The Art of Computer Typography
37signals.com
37signals.com
WEB is a language created by Knuth that supports his notion of literate programming.
The problem is layers over layers of fossilized complexity. The LaTeX distribution in my laptop is 3.1GB. It contains 344 files in its bin directory. I'm pretty sure the beautiful typesetting can be achieved in a leaner way.
Could this become an open source type project with a core engine exposing an api and additional modules written in commonly available languages to add functionality?
Once the core engine is stable, it should (in theory) fly...
This leaves open source typesetting a hostage of its own success.
Most of the size of a TeX distribution is due to the fonts and the documentation. I did not analyze TeX Live distribution due to its size, but ConTeXt standalone (which is a distribution just containing files needed for context), is around 230MB, out of which 100MB is fonts, 45MB is binaries, 42MB are core macro files, and 26MB is third party modules (and their documentation). You will get similar numbers if you install only the LaTeX packages that you need. Blame your distro's packagers for forcing you to install a single monolithic 3GB package.
DVI is exactly what we're talking about: a strange custom format that only exists to be transformed into formats we want. A modern TeX should produce PDF output with no DVI intermediate stage.
Same story with Metafont. Outside math, people want good fonts developed by typographers. Those fonts don't show up in Metafont or TFM format, they show up in OTF and TTF. Getting TeX to handle these is quite a chore, but even if you do, you're still going to have Metafont and all the strange intermediate files it creates lying around on your filesystem.
There is a reason no other software is built like TeX: it's terrible. But for its history and the fact it does the job really well, nobody would tolerate this mess.
Firstly, tab completion does not need those binaries. Zsh does similar tab completion for git (which uses 150 binaries) and hg (which uses one binary).
Now for TeX, pdfTeX has been around since, well, since the mid 90s. It has been part of the standard TeX distribution for more than 10 years. So for the last 10-15 years, TeX can directly produce PDF.
Similarly, xetex has been around since 2003-04 and luatex since 2007-08. With both of them, using OTF and TTF fonts is as simple as just saying `\setmainfont[Dejavu]` (using the simplefont module in ConTeXt or fontspec package in LaTeX). No need for converting to TFM files or anything.
The reason TeX is built like TeX is because when it started, postscript/pdf did not exist, Type1/TrueType/OpenType fonts did not exist, so TeX had to create its own formats. Over the years TeX has adapted to the new technology: you can easily use UTF-8 input (for text and math), ttf/otf fonts, opentype math fonts, use Lua to write macros, and get PDF output. You are objecting to the fact that TeX works hard to be backward compatible and carries around all the legacy programs so that documents written in 90s still compile easily today. If you don't want them, just don't install them (again this is more of a packing issue than anything else).
<pre> find /usr/lib/git-core -type f -exec md5sum {} \; | cut -d' ' -f 1 | sort | uniq | wc -l 68 </pre>
Comparing from TeX: <pre> pacman -Ql texlive-bin | grep '/usr/bin' | cut -d' ' -f 2 | xargs md5sum | cut -d' ' -f 1 | sort | uniq | wc -l 181 </pre>
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/news08.html
One of the originals
weave mf.web
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Computers-Typesetting-Volume-Metafont-...
That said, thank you for posting the link - that site looks very interesting.
Even though I am pretty good at identifying typefaces I have forever damaged my changes of identifying the standard mac fonts like Palatino, Times, Helvetica in print. Rendered as bitmap (like on a 9" Macintosh Plus) I have no problem in telling them apart.