6 ms·

I bet Knuth wouldn't be happy to hear that LaTeX was used to design Business Cards

graycat 10y ago
First, Knuth did TeX, Plain TeX, and was not the primary force behind LaTeX. Second, IIRC, Knuth did proudly use TeX to print dinner menu, invitations, or some such.
- adtac 10y ago
  >Knuth did proudly use TeX to print dinner menu That's hilarious. Any sources on that? That man is incredible.
  - graycat 10y ago
    I was typing quickly from memory. With The TeXBook, on page 411 he has a concert program; on page 248 he has a genealogy chart; on page 247 he has some nicely formatted stock tables; on pages 233, 236-7 he has some recipe stuff from Julia Child. So, instead of a menu, I found a concert program and some recipes. Maybe there is a menu in there someplace. He also has an addressed envelope where he used his Metafont in some tricky way to get something like a stamp. He might also be able to get from TeX with Metafont the whatever they are called little boxes of geometric gibberish used as identifiers. I did some TeX macros for foils -- I get a nice box around each foil. Some more macros I did let me do a simple drawing in, say, old Microsoft Photodraw, include it in a picture in a TeX document, and then position TeX math as annotation overlays on the drawing. So, I can, say, draw a right triangle and put the standard Pythagorean theorem annotation on the figure. Can put darned nearly any TeX expression as annotation. TeX is nice and for math nearly essential.
    - throwayguestman 10y ago
      >little boxes of geometric gibberish used as identifiers in which context?
      - sokoloff 10y ago
        I struggled to understand that as well. Couldn't tell if it was about USPS barcodes (1) or QR codes (or other 2D barcodes) or something else? [1] - https://www.neodynamic.com/Products/Help/BarcodeCF2.0/barcodes/Postnet02.gif https://www.neodynamic.com/Products/Help/BarcodeCF2.0/barcod...
        graycat 10y ago
        I meant QR codes! I don't really know what they are!

First, Knuth did TeX, Plain TeX, and was not the primary force behind LaTeX. Second, IIRC, Knuth did proudly use TeX to print dinner menu, invitations, or some such.

adtac 10y ago
>Knuth did proudly use TeX to print dinner menu That's hilarious. Any sources on that? That man is incredible.
- graycat 10y ago
  I was typing quickly from memory. With The TeXBook, on page 411 he has a concert program; on page 248 he has a genealogy chart; on page 247 he has some nicely formatted stock tables; on pages 233, 236-7 he has some recipe stuff from Julia Child. So, instead of a menu, I found a concert program and some recipes. Maybe there is a menu in there someplace. He also has an addressed envelope where he used his Metafont in some tricky way to get something like a stamp. He might also be able to get from TeX with Metafont the whatever they are called little boxes of geometric gibberish used as identifiers. I did some TeX macros for foils -- I get a nice box around each foil. Some more macros I did let me do a simple drawing in, say, old Microsoft Photodraw, include it in a picture in a TeX document, and then position TeX math as annotation overlays on the drawing. So, I can, say, draw a right triangle and put the standard Pythagorean theorem annotation on the figure. Can put darned nearly any TeX expression as annotation. TeX is nice and for math nearly essential.
  - throwayguestman 10y ago
    >little boxes of geometric gibberish used as identifiers in which context?
    - sokoloff 10y ago
      I struggled to understand that as well. Couldn't tell if it was about USPS barcodes (1) or QR codes (or other 2D barcodes) or something else? [1] - https://www.neodynamic.com/Products/Help/BarcodeCF2.0/barcodes/Postnet02.gif https://www.neodynamic.com/Products/Help/BarcodeCF2.0/barcod...
      - graycat 10y ago
        I meant QR codes! I don't really know what they are!