${\LaTeX{}}$: FUBAR NOT

The title is the “fairness equation”. I will leave you to google that.

In entire history of computer software, only one man succeeded in writing a program to typeset mathematics on both paper and screen. Remarkably that software:

• was bug-free.
• was so challenging that it has not been bettered.
• has always been free to use.

To summarise: One man wrote the best program ever written, for free.

No big corporations had a hand. Not even Adobe, credited with creating PDF (not true) could improve on ${\TeX{}}$. PDF had its beginnings, as did the mouse, and the Graphic User Interface, at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Apple and Microsoft just dressed PARC things up in new clothes.

I formatted a 200 page book in LaTeX, or, as LaTeX itself would format it, ${\LaTeX{}}$, the program under discussion. ${\LaTeX{}}$ is a program wrapper, around specially marked up text that is passed through the ${\TeX{}}$ program. Coding ${\TeX{}}$ was tough. The result is so stunningly beatiful that in this day of e-books and digital everything, it is sobering to realise that no programmer has improved on the ${\TeX{}}$ program.

I had no need to typeset maths, but I could have, like this:

\int_{-\infty}^{\infty} e^{-x^2} dx = \sqrt{\pi}

which, containing no special characters, renders in LaTeX as:

$$\huge \int_{-\infty}^{\infty} e^{-x^2} dx = \sqrt{\pi}$$

I did need to drop in some music examples, and those were in LilyPond, a kind of music note-processor that also uses plain text and renders the most amazingly beautiful music notation, working seamlessly with ${\LaTeX{}}$. It was not hard to learn what little I needed. LilyPond is unavailable in HTML, though, so for markdown/HMTL I now use ABC:

LilyPond it ain’t, but it will do.

Ever since my 1963 discovery of Joseph Schillinger’s yellowing, well-thumbed book of his system of music composition, tucked away in the shelves of the UNP (UKZN) library, I have never quite moved away from a connection between music and mathematics. Judging by its inside cover, The book was evidently donated by someone from Los Angeles back in 1937. Since poring over that book when I should have been studying other things, my mind never strays far from maths as music and vice versa.

Few people I have met want to typeset mathematics, but that doesn’t mean it is unimportant. In the movies, beautiful minds seem more content to write on any surface they can find: white wall, black board, green board, glass panel. Good luck toting your wall, board or plate glass to your professor.

There are many other markup systems, most of them forgettable. One that I enjoyed for a while was Pollen by Matthew Butterick. It worked fine until the coding language underlying it, a dialect of ‘Scheme’ (which is a dialect of LISP), named Racket, crashed one day, unable to work on the new linux display software, Wayland. It had worked beautifully for years with the old display server, X11.

So, it was ‘goodbye to Pollen’, a pity, because I enjoyed writing with it. I haven’t checked if Racket works again, because the only true advantage of writing in Pollen was that it could output simultaneously in PDF, HTML, Markdown and plain text, and I can just as easliy replicate that functionalality using linux scripting and Pandoc.

Checking on ${\TeX{}}$

I put this to Gemini AI: Has AI replaced the ${\TeX{}}$ engine?. The answer:

No, AI has not replaced the TeX engine. Instead, AI has revolutionized the front-end user experience of LaTeX by acting as a powerful assistant that generates, repairswere available, and optimizes code, while the TeX engine remains the backend responsible for high-quality typesetting.

Ahem.

It’s been a while …

We have had a century of both PhD degrees and type-writers, yet there were fifty type-writer years before Oxford and Cambridge insisted on typed dissertations and theses (replacing cursive, long-hand writing).

Then, it was another generation before they insisted on electronic copies. The PC revolution was well into its word processing days by the 1990s, yet it took until 2007 for Oxford to insist on digital copies.

Putting this another way, it took a century to abandon handwriting and paper..

Is it a good thing? Abandoning paper? When I am convinced that electronic media will outlast paper archives, then “yes”. Otherwise “no”. In pseudo geek-pidgin:

AbandonPaper = 'Digital lasts >= Dead Sea Scrolls': 'yes','no'

South African publishers want manuscripts submitted in “the standard” (.docx) format, fine for general typesetting, but no self-respecting science or mathematics adademic in America or America uses anything but ${\LaTeX{}}$. Users seem generally amused that anyone would entrust their texts to AI, or even allow AI-assisted ${\LaTeX{}}$.

Pay me

Last note: that book I formatted? Those formats will be replaced with HTML. Yes, my autobio will become an e-book.

That has been a sub-story of my life. I worked on steam: steam all but vanished. I coded in Pascal: Pascal all but vanished. I played trombone in a township jazz band. That band does not use a trombone any more, and township jazz all but vanished. I formatted a book in ${\LaTeX{}}$: it all but vanished. If you want something to all but vanish, thuma mina. Consider paying me. Evidently, I can make it happen.

Producing any book is not to be sneezed at. It takes work. I am not about to knock how my e-book was produced, However, I feel sorry for publishers who will never know about ${\TeX{}}$. Nothing beats the revelatory moment of seeing that perfect typesetting appear

The creator of ${\TeX{}}$, Donald Knuth, still with us.

I salute you Mr Knuth! Your offer of a Hex dollar ($2.56) to anyone who could find a bug in your typesetting engine code has long expired, but it’s ok, I am not looking for one. And, I am sure there were very few takers!