X-VM-v5-Data: ([nil nil nil nil nil nil nil t nil] [nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil]) Date: Mon, 13 Aug 90 14:44:11 CET From: Rainer Schoepf Organization: Inst. f. Theor. Physik d. Univ. Heidelberg Subject: Some words from the outside To: LaTeX discussion list Status: R X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 218 Friends, here are some comments I got from Cameron Smith : Rainer ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thanks for the pointers, I will check out the machines you mentioned. Do I understand that you are working on the "next generation" of LaTeX? Do you anticipate that it will be functionally very different, or will it simply be more streamlined code to do essentially the same kinds of things? I am a newcomer to LaTeX; is there somewhere (like a back issue of TeXHaX) that I could go to find out about this? I am very interested in the future of TeX and LaTeX, and hope to see electronic typesetting of this kind used much more widely in book production in the future. But I have a couple of friends who are book designers and editors who seem to feel that the current TeX-oriented tools, although very nice for journal articles, theses, and the like, are not sufficiently sophisticated to be of real help in book production. They seem to feel that using LaTeX (for example) solves some problems but leaves others un-addressed, and has the added burden of requiring the designer or production manager or whoever to learn the internals of LaTeX to fix those problems. An example that was cited to me recently was (La)TeX's making pages one at a time. It was claimed that the only right way to make pages was to consider "spreads" (pairs of facing pages), and that a program that irrevocably made up page 10 before it even knew what would be on page 11 was fundamentally flawed. Well, I didn't mean to turn this into a diatribe -- for me, LaTeX has been a wonderful tool -- I was just curious to know whether the next version would be a substantial change from the current one, perhaps taking some of these sorts of issues into account. Thanks again for your assistance. --Cameron Smith CAMERON@MIDD.BITNET