jenny@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU (Kathryn Hargreaves) (12/15/85)
Regardless of how well or poorly Ullman's database book was set with TeX, that has nothing to do with the typesetting system used. It simply means the book designer did a bad job. Knuth points out in Appendix E of The TeXbook that, ... the author prepared sample pages and showed them to the publisher's book designer. (The importance of this step cannot be overemphasized. There is a danger that authors---who are now able to typeset their own books with TeX---will attempt to do their own designs, without professional help. Book design is an art that requires considerable creativity, skill, experience, and taste; it is one of the most important services that a publisher traditionally provides to an author.) -- The TeXbook, pp. 412--413. Please don't blame TeX for poor design style. (Nor laud it for good style.) I don't think much of Kernighan/Ritchie's The C Programming Language's design, but I don't blame troff. TeX has also been vilified for its lack of available fonts. Again, this is not a limitation of TeX, but rather of the format writers, who have so far stuck mostly to Computer Modern. (Kudos to Howard Trickey for writing a format that uses Times Roman, perhaps settling some of those accusations.) I have seen some of the high end industrial typesetters (Compugraphic, Varityper, and Mergenthaler; TeX compared favorably to them for document preparation. It is much harder to use for ad copy -- but that only reflects the fact that no one has designed a format for such jobs yet. TeX strikes me as better designed, easier to use, and more easily extensible than troff or Scribe, its major competitors. The real test, it seems to me, is that it is possible to make TeX look like Scribe or troff. The reverse is not true. Which system, then, is more powerful? ucbvax!jenny jenny@ucbvax.berkeley.arpa