🚀 go-pugleaf

In a recent article Garry Wiegand writes:
>
> We're using the Postscript's fonts, not TeX's.  It's a shame good
> computerized fonts are so hard to come by in the world, especially
> for free :-) 

Great!  I'm glad to hear *someone* is dissatisfied with the default
TeX fonts and is using better ones.  Now if only all the other
people out there who use TeX would switch . . . .  :-)



> I deal in manuscripts running up to several hundred pages, with
> figures, tables of contents, indices, cross-references, special
> page layouts, etc etc etc up the wazoo.  I'd love to have a real
> CAD documentation system for keeping track of all this information,
> but I can't afford the $$$$.  I'm not aware of anything on the Mac
> that comes anywhere near doing a tolerable job.  

The Mac won't do everything, I'll grant you that.  And it is slow as
well.  Both of these defects are changing, though -- Mac Plus is
significantly faster (I've heard), and 3rd party applications are
more flexible than the standard MacWrite and MacDraw.  My suggestion
of the Mac was based on its superb user interface (the best I've
seen).

But if you consider functionality to be more important than user
interface, why not consider office publishing systems (perhaps best
exemplified by Interleaf)?  The Interleaf system is quite flexible,
extremely fast, has mixed text and graphics, and most of the goodies
you say you're looking for, *and* is a WYSIWYG display editing system.
(The user interface on the Interleaf isn't as good as the one on the
Macintosh, but then no one else's is, either.)  The Interleaf system
is expensive, but consider: one, the recently announced educational
discounts (quite substantial), and two, what you are buying and how
much that is worth to you.  If you are in the academic world, your
papers and reports are important to your career, and whatever you can 
do to make those papers easier and more pleasant to read will make more
people read them and advance your reputation correspondingly.



> Latex, I think, puts one back in a league with Nroff/Runoff etc,
> where someone else has made a few limited choices about what the
> poor lowly user is to be allowed to do.  Mixing Tex into Latex
> requires considerable luck and/or fortitude.  And the Latex manual
> (at least the old version) is a bit scrambled in the brains -- I've
> had to write notes explaining Mr.  Lamport's explanations.  

Not having enough flexibility is certainly frustrating.  But having
too much flexibility is also frustrating, albeit in a different way.
The best aphorism I've heard in this regard is generally attributed
to Alan Kay: 

  "Simple things should be simple;  complex things should be possible."



> What I was really asking is:  with what can we replace this godawful 
> macro/macro/macro/what-do-I-do-with-a-space/mouth&stomach language?
> I admit I'm puzzled about what a replacement might look like - the 
> problem does not neatly fall into any traditional computer language.
> Creative suggestions, anyone?  

Hear, hear.



> garry wiegand
>
> [Perhaps a new TeX front end would be a suitable project for a
> human-interfaces or programming languages course... hint hint] 

This I would say differently:  How can we take a usable, WYSIWYG
system that also makes it easy to produce good looking documents,
and add to that system (rethink that system?) so that it has the
flexibility and elegance of concept (but not necessarily the same
elegant concepts) that TeX has?  

cheers,

Tim Rentsch

[personal to Garry:  as should be obvious, I enjoyed your note.
 Glad to see you took my posting in the spirit it was intended.]