[pdftex] TUGBoat - HTH's thesis

[Robin Fairbairns]

Joe Riel writes:

> I had a few minor comments, though, about the typesetting of
> the article itself.  There appears to be too much vertical 
> space above the equation displays; that is, there is more space 
> above then below the displays which looks wrong.  
> Another is that the rendering of "TeX" doesn't look quite 
> right with the chosen font.  The serifs of the lowered "E" 
> run into the "X" (from memory).  Contrast this with Knuth's
> TeX in CM.

this sort of silliness is inevitable in the context of the silly
logos.  _why_ so many of us feel impelled to perpetuate knuth's weak
joke/minor demonstration to an unsuspecting world of a slight feature
of his new (1978) program, i don't really understand.

even more incomprehensible are the latex, bibtex, thistex, thattex
theothertex logos that have been spawned since (perhaps the most
spectacularly odd current one is xymtex -- vortex used to look
horrible, according to its "accepted" coding, in almost any font).
almost all these dotty logos are single-font objects, yet people
plough on and typeset them in any random font that comes to hand.

this logo game has nothing to do with typesetting: sometimes it has to
do with vanity (of a sort, as in latex, a true abomination of a logo),
sometimes it's like the wilder excesses of the marketing person,
trying to find something that will stick out (like a sore thumb) and
mark out a product from the masses of similar ones.

i've long since come to expect to find tex-related logos jarring,
wherever i read them.  it's almost a pity that thanh didn't bother to
do the incredibly tedious adjustment for whatever font it is he uses
(i've not received my copy yet), but it's so minuscule a deal that i
can't honestly be bothered.  (i'm happy that his time was better spent
elsewhere.)  he more-or-less _has_ to talk about tex, and he can't
really write it all in minuscule, as i tend to.  (even i use the logo
in print.)

robin