🚀 go-pugleaf

In this argument I claim these things:
  (1) Troff is the most powerful formatting language, because it is the
      only one of the three mentioned that can compute generalized functions
      of the image state. Neither TeX nor Scribe can examine the image state.
  (2) I can't offhand see why that is a big deal.
  (3) I consider that the very best feature of Scribe is that nobody is able
      to make it process TeX-like input. The whole point of Scribe is that
      it enforces a certain amount of rigor and discipline on the preparation
      of documents. If I had wanted to program a turing-complete system that
      could emulate somebody else's formatter, I would have done so.
  (4) Arguments that the ugliness of published documents are not the fault of
      the text formatter are somewhat analogous to arguments that handguns
      don't kill people, rather people kill people. My stand on text formatters
      is the same as my stand on handguns: I don't want the average guy in the
      street to be carrying a gun, and I don't want the average hack at a
      word processing terminal to be using a text formatter that will let him
      have any control whatsoever over the appearance of the finished document.

Stanley Morison, the eminent British typographer and Cambridge University
Press author, wrote that the purpose of typesetting is to be invisible, and that
if the reader even notices the typesetting of a book then the typesetting has
failed. Most modern psychology researchers who have studied legibility of
typewritten material (Burt [1959], Tinker [1963], Zachrisson [1965]) report
that people find most legible that with which they are most familiar. Everyone
finds his own newspaper to be much more readable than the New York Times
(unless his own newspaper IS the NYT). Everyone finds his own handwriting 
legible. Everyone learns to like the fonts on his own laser printer. This 
suggests that we should all just pick some standard, however ugly, and all
use it, because if we all use it then we will all be able to read each other's
material more easily. Anyone game?
-- 
	Brian Reid	decwrl!glacier!reid
	Stanford	reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA