@CarLaTeX Well, that would be a bad job for the downvoted with no reason. I have not done much downvotes ... And for that reason I will not do that! But thanks for the tip :-)
@FaheemMitha I find it quite comprehensive, yes. It describes TeX pretty much in detail. Much more detail than you're likely to need, in fact. And yes, if you wish to understand the more subtle points of TeX, it is indispensible. Possibly, you might want to start with Victor Eijkhout's TeX by Topic, though. It is quite terse, though, as it is really intended for readers who already know the fundamentals.
@FaheemMitha I was joking. Clearly, there was a time before I read it. But, I did read it long before I had access to a working TeX system. I figured here was the future, and it turned out I was right.
And the TeXbook contains stuff like a detailed description of how math is built, which TbT does not.
@FaheemMitha There are indeed lions. I think many of the jokes are funny, but they alone do not justify getting the book. They do liven it up a bit, though.
@FaheemMitha From a modern perspective, the criticism is probably right. But given the state of computing at the time, what he did is not so unreasonable, I think.
@samcarter Can I write a loop to do it, or must I rerun the command each time? And if the latter, is it ok to use the shell's history mechanism? (Up arrow, return.)
@egreg Yes, the Hollywood movies also tended to be shorter back in the old days. The newer ones have a lot of fancy stuff and are usually a bit longer. So it is all consistent. ;-)
@egreg Hmmmh. Back in the old millennium I was told that LaTeX3 will be released in a few years. That was a good prediction, it is still true today. ;-)
It is like I am a grad student again ... I am reformating a manuscript from author-year in text citations to a numeric style. In author-year I wrote \cite{ArticleByStrongbadAndTheCheat} and \cite{ArticleByHomestarRunnerAndStrongbad}. With a numeric style should I write Strongbad and colleagues \cite{ArticleByStrongbadAndTheCheat, ArticleByHomestarRunnerAndStrongbad} or something else?
@Kurt Dear Kurt, I think with such sincerity, considering your comment, that my question will have to be eliminated because as you wrote you may have problems for special cases. I always renew my idea that I do not care about any score but learn and learn from all those who are correct with me.
@HaraldHanche-Olsen -- Late to the party, I know, but ... TeX was in existence by 1979, when Knuth described it in his invited Gibbs Lecture at the AMS annual meeting in January of that year. The germ of Unicode didn't surface until 1987, and the Unicode Consortium wasn't in existence until 1991. Before that, "standard encodings" were defined by various ISO standards; ISO 646 defined ASCII, for instance. Work on a more comprehensive standard, ISO 10646, began in the late 1980s, (cont'd)
(cont'd) and Unicode was a competitor. The first draft of iSO 10646 was voted down, and Unicode adherents came forward to offer their work to take its place. As it happens, I attended one of the working group meetings where this was discussed. (I was active on an ISO working group on document processing at the time.) In 1991, a "compromise" was achieved, and Unicode work became the basis for the overhauled ISO 10646. Additions to Unicode are now passed on to the ISO 10646 working group.
@barbarabeeton Thanks for the history lesson. I was very far from the center of things at the time, but as far as I recall, one of the controversies was about whether 32 bits was necessary (ISO 10616) or whether 16 bits was enough (Unicode). And so far, it seems that just a bit more than 16 bits is required, so neither side to the controversy was completely on target.
@barbarabeeton Right. There a combinatorics explosion going on: Every emoticon has to appear with multiple skin tones, who know how many genders, not to mention hair styles and religious affiliations. But seriously, many of those variants are handled by combining characters, aren't they?
@DavidCarlisle In my neighbourhood, we use funny letters like æøå that don't quite fit into ASCII.
@FaheemMitha I think that the WSJ gives you a fixed (small) number of free articles each month. Clearly, they need to track you to achieve this goal, most likely by setting a cookie. And this has nothing to do with Apple. (Well, the article has to do with Apple, but it is not their article. It pokes fun at Apple after all.)
@FaheemMitha -- DEK will next review submitted bug reports in late 2020, and for each either make an update, accept in concept but declare a "feature", or decline with an explanation. As in past years, I expect that he will prepare a cogent summary for publication in TUGboat. Oh, his name is on the attendees list for the TUG meeting in Palo Alto this summer; though I don't expect him to attend the full program. (I do hope for an "all questions answered" session.)
