[tex-eplain] LaTeX vs just TeX (or TeX with eplain) vs everything else

[Laurence.Finston at gmx.net]

> So here I am learning TeX by itself (and with eplain). Heck, maybe I can hack my own vertical, front-to-back layout (though that's probably too advanced). My best bet for the Japanese engines is learning enough to NOT NEED all the macros I can't read about in English.

I've used TeX--XeT for mixing left-to-right and right-to-left typesetting but I've never looked into the various possibilities for CJK. I think that vertical typesetting might be beyond the capacity of TeX.  Even the encoding for CJK characters was kind of an afterthought and the solution is not particularly elegant.

An important fact about TeX and METAFONT is that they were programmed for the computers of the late 1970s to mid '80s.  I'm pretty sure there was no virtual memory, because TeX and MF have fixed limits for many kinds of objects and that doesn't make sense if you've got virtual memory.  In addition, memory was severely limited by today's standards, where memory constraints hardly play a role anymore for most kinds of programming. So, in each case, Knuth set out out to solve a limited problem.  TeX is _not_ a general solution to the problem of typesetting any kind of document and MF is not a general-purpose drawing program.

It would certainly be possible to typeset a vertical line of text using TeX as a kind of display and a one-off display wouldn't be too hard to program in MetaPost.  However, TeX and MF do not address the issue of vertical spacing of letters.  If one were to ask me to try to find a general solution for this problem and I were to agree (which wouldn't happen), I would start by modifying the fonts I wanted to use (which would have to be MF fonts) by copying and renaming the sources and then turning all the letters sideways, which would be perfectly easy to do.  I would then typeset everything left-to-right (or right-to-left, if that would work better), and then turn everything (i.e., the pages) sideways, which would also be perfectly easy to do.  Since I don't know how to convert MF fonts into PS, they would have to be generated at every size I wanted and they wouldn't be scalable in a PS or PDF viewer, but that's not a serious problem.

This might be fun as a puzzle, but my advice would be to look for something else for vertical typesetting.  Unless of course someone else has already programmed a solution.

> Gesendet: Donnerstag, 12. Oktober 2023 um 05:49 Uhr
> Von: terry.s at Safe-mail.net
> An: tex-eplain at tug.org
> Betreff: [tex-eplain] LaTeX vs just TeX (or TeX with eplain) vs everything else