encoding and Omega and commercial and limbo (was Re: [pdftex] MS Word hell, TeX heaven?)

[William Adams]

On Thu, 2003-03-13 at 20:37, William Adams wrote:
>> Ironically, there was a time when TV Guide was typeset w/ TeX---not 
>> sure if that's still the case or no, though.

and Sebastian replied:
>i think thats an urban myth, you know. they look at it once,
>but I don't believe it was ever implemented in production

Berthold Horn said it was used for a time in this post:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=462rf3%24k8s%40life.ai.mit.edu&output=gplain

There was also an article on this AIUI:
David Ness, ‘The use of T E X in a commercial environment’, in TUG87,
ed., Dean Guenther,
number 5 in T E Xniques. Publications for the T E X Community, pp.
115–123, P. O. Box 9506
Providence, R. I. 02940, U.S.A., (1987). T E X Users Group.

referenced from:
http://cajun.cs.nott.ac.uk/compsci/epo/papers/volume7/issue1/ep113rw.pdf

However, I've not read the TeXniques article, and only looked through
the .pdf enough to find the citation...

>> Moreover, how long was it from SGML -> XML?

>10-15 years, but not sure why its relevant?

How long would it've taken XML to've been done had SGML not existed?
Surely. having this leg up helped the abbreviated timeframe from
nascency to TV mention.

<snip>

>> > Even if you look at the analysis made of the US government's dependence
>> > on Open Source software, TeX doesnt figure much.
> 
>> Yeah, but it still gets used behind the scenes quite often when ink 
>> hits paper.

>yesm "quite often" probably characterizes it. not a ringing
>endorsement...

But neither a complete turning away / ignoring of, either.

>> One also has things like InDesign which directly take advantage of 
>> TeX w/o acknowledgement :(

>so? TeX is good, and Knuth made it open for others to learn from. 
>its not surprising other people pick the good bits.

Yeah, but it's depressing that such efforts tie things up so tightly in
proprietary software---I really wish Adobe had put HZ into (Display)
PostScript so that everyone could have ready access to it.

>> Well, there is Omega.... and dvipdfmx now supports it.

>if only there *were* Omega. Nobody, I hope,
>will argue that omega is production ready!

Apostolos Syropoulos seems to've managed fairly well with _Digital
Typography Using LaTeX_, just published from Springer-Verlag.... okay,
so all they minus signs dropped out 'cause the Symbol font was probably
re-encoded and didn't go along for the ride in the PostScript file and
there're a bunch of typos, still it got produced, and with Omega for the
most part.

William