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It's going to take da Vinci like talent and a herculean effort and to build anything 10% as good a TeX. Knuth, the pre-eminent computer scientist, devoted 10 ye
by waynecochran 12y ago
It's going to take da Vinci like talent and a herculean effort and to build anything 10% as good a TeX. Knuth, the pre-eminent computer scientist, devoted 10 years of his life to type setting to create MetaFont and TeX. Being able to "write scripts" for it ain't enough. Anyway... prove me wrong.
- rst 12y agoA lot of that time went into the development of not the code per se, but algorithms that newer code could reimplement. Perhaps in simpler forms on newer machines. Conventional TeX has a hard time optimizing placement of page breaks because its data structures hold only one page at a time, and discard its contents before starting the next, due to memory limitations of computers from the 1980s. Those limits no longer apply, which could make it a lot easier to code strategies for eliminating "widows" and "orphans" -- situetions in which only one line of a paragraph is stuck at the top or bottom of a page.