"Of course, nobody uses plain TeX" I use plain TeX. I dislike LaTeX. "we use TrueType fonts, not METAFONTs (xetex); PDFs, not DVIs (pstex, pdftex); Unicode, no

"Of course, nobody uses plain TeX" I use plain TeX. I dislike LaTeX. "we use TrueType fonts, not METAFONTs (xetex); PDFs, not DVIs (pstex, pdftex); Unicode, not 7-bit ASCII (xetex again)" I still like METAFONT, DVI, and ASCII; I want to use character sets other than Unicode (and don't want to require converting to/from Unicode; some can't be converted anyways). "the parts of TeX that people actually use are 1) the box-and-glue model, 2) the hyphenation algorithm, and 3) the line-breaking algorithm." I agree, although I use the other features too including insertions, custom output routines, etc. Also, the math typesetting of TeX is commonly used. Perhaps if the troff output format could be used, or something combining DVI format with troff output format. The font metrics of TeX are a bit deficient and could be improved, e.g. specifying accent positioning above and below properly, multiple kerning/ligatures, more than 256 characters per font, etc. (The font metrics common with PostScript are also a bit deficient.) What I would like is a typesetting system similar to plain TeX but to be able to extend it with PostScript code to alter the behaviour of the typesetting (with immediate and deferred, similar to the \immediate command in TeX can make writing to files immediate or deferred when shipped out, same would be true of PostScript codes too; immediate PostScript codes would be executed during the typesetting process, and deferred would be executed as part of shipping out the page (so diagrams could be inserted)). (Some programs can output PostScript; that isn't good enough since it is executed too late)