Re: The Problems of TeX

Hallöchen!

Paul J Gans writes:

[...]

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.

Okay, but im my opinion, PDFs for screen-viewing are suboptimal. A
well-made HTML is superior to it. It doesn't look so aesthetical,
but enlarging the font size, bookmarking deep links, and skimming by
scrolling work much better. This won't change in the future: HTML
will never be perfect for printing, and PDF will never be perfect
for screen-viewing.

The emphasis is on "*well-made* HTML" here because this is a tricky
job that still is done poorly in most cases, no matter whether Word
or LaTeX is the starting point.

[...]

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.

There is nothing in the free software world that can compete with
TeX, and I'm pretty excited about LuaTeX and XeTeX which prove that
TeX isn't a dead end at all. I think it will remain the best
typesetting backend for a long time.

I'm not so sure about LaTeX, though. Over the last year, I've had a
lot to do with beginners, and I was stunned how badly they used
LaTeX. Mostly, these people were really good scientists or
engineers, so the limiting factor must have been somewhere else. I
think while a mere backend like TeX can cope with a lot of
historical burden that has been accumulated over the decades, this
is a real problem for systems like LaTeX that are supposed to be
used by human beings.

Tschö,
Torsten.

--
Torsten Bronger, aquisgrana, europa vetus
Jabber ID: bronger@xxxxxxxxxx
(See http://ime.webhop.org for further contact info.)
.

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