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Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
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Date:         Wed, 25 Nov 1998 13:04:32 +0000
From: Sebastian Rahtz <s.rahtz@ELSEVIER.CO.UK>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
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To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
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Subject:      Re: What is "base" LaTeX
Status: R

Hans Aberg writes:
 > I thought it was the opposite, Sebastian speaking about the faith common
 > among businesses, but knowing nothing about the real world that researchers
 > experiences: It is like teaching students at an university which thinks
well, to be fair to me, i have worked for 14 years in academia in
various roles (including teaching CS) and only 4 in business :-}

when i joined this company, I worked in TeX support, in a religious
way; 4 years later, its plain as the nose on your face that TeX _as
author/editor interface_ has lost the battle for market dominance. the
Good Guys do not always win, historically [1]

 > The best way out of this dilemma for publishers and typesetters is to
 > having as little as possible with this semantic aspect of contents that the
 > mathematician supplies, and only provide the things that has to do with the
 > general graphical look: Anything else is going to be too expensive, and the
 > interface between mathematician and proof-readers does not work anyhow.
sure. i might not argue with this

 > In order to support this, TeX was invented, and LaTeX was invented in order
 > to support using TeX as an authoring tool, even though most mathematicians

and sadly, the mathematicians (led by the rather unusual Don Knuth)
took a license to escape from the confines of $..$ and starting
spending days and weeks formatting their bibliographies (an area
which, you must admit, is NOT a special case for mathematicians)

sebastian

[1] sorry, you 20th century mathematicians, as an ex-archaeologist,
now i am on _my_ territory.