LaTeX subscription¶
251 words on TeX
TEX and LATEX really belong to the small set of software I actually like. Sure, they aren’t the prettiest tools around. And certain aspects of them give away their heritage from the 1970s, but at least they work reliably.
And they are improving. Particularly when compared with other software. When I got into TEX in the early 1990s processing a document was an adventure. And when using ‘fancy’ packages styles, it could take about a minute to process a page on my Atari ST. And that was just processing the document, not even printing, which in high-quality mode on the NEC P6 took an eternity and kept the whole neighbourhood awake.
Now look at the progress: Today speed and memory are almost non-issues for TEX. You can load all the packages you want and it will happen almost instantaneously. Up to hundred pages per second aren’t unrealistic even on the smallest MacBook. And even the output of that, given as a convenient PDF file, has improved over time. I’m quite happy with that. (Bonus question: What were the speed improvements of XPress or Word in the same time frame?)
One thing that keeps irking me is TEX’s positioning of subscripts. Why the heck is the position of a subscript changed when a superscript – and that includes the innocuous prime mark ′ – is added. It just makes things look silly when they are written next to each other.
