Name: Computers and Typesetting
ISBN: 9780201734164

What Hacker News says

ameliusJul 2026

Read this instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_and_Typesetting

DemocracyFTWDec 2021

See, that might be cultural background or whatnot, I don't know, but some people find those cartoons to be a nice touch, and they admire the clarity of exposition of The TeXbook.

I'm the proud owner of the entire 6 vol Computers and Typesetting series (of which the former title is vol A), and have worked through sizable portions of those. I also read mot of the 680 pages of Knuth's Digital Typography monograph. I also owned one LaTeX book at some point. I admire the depth of Knuth's knowledge (typographic and otherwise), the sheer diligence, his quest for quality, all of that. Those lion doodles though, the author's urge to land another witty remark, come up with another finely crafted reference, and how he's prone to hint at stuff instead of writing a proper documentation are not aspects of his work that I enjoy.

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dhosekJun 2020

An even better presentation (although lacking bug fixes after publication) is volume D of Computers & Typesetting, Metafont: The Program. It's not just the output of weave (which is what's in the linked mf.pdf file), but also includes "mini-indexes" for quick cross-referencing of parts of the code.

I'd also note that while TeX is primarily the work of Knuth, MF was more of a collaboration between Knuth and his grad student John Hobby (who also wrote MetaPost) and Hobby should be recognized as a co-author of MF.

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svatNov 2017

The .web files aren't meant to be read raw; you should instead read the typeset version (http://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/generic/knuth/mf/mf.pdf)

Even better to read from volumes C, D, E of the Computers and Typesetting series (https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/abcde.html). Specifically in this case, Volume D (METAFONT: The Program) — the mini-indices on each page spread are useful if you're trying to understand the program, and they're missing in the typeset PDF (above) that you can get with weave.

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anjbeApr 2016

I’m also one of those who prefers troff. I read all five volumes of Knuth’s Computers and Typesetting cover to cover, and TeX is a beautiful piece of work. But in my preferred alternate universe, two things would be different: Joe Ossanna would not have died young, and AT&T would have been more open with licensing in time for Knuth to use troff as a base for his improvements to the world of typesetting.

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NY_USA_HackerMar 2011

Part Two

III. What TeX is Good for.

No single piece of software is everything, and neither is TeX.

It is possible to look at TeX and wish for more.

So, just what is TeX and what is it good for?

The history is clear: For Knuth's series of books, 'The Art of Computer Programming', the publisher Addison-Wesley told Knuth that for his next edition they were going to use an approach to typesetting that would reduce the 'typesetting quality' of the results. So, Knuth wrote TeX so that he could do the 'typesetting' for his books himself and deliver to the publisher 'camera-ready' copy or perhaps just some files.

So, Knuth wrote TeX to let him write his books.

Knuth presented his work to the American Mathematical Society that quickly took TeX seriously. Why? For typing math, TeX is terrific, was much better than anything else, and mostly still is. Otherwise, the typesetting quality is about as high as typesetting gets.

So, TeX is also good for developing camera ready versions of papers in mathematics.

Quickly TeX became the international standard for word processing of more mathematical material in all of the more mathematical fields in science and engineering.

Since then, TeX has been used for the word processing for many books in mathematical fields.

TeX is good for such word processing: TeX was designed for such work and is heavily used for it.

Note: With TeX, Knuth was essentially looking backwards in time, not forward. So, he was writing software to automate, with high quality, what was old and solid but slow and expensive in manual typesetting for mathematics and to be printed on paper. So, he was not trying to do all of word processing, graphical design, interactive user interface, and software development for the future of information, computing, the Web, and civilization.

Notice the typesetting and 'graphical design' in Knuth's 'The Art of Computing' and 'The TeXBook' and in papers with a lot of mathematics:

(1) There isn't a lot of color; mostly it's just black and white.

(2) There fonts are not 'stylish' like can find in printed advertising.

(3) There are only a few tables and figures, and the figures are mostly simple line drawings, X-Y graphs, or photographs.

(4) The output is to be on paper and not 'interactive' or continually updated. That output can also be converted to PDF and still not be interactive.

(5) Typically the writing is by no more than a few authors so that the techniques for coordinating the work of many people on one large software development project are not relevant.

Net, the emphasis is on the technical content and not the typography, graphical design, GUIs, or large work groups.

So, now we know what TeX is good for.

IV. Warnings.

For the math, be well advised to stay with just Knuth's math fonts standard in TeX and the AMS fonts and symbols. Once you are staying with these math fonts, for the text just stay with Knuth's Computer Modern fonts that are standard in TeX and work well with the math fonts.

For developing your own high quality math fonts for TeX, that'd be a LOT of work. For using fonts for text other than Knuth's standard Computer Modern, it would be a lot of work to get them to work well with Knuth's math fonts.

If you are not doing math, then you can work to use fonts Helvetica, Bookman, Century School Book, etc. for your text, but then there will be some question just why you are using TeX.

If you are developing a Web page, then use HTML and whatever, maybe ASP.NET, that helps writing HTML. TeX and HTML have very different purposes.

If, compared with TeX, you want a lot more or something very different, then you will likely run into problems from limitations from the original intentions of TeX.

If you want something as good as TeX where TeX is good plus a lot more, then don't hold your breath while waiting for it.

If you want to write a better TeX yourself, then start with Knuth's voluminous, exemplary, polished, very finely detailed documentation in volumes A-E of 'Computers and Typesetting'. After reading that material, you may decide that you have better things to do than writing a better TeX.

Don't think that TeX and HTML compete: They are designed for very different purposes.

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