From: Chris Rowley <C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Message-ID: <18697.44693.705326.885864@fell.open.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2008 12:54:45 +0000
To: "LaTeX Team" <latex-team@latex-project.org>
Subject: Re: how much base engine variation do we want?
In-Reply-To: <27990a880810291612v455c07aak2a00443e181873e5@mail.gmail.com>
References: <AF343C3B-0141-4231-9F60-4264FECAEE71@gmail.com>
	<18656.30534.775999.877650@morse.mittelbach-online.de>
	<859ec5630810240114w6acacdfep5bb2fcd2b6c1f19a@mail.gmail.com>
	<18696.25729.957701.368319@fell.open.ac.uk>
	<27990a880810291612v455c07aak2a00443e181873e5@mail.gmail.com>
Precedence: list
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Sender: latex-team-bounces@latex-project.org
Errors-To: latex-team-bounces@latex-project.org
Status: R

Will

> > ^1 and for many many^a years to come, I prophecy.
> > ^a if any monolithic Tex-compatible processor has that long to last
> >   in widespread use???
> 
> Do you actually think that TeX will just die out because
> MS-/Open-Office become "good enough"? I think the relegating of LaTeX
> to niche status happened long ago -- relative to my own age :) I don't
> see that niche changing much in size going forward, however.

That depends on what you mean by 'become good enough'!

Suppose that I could reasonably easily select any sensible part of the
underlying XML file and apply 'any of XeTeX's current typesetting
algorithms to it' (and also fully integrate SVG graphics with text and
maths, or choose full implememtions of the Karow-Zapf (hz etc.)
algorithms, and maybe other layers of icing).  Then, not only would
Jonathan K's life be fulfilled but a lot of the 'more casual use of
TeX-based systems as technical word-processors and for typographical
quality' would not need to use TeX' batch-mode processing model.  This
could make a lot of current users to leave TeX, espacially if we
provide cut-and-paste technology to/from their favourite text editor's
screen interface.  Conversion LaTeX <--> (common XML document schemas)
is already serious business.

I don't think that LaTeX is any more niche than it has ever been and I
suspect that its use as a language is still growing.  The question is,
what software will that language be processed by?

This still leaves very important uses of TeX purely as a part of a
highly automated batch processor producing 100s of bank statements and
other businnes documents per second.  Here it is not so clear whether
anything more radical than the error-prevention/handling is worth
changing in TeX.

Of course, if I spend my time just explaining this rather than
organising some of it, then I shall verily be an false prophet:-).

Meanwhile, how is XeTeX-math doing?  Ready to tackle typesetting the MathML spec
and associated tables of characters/glyphs yet?

Cheers,  chris


_______________________________________________
Latex-team mailing list
Latex-team@latex-project.org
https://lists.dante.de/mailman/listinfo/latex-team