% Report plus info re distributors of certain products which I hope % is accurate: no prices as I am sure they would not be correct for UK. % % Please feel free to edit it however you like. % \def\linesep{\vskip\baselineskip} \let\sf\relax \let\extraspace\quad \centerline{\bf \TeX\ Users Group 1987 Meeting } \centerline{\bf 2. Is there \TeX \ after Knuth?} % Possible title. \medskip\noindent The answer from the Seattle meeting was loud and clear: Yes! it is not only very alive and well but busy evolving into Japanese and Turkish speaking species. It is also becoming slowly accepted by the commercial world: both by publishers and typesetters. The majority of the grumbles and ``Why on earth did Knuth do\dots '' comments came from the computing professionals; i.e.\ those whose interests involve using \TeX \ as a programming language or who are attempting to unravel and adapt macros written by other \TeX nicians. Their consensus was roughly as follows: \TeX \ is hard to program in and to debug, and nigh on impossible to produce good (according to the fashionable standards) code; to this those with wider aesthetic standards often add that \TeX \ enables bad typesetting as easily as it does good. But enough of the gripes, with Seattle putting on its very best in clear, sunny weather for us it was impossible to be anything but optimistic: and those who could discipline themselves to stay in the lecture theatre for long enough heard about the use of TeX in publications ranging from the ivory towers of Linguistics journals---where the publishers had discovered (with some surprise?) that {\tt \$} signs have lots of nonmathematical uses, to the mass-media world of {\sf TV--Guide} (the US equivalent of TV\kern-2pt /Radio Times) --- where allowing \TeX \ to ``float'' an advert onto the wrong page in just one of the 108 editions could result in badness \$150,000! (and probably some trade for the legal profession who, in Maryland at least, have ``endorsed \TeX\ as their standard for Text Formatting''). The relationship between \TeX\ and the PostScript world was subjected to very close scrutiny from many different angles but I shall not attempt to summarize what was said as I am still trying to piece together into some semblance of coherence the enormous amount of advice and information which I accumulated on the subject. It is certainly one on which everyone in the \TeX\ world has a lot to say; I wonder if PUG members spend so much time wondering about this relationship. The marketing slots were, on the whole, fairly low-key. Many software goodies were promised to be ``ready for shipping this fall'' but my experience leads me to advise waiting until you know someone else who already has been sent the {\it final\/} release version before parting with your money. The reasonably-priced products which seemed to me to be most likely to warrant further investigation were: \item{$\bullet$} Publishing Companion from K-Talk Communications:\extraspace claims to take documents ``from WordPerfect to typesetting, completely untouched by human hands'' (other wordprocessors, e.g. WORD are to be included ``soon''). K-Talk's flyer, which had been produced using this package, suggests that this software exemplifies the criticism I mentioned above: that \TeX \ is as good at sloppy typesetting as it is at excellent typesetting; however, it may be that the true culprit in this case is WordPerfect, which lays no claim to aesthetic judgement. \item{$\bullet$} \TeX WRITE from Docusoft Publishing Technologies:\extraspace this is an environment for \TeX\ on an IBM-type PC. I have a pre-release version of this and, with the bugs removed and the promised features implemented, it could provide a very friendly one: it is, briefly, a multiple-buffer, full-screen editor, with optional menus, which allows files to be \TeX ed, Previewed, etc.\ without leaving it. My major criticism of it is that, as an editor, it is not fully adapted to editing \TeX \ files. \item{$\bullet$} Macro\TeX\ from \TeX nology Inc:\extraspace this is Amy Hendrickson's macro package which is in fact a toolkit of independent suites of macros, all of which work with Plain \TeX. They cover such areas as Tables, Indexing and Glossaries; and the author says that she hopes that the macro constructions in the package will be accessible by and useful to those who want to write their own macros to do either similar things or even ``something completely different''. Those with the odd couple of thousand dollars to spare and a Sun Workstation will of course be eagerly awaiting delivery of the software no Yuppie typesetter could possibly be without --- The Publisher from Arbortext; the pre-release version was happily singing and dancing its way through a somewhat limited routine but the (real)-timing of its ``WYSIWYWouldGetIf\dots\ show'' was most impressive. Nevertheless, when my boat comes in or I write The Program (you know, the one which is able to accurately forcast all the financial markets in the world and act appropriately before anyone else's does), after the red BMW it will have to be a Monotype Lasercomp, together with whatever secret software the long-established German typesetting company St\"urtz have developed to give \TeX \ access to the Aladdin's cave of Monotype fonts, especially those for between the \$-signs! Who knows, then I may be able to keep my linguistics colleagues supplied with all the diacritics and phonetic symbols they lust after, {\it and\/} get an empty set symbol which is more to my editor's (the human one, that is) taste. I do not wish to give the impression that the meeting offered none of what has been in the past its staple diet: implementations of \TeX; and this years fashions in device drivers. There was indeed plenty of information from site-coordinators, companies and consultants to satisfy such appetites. Also, a movement was started to set standards for printer drivers which led to considerable controversy over what such standards should cover. However, the meeting gave me the clear message that TUG is becoming more and more a true {\it Users\/} Group rather than merely an {\it implementor's\/} group. Even clearer though, and I suspect longer lasting, than any such impressions (or what I learnt about accents and breathing signs in Modern Greek, and what it takes to change a hash table size) will be my memories of the never-ending display of sea, lakes, forests and snow-capped mountains which Seattle provided for us that week in August. % Appendix: \linesep\noindent Names and addresses of suppliers mentioned above: \linesep {\obeylines\parindent2em \vbox{Arbortext Inc 416 Fourth Street PO Box 7993 Ann Arbor Michigan 48107 USA $+1$ 313 996 3356} \linesep\goodbreak \vbox{Docusoft Publishing Technologies Inc 1150 Homer Street Vancouver British Columbia V6B 2X8 Canada $+1$ 604 687 0354} \linesep\goodbreak \vbox{K--Talk Communications 3920 Olentangy River Road Columbus Ohio 43214 USA $+1$ 614 459 9711} \linesep\goodbreak \vbox{Seattle Tourist Authority City Hall Seattle Washington USA} \linesep\goodbreak \vbox{\TeX nology Inc 57 Longwood Avenue \#8 Brookline Massachussets 02146 % spelling?? USA $+1$ 617 738 8029} \linesep\goodbreak \vbox{Universit\"ats-druckerei H. St\"urtz AG Beethovenstra\ss e 5 D-8700 W\"urzburg I DFR $+49$ 9 31 385 323} } \medskip \rightline{\sl Chris Rowley, Open University}