[tex-eplain] Fwd: Re: Aw: LaTeX vs just TeX (or TeX with eplain) vseverything else

[terry.s at Safe-mail.net]

Sorry, I get 2 copies of your messages and I keep forgetting to change the reply-to address; the one directly from your email tends to arrive first. :-)
Though its seems only 3 of us are active this week.

-------- Original Message --------
From: terry.s at Safe-mail.net
To: Laurence.Finston at gmx.net
Subject: Re: Aw: [tex-eplain] LaTeX vs just TeX (or TeX with eplain) vseverything else
Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2023 01:09:03 -0400

Hi Laurence,

It's fun just to consider the silliness you'd have to go through (and if it's even possible). That was amusing!

> 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.

Well, that would be pTeX or UpTeX! But the lack of English documentation is a critical issue.

Terry S.