Nelson H. F. Beebe
University of Utah
beebe@math.utah.edu
Sunday July 20, 2003
This talk reviews some of the history of TEX and METAFONT, how they have come to be used in practice, and what their impact has been on document markup, the Internet, and publishing.
TEX has several design deficiencies that limit its use and its audience. We look at what TEX did right, and with 25 years of hindsight, what it did wrong.
The talk closes with some observations about the challenges ahead for electronic representation of documents.