to a table, a figure, etc.
> When I do \begin{table}...\end{table}, it automatically numbered
> behind the scenes for me.
Whether you want it or not. How nice for you!
> > > Smart cross-referencing: you can have ordinary numerical
> > > cross-references like "on page 213", but if you want, you can have
> > > them automatically come out as relative references like "on the
> > > previous page" or "on the next page". If your content changes the
> > > relationship, the cross-references will automatically change
> > > appropriately.
>
> > Just like Word!
>
> I don't believe you. Where are smart page references documented? How
> are the inserted?
You're now in 2007? References tab, Captions group, Cross Reference.
Anything with an automatic number is automatically listed in that
panel, and if you want to reference a word, a passage, or whatever,
you insert a bookmark, and that too is in the cross reference panel.
> In LaTeX, they are just "v"ariant references, so they are inserted
> quite easily, with \vref{...} and \vpageref{...}.
A hell of a lot of typing.
> > > Proper small caps (when they're available in the font): Word scales
> > > down capital letters rather than using the true small caps, resulting
> > > in wispy small caps that don't fit in with the rest of the text.
>
> > How many decades ago did you last look at Word? If they're in a font,
> > Word can use them.
>
> I just tested it. The small capitals for Times New Roman are faked in
> word: they are 80% scaled down version of the regular capitals.
There are options for changing the ratio, but again, Word is not a DTP
program. FrameMaker automatically uses the sc font if it exists, and
you can change the parameters for when it has to fake them; InDesign
automatically uses the forms provided in OpenType.
> In LaTeX, the small capitals are true small caps.
If the font designer has provided them. In Computer Modern, they are
even worse done than the regular font.
> > > Automatic proper spacing after sentence-final periods. No need to do
> > > a search-and-replace to change the occasional double space into a
> > > single space (which is still wrong anyway: the spacing is supposed to
> > > be 1.5 spaces, which can't be done easily in Word).
>
> > Where did "1.5 spaces" come from? Is that something Knuth invented
> > because he didn't quite want to abandon the typewriter?
>
> Technically, the actual spacing is 1em, which is about 1.5 regular
> spaces.
For the third time: WHO SAYS?
(And there's no such thing as a "regular space." The default width of
a word space is at the discretion of the type designer, and how much
that may be expanded or condensed during justification is under the
control of the book designer. An em space, OTOH, has a width equal to
the nominal point size of the font.)
> I'm surprised you don't know this.
Sorry, I've only been studying type design and typesetting and the
history of printing for about thirty years now.
> (Because of an increase in adamant "one-spacers" and the use of poor
> typesetting software like Word, more and more printed books use one
> space instead of the proper 1.5 space. The first book I found with
> the proper spacing after going through half a dozen on my shelf was
> printed in 1989.)
Care to name the publisher? Was it CRC?
For the fourth time: WHO SAYS IT'S "PROPER"?
> > > Multiple accent marks on the same character (e.g., acute over macron).
>
> > Just like Word! (Inmcluding for combinations that are not pre-defined
> > in Unicode.)
>
> I tried. It doesn't work.
Maybe your program is broken. Or maybe Mac is different from PC.
> > > Language-specific hyphenation and ligatures.
>
> > Just like Word!
>
> If you want "fortran" to remain un-hyphenated every time it appears,
> how many times do you have to specify that in the file?
Once. In your custom dictionary.
> In LaTeX, you just do it once.
Just like Word!
> If you change your mind later, how difficult is it to undo that change
> for every instance of "fortran"?
>
> In LaTeX, you just do it once.
Just like Word!
> > > Cost and portability: (La)TeX is free and the source files are written
> > > in plain text, so anyone can read your document without having to buy
> > > proprietary software, without cross-platform conversion issues, and
> > > without legacy version issues.
>
> > Word has no cross-platform conversion issues,
>
> You are lying. I have witnessed them first-hand. I have received
> files created on PCs, opened them on my Mac, and found them not to
> look like the original (I always ask the sender to send a PDF too, so
> I can see what he intended the layout to look like).
As I said, if you have the same printer driver (which is what Word
uses for the external parameters), the result should be the same.
That's not a cross-platform thing, that's a different-computer thing.
> > and the only "legacy
> > version issues" are because Word2007 uses a new, much compacter format
> > and you can download a free Compatibility Pack for your earlier
> > version of Word so it can open the new format (or you can save from
> > 2007 in the earlier format).
>
> How swell of them to offer a special downloadable "compatibility pack"!
>
> I've never needed any sort of "compatibility pack" to open a plain
> text file.
Which means either that the system has never been improved, or that
the program is burdened with tons of obsolete code to deal with
obsolete matters.