6 ms·

Knuth touches the reason for writing TeX et al.- briefly in this paper. He wanted the second edition of his TAOCP to be printed with exactly the same typograph

by wolfi1 5mo ago

Knuth touches the reason for writing TeX et al.- briefly in this paper. He wanted the second edition of his TAOCP to be printed with exactly the same typography as the first edition, but the publishers told him at first they wouldn't have the Linotype machines anymore, with which they printed the first edition. But Knuth wanted to preserve the typography for the other volumes and other editions, so he set aside the TAOCP and began researching typography and writing TeX et al. Took him a long time before he could return to TAOCP. Btw, the second edition got finally printed with Linotype as these machines still existed in Europe

golem14 5mo ago
Suddenly, I don't feel so bad about my own procrastinitis.
- andyferris 5mo ago
  How many great inventions and discoveries were the product of yak shaving? I'd imagine quite a lot.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5mo ago
    Wasn’t that the story behind Slack?
    - throw0101a 5mo ago
      Butterfield [1] started a company to develop a game, but during their interactions the employees created some photo sharing code which ended up as Flicker, which he then sold off. Butterfield then started another company to develop a game, but to make internal company communications more efficient they developed some chat software which ended up as Slack, which he then sold off. I have not heard if Butterfield has started a third company to develop a video game. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield
      - kybernetikos 5mo ago
        You can still hear the music written for the game 'glitch' if you join a slack audio room with nobody else in it.
  - fragmede 5mo ago
    The other question is how much innovation is the result of spite? The professor who told someone they're never going to amount to anything, the business person that told someone "that's never going to work".
goolz 5mo ago
I just want to add that they are a gorgeous set of books and I am so happy he did this. While a good chunk of the content is above my pay grade it is still enjoyable to flip through them and read about things like MIX. Gorgeous typesetting. And his writing is so very engaging for such a dense topic.
- WillAdams 5mo ago
  All of his books have been great, and he is the next author whose oeuvre I am going to try to collect (and read) in its entirety --- will finish up Tolkien this year when the second Myths and Legends box set is released in the U.S. and I can replace my ratty photocopy of _The Book of Exodus_ which was sent to me the second time I requested it on Interlibrary Loan.
WillAdams 5mo ago
Note that they weren't directly printed with a hot metal casting machine (I believe Monotype was used, since it output discrete letters which did not need to be sawn apart as the Line of Type the competitor used), but rather what could be composed on a hot metal casting machine was, then additional spacing material and special characters and extensions which weren't available from that keyboard were sourced and the whole put together as a composed galley, then a proof was pulled and once approved, printed, then photographed to make a negative which was then used to make an offset plate for actually printing the book.
drfuchs 5mo ago
Not so about the Linotype. Back in 1980, I personally ran the Alphatype CRS phototypesetter (bought by DEK for the purpose), in the basement of Margaret Jacks Hall, that produced the entire camera-ready copy of The Art Of Computer Programming, Volume II, Second Edition. The DVI files and Computer Modern fonts were created by the early, Sail-language, 36-bit versions of TeX and Metafont that were later redesigned and implemented to be more cross-platform. Knuth rewrote the firmware that resided on the Alphatype (in 8080 assembly language), and I wrote the code that translated from DVI and drove it from the DEC20 mainframe over a serial line (trickier than it sounds; see our joint paper "Optimal prepaging and font caching" ACM TOPLAS Vol 7 Issue 1).
- RajBhai 5mo ago
  [flagged]
- wolfi1 5mo ago
  impressive. do you have written up that somewhere? I'm sure there are several people interested in the history of Metafont, TeX, etc.
  - WillAdams 5mo ago
    I'm pretty sure there are TUGboat articles on this, but you may find: https://tug.org/interviews/fuchs.html https://tug.org/interviews/fuchs.html a useful starting point.
  - drfuchs 5mo ago
    Earlier additional great info from svat (and ramblings by me) are at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20006525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20006525 One point concerning Metafont and Computer Modern (and TeX): A key overall goal of the whole kit and caboodle is that a document written in TeX and using the default fonts would produce exactly the same output on all capable computers and output devices, indefinitely into the future, with the same line breaks, page breaks, character shapes, etc. And in fact TeX files from over half a century ago still produce pixel-perfect results. This requirement meant that the default fonts had to be portable between printers and typesetters with various resolutions (and other optical filtering attributes). There was simply no other way at the time to accomplish this than using a tool like Metafont to author a home-grown font family like Computer Modern (and even then it was a bit of a hope and a prayer). And don't even get me started on how 5pt super-super-scripts aren't just 10pt characters scaled down by half, contrary to how post-hot-lead typesetters operated, and not fully addressed commercially until decades later.
svat 5mo ago
Actually: • He had already published the first editions of Volume 1, 2, 3, and the second edition of Volume 1, by 1973. It was in 1977 when the publishers sent him galley proofs for the second edition of Volume 2, having switched to phototypesetting (away from hot-metal typesetting a la Linotype, though IIRC it was actually Monotype) that he was disappointed with the results. And he had some back-and-forth with them and they did improve their fonts (https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/367133/48 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/367133/48), but he was still dissatisfied. > I didn't know what to do. I had spent 15 years writing those books, but if they were going to look awful I didn't want to write any more. • At this time he came to know of the existence of digital typesetters. Typesetting with computers had existed before, but it had always seemed a crude toy, rather than something suitable for “real books”. But he saw Patrick Winston's Artificial Intelligence that had been just published (I think he got an early proof copy to review or something), and he realized for the first time that digital typesetting was an option (apparently Winston's book was printed at >1000dpi, and Knuth later got his hands on a machine that claimed a resolution of 5333 dpi: see this wonderful comment from Knuth's student and “right-hand man”, David Fuchs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20009875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20009875) • In fact it was the fonts that he was dissatisfied with rather than the typesetting, so METAFONT was in some sense the primary/motivating project and TeX was only written in order to be able to use METAFONT. • Actually his first idea was to simply take the old fonts, get high-resolution scans of them (not easy to obtain at that time) and use them directly. He approached Xerox Research Center but: > I asked if I could use Xerox's lab facilities to create my fonts. The answer was yes, but there was a catch: Xerox insisted on all rights to the use of any fonts that I developed with their equipment. Of course that was their privilege, but such a deal was unacceptable to me: A mathematical formula should never be "owned" by anybody! Mathematics belongs to God. • So he went home and (after trying a bit with TV cameras) tried projecting photographs of the pages onto the wall and tracing the outlines, and it was while staring at these images that he realized that the shapes of letters were not arbitrary but there was some logic to them (e.g. in the font he was using, the spacing between the vertical strokes in 'm' was equal, and equal to that in 'n'), and he decided (as a computer programmer) to capture this design in code — something that had never before been done. The hardest letter to capture this way is S, hence the paper in the OP. > Finally, a simple thought struck me. Those letters were designed by people. If I could understand what those people had in their minds when they were drawing the letters, then I could program a computer to carry out the same ideas. Instead of merely copying the form of the letters my new goal was therefore to copy the intelligence underlying that form. I decided to learn what type designers knew, and to teach that knowledge to a computer. • This is also why METAFONT never really caught on among typographers: as Charles Bigelow (quoted by Richard Southall, https://luc.devroye.org/Southall-METAFONT1986.pdf https://luc.devroye.org/Southall-METAFONT1986.pdf) observed, “the designer thinks with images, not about images”. Knuth did not want crude “geometric” constructions of letters (as some prior 16th century typographers had attempted: https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1979-01-02/S0273-0979-1979-14598-1/S0273-0979-1979-14598-1.pdf#page=16 https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1979-01-02/S0273-0979-1979... and as some typographers only passingly familiar with METAFONT think!). He wanted actual real typographically beautiful shapes, but to be able to generate those shapes with code. This is obviously much harder than simply drawing the shapes using visual intuition, even if it enables variation. (See “The Concept of a Meta-Font”: https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/1982-knuth.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/1982-knuth.pdf — again, many people in the typography world confuse the abstract concept of a meta-font introduced in this paper with (their incorrect impressions of) the METAFONT program, and omit crediting Knuth for variable fonts). • The second edition of Volume 2 was not printed with Linotype. Yes the machines still existed in Europe and he talked to typesetters (he mentions in particular a person from Belfast), but it was in fact published using TeX (the first version, TeX77 and MF78). He was still unhappy with the results, though, and spent a few more years learning more about typography and working with people like Bigelow and Hermann Zapf, before the rewrite into the current TeX82 and MF84 (and current version of Computer Modern). I think it's only with the third edition (1997) that he's finally satisfied.

by wolfi1 5mo ago

golem14 5mo ago

Suddenly, I don't feel so bad about my own procrastinitis.

andyferris 5mo ago
How many great inventions and discoveries were the product of yak shaving? I'd imagine quite a lot.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5mo ago
  Wasn’t that the story behind Slack?
  - throw0101a 5mo ago
    Butterfield [1] started a company to develop a game, but during their interactions the employees created some photo sharing code which ended up as Flicker, which he then sold off. Butterfield then started another company to develop a game, but to make internal company communications more efficient they developed some chat software which ended up as Slack, which he then sold off. I have not heard if Butterfield has started a third company to develop a video game. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield
    - kybernetikos 5mo ago
      You can still hear the music written for the game 'glitch' if you join a slack audio room with nobody else in it.
- fragmede 5mo ago
  The other question is how much innovation is the result of spite? The professor who told someone they're never going to amount to anything, the business person that told someone "that's never going to work".

goolz 5mo ago

I just want to add that they are a gorgeous set of books and I am so happy he did this. While a good chunk of the content is above my pay grade it is still enjoyable to flip through them and read about things like MIX. Gorgeous typesetting. And his writing is so very engaging for such a dense topic.

WillAdams 5mo ago
All of his books have been great, and he is the next author whose oeuvre I am going to try to collect (and read) in its entirety --- will finish up Tolkien this year when the second Myths and Legends box set is released in the U.S. and I can replace my ratty photocopy of _The Book of Exodus_ which was sent to me the second time I requested it on Interlibrary Loan.

WillAdams 5mo ago

Note that they weren't directly printed with a hot metal casting machine (I believe Monotype was used, since it output discrete letters which did not need to be sawn apart as the Line of Type the competitor used), but rather what could be composed on a hot metal casting machine was, then additional spacing material and special characters and extensions which weren't available from that keyboard were sourced and the whole put together as a composed galley, then a proof was pulled and once approved, printed, then photographed to make a negative which was then used to make an offset plate for actually printing the book.

drfuchs 5mo ago

Not so about the Linotype. Back in 1980, I personally ran the Alphatype CRS phototypesetter (bought by DEK for the purpose), in the basement of Margaret Jacks Hall, that produced the entire camera-ready copy of The Art Of Computer Programming, Volume II, Second Edition. The DVI files and Computer Modern fonts were created by the early, Sail-language, 36-bit versions of TeX and Metafont that were later redesigned and implemented to be more cross-platform. Knuth rewrote the firmware that resided on the Alphatype (in 8080 assembly language), and I wrote the code that translated from DVI and drove it from the DEC20 mainframe over a serial line (trickier than it sounds; see our joint paper "Optimal prepaging and font caching" ACM TOPLAS Vol 7 Issue 1).

RajBhai 5mo ago
[flagged]
wolfi1 5mo ago
impressive. do you have written up that somewhere? I'm sure there are several people interested in the history of Metafont, TeX, etc.
- WillAdams 5mo ago
  I'm pretty sure there are TUGboat articles on this, but you may find: https://tug.org/interviews/fuchs.html https://tug.org/interviews/fuchs.html a useful starting point.
- drfuchs 5mo ago
  Earlier additional great info from svat (and ramblings by me) are at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20006525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20006525 One point concerning Metafont and Computer Modern (and TeX): A key overall goal of the whole kit and caboodle is that a document written in TeX and using the default fonts would produce exactly the same output on all capable computers and output devices, indefinitely into the future, with the same line breaks, page breaks, character shapes, etc. And in fact TeX files from over half a century ago still produce pixel-perfect results. This requirement meant that the default fonts had to be portable between printers and typesetters with various resolutions (and other optical filtering attributes). There was simply no other way at the time to accomplish this than using a tool like Metafont to author a home-grown font family like Computer Modern (and even then it was a bit of a hope and a prayer). And don't even get me started on how 5pt super-super-scripts aren't just 10pt characters scaled down by half, contrary to how post-hot-lead typesetters operated, and not fully addressed commercially until decades later.

svat 5mo ago

Actually: • He had already published the first editions of Volume 1, 2, 3, and the second edition of Volume 1, by 1973. It was in 1977 when the publishers sent him galley proofs for the second edition of Volume 2, having switched to phototypesetting (away from hot-metal typesetting a la Linotype, though IIRC it was actually Monotype) that he was disappointed with the results. And he had some back-and-forth with them and they did improve their fonts (https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/367133/48 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/367133/48), but he was still dissatisfied. > I didn't know what to do. I had spent 15 years writing those books, but if they were going to look awful I didn't want to write any more. • At this time he came to know of the existence of digital typesetters. Typesetting with computers had existed before, but it had always seemed a crude toy, rather than something suitable for “real books”. But he saw Patrick Winston's Artificial Intelligence that had been just published (I think he got an early proof copy to review or something), and he realized for the first time that digital typesetting was an option (apparently Winston's book was printed at >1000dpi, and Knuth later got his hands on a machine that claimed a resolution of 5333 dpi: see this wonderful comment from Knuth's student and “right-hand man”, David Fuchs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20009875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20009875) • In fact it was the fonts that he was dissatisfied with rather than the typesetting, so METAFONT was in some sense the primary/motivating project and TeX was only written in order to be able to use METAFONT. • Actually his first idea was to simply take the old fonts, get high-resolution scans of them (not easy to obtain at that time) and use them directly. He approached Xerox Research Center but: > I asked if I could use Xerox's lab facilities to create my fonts. The answer was yes, but there was a catch: Xerox insisted on all rights to the use of any fonts that I developed with their equipment. Of course that was their privilege, but such a deal was unacceptable to me: A mathematical formula should never be "owned" by anybody! Mathematics belongs to God. • So he went home and (after trying a bit with TV cameras) tried projecting photographs of the pages onto the wall and tracing the outlines, and it was while staring at these images that he realized that the shapes of letters were not arbitrary but there was some logic to them (e.g. in the font he was using, the spacing between the vertical strokes in 'm' was equal, and equal to that in 'n'), and he decided (as a computer programmer) to capture this design in code — something that had never before been done. The hardest letter to capture this way is S, hence the paper in the OP. > Finally, a simple thought struck me. Those letters were designed by people. If I could understand what those people had in their minds when they were drawing the letters, then I could program a computer to carry out the same ideas. Instead of merely copying the form of the letters my new goal was therefore to copy the intelligence underlying that form. I decided to learn what type designers knew, and to teach that knowledge to a computer. • This is also why METAFONT never really caught on among typographers: as Charles Bigelow (quoted by Richard Southall, https://luc.devroye.org/Southall-METAFONT1986.pdf https://luc.devroye.org/Southall-METAFONT1986.pdf) observed, “the designer thinks with images, not about images”. Knuth did not want crude “geometric” constructions of letters (as some prior 16th century typographers had attempted: https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1979-01-02/S0273-0979-1979-14598-1/S0273-0979-1979-14598-1.pdf#page=16 https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1979-01-02/S0273-0979-1979... and as some typographers only passingly familiar with METAFONT think!). He wanted actual real typographically beautiful shapes, but to be able to generate those shapes with code. This is obviously much harder than simply drawing the shapes using visual intuition, even if it enables variation. (See “The Concept of a Meta-Font”: https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/1982-knuth.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/1982-knuth.pdf — again, many people in the typography world confuse the abstract concept of a meta-font introduced in this paper with (their incorrect impressions of) the METAFONT program, and omit crediting Knuth for variable fonts). • The second edition of Volume 2 was not printed with Linotype. Yes the machines still existed in Europe and he talked to typesetters (he mentions in particular a person from Belfast), but it was in fact published using TeX (the first version, TeX77 and MF78). He was still unhappy with the results, though, and spent a few more years learning more about typography and working with people like Bigelow and Hermann Zapf, before the rewrite into the current TeX82 and MF84 (and current version of Computer Modern). I think it's only with the third edition (1997) that he's finally satisfied.