Re: The Problems of TeX

In comp.text.tex Robin Fairbairns <rf10@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

personally, i don't write tex off as glibly as xah does; in
particular, his assumption that typesetting doesn't count because
everything's going to be on-line. but lots of stuff is on-line, even
now, and i'm sure i'm not the only person who prints a document of any
significance because i can't cope with it on-screen.

Back a decade or so ago I created a fair amount of course
content and put it up on the web. I then went through a
period when I ran (almost) everything throught latex2html
and generated web pages that way while having decently printed
copy for myself.

What I find happening now is that pdf files are ubiquitous
on the web. Pdftex is my tool of choice for now. And it
allows easy printing as well as screen viewing.

The best of it is that the source files have survived almost
unscathed during all this time. The largest conversion job
I had was back at the start of my use of TeX when I had to
convert a fair number of troff files to TeX. And even that
wasn't so hard.

I have no idea how TeX will go on in the future. But I think
we can look back with satisfaction on the long run it has had
so far -- and my thanks to all of you who have helped make
that possible.

--
--- Paul J. Gans
.

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