Thread: Re: [MiKTeX] LaTeX Input, TeX Output?
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From: David A. <dra...@me...> - 2007-04-19 11:45:31
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> There is no sense in doing that. Reading the TeXbook by the way doesn't > learn you the internals of TeX. First page of the Preface - "Everything you need to know about TeX is explained here somewhere". You need Computers and Typesetting Vol. B if you want to follow the code but you appear to confusing "internals" with "implementation". The double-dangerous-bend-sign-sections explain the end-users' aspect of all the processes fairly clearly (even if you have to refer to other books for algorithms such as weighted Dijkstra that are regarded as "obvious" to a computer scientist). > Essentially what TeX does it optimizes graphs and it sets the vortexes > of these graphs with constraints. (I did some graph theory and that is > the way I understand it) And TeX does it mathematically complete, even > Turing complete. Yes, but that's only a (small) part of TeX --- namely line-breaking and page-breaking. IMHO the processing of math mode and the hyphenation algorithms are also major parts of the TeX engine. \beginopinion I find that LaTeX gets given far too much credit for things that TeX (with or without Plain) can already do. And --- with reference to Christopher/Ulrike's pending flame war :o) --- I use Plain TeX because LaTeX offers nothing useful for *me* that I can't already do in my specific tasks. That's not to say that some future task I have to do wouldn't be more appropriate in LaTeX, in which case I would devote the time to figuring out how to use it properly in the same way as I have tried to with TeX. I prefer having total control over the starting point (Plain TeX arguably is a smaller so simpler starting point than LaTeX) but that's probably because I'm a programmer. \endopinion I *never* recommend Plain TeX to my MS Word converts but instead point them in the direction of LaTeX because it's easier to get started with and there are many more LaTeX users than Plain users. |