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Comment by Koshkin | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if Donald Knuth uses LaTeX or some other TeX macro package (e.g. Plain TeX).

> Andrew: What set of tools do you use today for writing TAOCP? Do you use TeX? LaTeX? CWEB? Word processor? And what do you use for the coding?

> Donald: My general working style is to write everything first with pencil and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket. Then I use Emacs to enter the text into my machine, using the conventions of TeX. I use tex, dvips, and gv to see the results, which appear on my screen almost instantaneously these days. I check my math with Mathematica.

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856

So, one of the greatest minds of our time uses Plain TeX, it seems. Given that his texts look more complex than any other mathematical texts that I have seen, why would anyone prefer to use LaTeX instead?

Because most people do not have his great mind :P

Well, he took a detour in writing TAOCP to invent TeX, because he felt other typesetting solutions were inadequate. So not surprising he uses plain TeX still. Most people prefer LaTeX becase plain TeX is rather more primitive -- for the same reason most people would choose C or a higher level language over assembly language for programming.

> most people would choose C or a higher level language over assembly language for programming

And the inventor of TeX is not most people, and decided to invent an assembly language for his book, rather than using a high level language.

Because you probably didn't read the whole TeXbook and come up with a set of useful personal macros.

Any anyone else use plain tex these days?

I use Plain TeX for short and simple documents (which is pretty much most of my needs), it is often simpler than coercing LaTeX to do the layout I need.

I've played a bit with plain TeX last year[1] because I wanted to find an alternative to do PDF slides using a simple text-based formatting.

Deckset is cool but I can't customize much of the layout, and I don't love HTML-based solutions. I don't love Beamer either because you have to write a lot of ceremony for a single slide, and most styles feel very "old" (lots of side/top bars).

Here's an example of what you can do using the `lecturer` package:

https://twitter.com/evacchi/status/738018829905887232

the only problem with plain TeX is that there is no good listings package

[1] https://github.com/evacchi/lecturer-playground/

I have found spamming Google for LaTeX solutions to be really unsatisfactory and recently decided that I'd rather just learn my tools properly. This very very quickly led me away from LaTeX and over to plain TeX.

I have read through about 2/3 of the TeXbook so far and currently am writing my thesis in it. So far it's been really enjoyable! That's not something I could say about my past struggles with LaTeX.

Maybe once I have TeX down really pat, I'll peek back over into LaTeX, but for now I really don't see a need.

Getting a handle on the typographic primitives that TeX offers makes a huge difference. I've actually found it surprisingly easy to handcraft whatever macros I need. Though I do also use a the amstex macros.

Admittedly, it's easy to end up with a horrid mess of macros if you're not careful, but a bit of forethought and experience with frontend design patterns goes a long way.

One thing I haven't figured out yet is how to deal with CJK languages nicely.

Because he wrote TeX and Plain TeX to cover his needs (writing TAOCP mostly), which might not be the same as everyone else’s?

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