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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: About TeX as printing engine [Re: Fwd: Re: Application Ideas]
From:       Vadim Plessky <lucy-ples () mtu-net ! ru>
Date:       2001-08-24 16:54:43
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On Thursday 23 August 2001 12:55, Claus O. Wilke wrote:
|   > Borrowing ideas from TeX is cool but has the disadvantage of sorta
|   > reinventing the wheel on a smaller scale. It would be about always
|   > catching up with the evolving TeX engine (does it still evolve?).
|   > CT
|
|   It doesn't evolve anymore. Knuth's research on that subject was
| incredibly comprehensive, in essence he covered more or less the whole area
| of typesetting. In any case, it is definitely feasible (and very sensible)
| to put algorithms used by TeX into other layouting engines. In fact, I
| wanted to do that for kformula, but then ran into the typical 'no time'
| problem.
|
|   David: if you don't know much about typesetting, you should definitely
| have a look at Knuth's TeX-book, you get tons of insight from there, even
| if you are not interested in rebuilding TeX function for function. Another

I would recommend another book:

Peter Karow
"Font technology. Description and Tools"
Springer-Verlag, 1994

I discovered this book just recently, as Russian translation was published 
only in 2001 :-((

Peter Karow invented the first CAD-like Font Design program, named IKARUS (he 
is, or at least was, working for URW).  IKARUS was working on VAX VMS, with 
Vector (not *raster*) displays!!   :))
This book has comprehensive comparision of different font technologies, 
hinting process, layout, etc.
Actually, I was surprised to see book on fonts & font technologies so close 
to real world.
(and yes, I have read about 10 books on fonts before...)

Despite it's rather old (1994) at a first glance, it has information which 
PostScript and TrueType/OpenType specification do not have.
And yes, I need to say here that IKARUS system has own font format, superset 
of AGFA-Compugraphic Intellifont, Adobe PostScript, Microsoft/Apple TrueType, 
and able to export to those formats. 

I think this book is *the MUST* to read before talking about WYSIWYG layout 
:-))

| book I recommend (though a bit longer) is 'Digital Typography', again by
| Knuth. There, you find a very good introduction into TeX's paragraph
| layouting algorithm (The algorithm is the best in existence, and in fact
| can be described on 1-2 pages pseudocode, so there is really no reason not
| to use it).
|
|   If you have any questions, contact me via private mail (I can also go
| into the library, photocopy the pages on the paragraph layouting algorithm,
| and send them to you, if you can't get a copy of the book. It's kind of
| expensive).
|
|   Best,
|     Claus

-- 

Vadim Plessky
http://kde2.newmail.ru  (English)
33 Window Decorations and 6 Widget Styles for KDE
http://kde2.newmail.ru/kde_themes.html
Do you have Arial font installed? Just test it!
http://kde2.newmail.ru/font_test_arial.html

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