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Subject:
From:
Chris Rowley <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Thu, 26 Jun 1997 14:11:08 +0200
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Sebastian Rahtz wrote --
>  > Were I a betting person I would put quite a lot of money on there
>  > being a lot of people using comparatively dumb editors to enter
>  > LaTeX (and AMSTeX) code in 3 years time.
>
> yes, but `a lot' could be the same number of people now programming
> use MS Basic on their 8086 computers. do you care about them?

As much as I care about any other large number of people doing things
with documents, yes.

> so as i suspected, you dont wan't to see markup at all! you are now
> saying TeX is an _interchange_ format, like RTF, which humans don't
> read or write. Thats a whole different kettle of fish

I may not want to see mark-up (although I did not actaully say that:
it depends a lot on what scren I am using, etc) but that is just me.
I do not want to stop other people doing so if they wish to; I do not
want them to curse me like I curse the people who think I should be
encouraged to point at things with a mouse simply because someone
thinks it is easier for me than other methods of communicating
commands to my softeware.

> the conclusion i would draw from that is the best we can do is make
> (La)TeX an even better formatting engine, since that is the one thing
> we all agree that it is needed for. hence back to issues like
> algorithms for float placement....

Whilst I would not draw this conclusion I would very much like to do
as you suggest, but if that is all we need then we should leave out
the TeX bit and just:

  make an even better formatting engine

This endeavour would start from the TeX formatting engines (note the
plural) but not necessarily from any other parts of TeX

> hence back to issues like
> algorithms for float placement....

Oh please, yes please!  No one ever sent me one yet.


chris

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