🚀 go-pugleaf

First, allow me to apologize to rs@mirror for overstating my case :-).
I misunderstood some of his complaints, and I must admit that recently
I've been getting a little uptight about people complaining about TeX
not doing "real" typesetting because it comes from a university.  This
is how I initially perceived the posting, and I'm afraid my noise/signal
ratio was a little high.  Sorry about that.

By now I have accumulated a fair amount of experience figuring out how
to make TeX "stand on its head and play Dixie" (usually successfully).
With a little study/training, you can do amazing things (true for many
systems, I admit).  Lest I be accused of succumbing to the baby duck
syndrome, let me now vent some of my complaints about TeX:

1. It's big and it's slow.  Because of the way it was designed (machine
   independence at all costs) and its implementation as a monolithic
   Pascal program, it does a lot of unnecessary things.  I've profiled
   it (an interesting experience in itself), and it spends most of its
   time reading from the input file, parsing it up, etc.  The hyphenation
   and optimal line-breaking routines are actually respectably fast.

2. It's strictly batch-oriented.  It can't do incremental reformatting
   (a big loss).

3. It represents everything as little rectangular boxes (rotate type?
   why would we want to do that?).  I have the option of escaping into
   PostScript when I need to, but this means my document is then not
   really portable.

I use TeX because (a) it is flexible, (b) it has an excellent paragraph
builder, and (c) the price is right.  I have for some time been thinking
of implementing a system that uses many of TeX's algorithms, but
implemented for high performance operation.  Maybe someday I'll have the
free time to do so.


-- 
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Total Nuclear Annihilation:				Clayton Elwell
The Ultimate Error Message.			Elwell@Ohio-State.ARPA
					   ...!cbosgd!osu-eddie!elwell
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