[OS X TeX] Slight OT but fun: Crazy TeX code

[Jung-Tsung Shen]

On 10/12/06, William Adams <will.adams at frycomm.com> wrote:
> On Oct 12, 2006, at 2:58 PM, Jung-Tsung Shen wrote:
>
> > This is slightly OT but is fun. I ran across a website that contains
> > some lines of codes (termed "Crazy TeX" in the page):
> >
> > http://latex.olympus.het.brown.edu/
> >
> > (scroll slilghtly down the page to about 1/3 of the page).
>
> It should work perfectly if compiled as Plain TeX.
>
> > I compiled the codes and the results were really amazing (there were
> > some error messages on compiling, I simply ignored them. The results
> > didn't come out perfect).
> >
> > Could someone explain to me, in plain English, how does the code
> > work? :-)
>
> It was done by David Carlisle and he did it by working backward from
> the text and manually working up the most efficient way to represent
> it as TeX code using looping and other structures, playing w/
> catcodes &c.
>
> It's on CTAN as xii.tex and there's some discussion of it on usenet
> in comp.text.tex --- working out how it works is a pretty good
> indicator of a TeX wizard.
>
> William

Thanks for the reply, William. There's much fun in (La)TeX! :D

JT
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