X-VM-v5-Data: ([nil nil nil nil nil nil nil t nil]
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Date:         Thu, 3 May 90 00:16:29 CET
Reply-To: LaTeX-L Mailing list <LATEX-L%DHDURZ1@unido.bitnet>
From: "Nelson H. F. Beebe" <Beebe@SCIENCE.UTAH.EDU>
Subject:      Leslie Lamport's note on ``LaTeX STYLES for CLASSIC DESIGNS''
              book
X-Cc:         Milazzo@bbn.com
To: Rainer Schoepf <BK4@DHDURZ1.uucp>
Status: R
X-Status: 
X-Keywords:                  
X-UID: 94

I was delighted to read Leslie Lamport's posting about the
proposed book ``LaTEX STYLES for CLASSIC DESIGNS''.

This book should be very useful to the community, and would
supply material in an area that is not yet well covered in
the literature---computed-assisted document design and
publishing.  Two references which I recommend to people are

@Book{Tufte:graphics,
  author =      "Edward R. Tufte",
  title =       "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information",
  publisher =   "Graphics Press",
  year =        "1983",
  address =     "Cheshire, CT, USA",
}

@Book{White:design,
  author =      "Jan V. White",
  title =       "Graphic Design for the Electronic Age",
  publisher =   "Watson-Guptill Publications",
  year =        "1988",
  ISBN =        "0-8230-2122-X",
}

There is a small number of other books on desktop
publishing, but I not seen any yet that are sufficiently
noteworthy to include here.  Other readers of this list are
invited to contribute their favorites.

It is premature to make much comments on the book outline,
other than a couple of points that spring to mind.

(1) Surely the Art of Computer Programming books are a
classic in computer science.

(2) One thing that I would strongly urge the authors and
their publisher to agree on beforehand is that (a) the
styles described in the book not be burdened by copyright,
and (b) machine-readable text of the styles be made
available to TeX archive sites and commercial TeX vendors
for unrestricted further distribution.

If copyrights are felt necessary, then perhaps something
like the GNU copyleft, or the copyright on TeX listed on the
reverse of the cover page of Computers and Typesetting,
Volume 2, that says:

>> The program for TeX is in the public domain, and readers
>> may freely incorporate the algorithms of this book into
>> their own programs.  However, use of the name `TeX' is
>> restricted to software systems that agree exactly with the
>> program presented here.

would be appropriate.

Those of us in the Internet community are deeply aware of
the benefit to society, and progress, accruing from the free
sharing of our research results that the Internet has
facilitated, and the Free Software Foundation and GNU
Project have taken this as a guiding axiom for their
existence.

Commercial firms, such as publishers, in most cases do not
share these views, and may need their arms twisted.  I
understand that Don Knuth had to argue with Addison-Wesley
about making the source text for the TeXbook available;
fortunately, he succeeded.  I own three copies of the
TeXbook, but I still find it useful to dig into its source
code to find out how he did something.  And, as Don once
pointed out, there are even jokes in the comments which you
can enjoy only by reading the source text, but you need the
printed edition if you want to see Duane Bibby's drawings.

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