From boiling lead and black art: Eddie Smith on math typography
October 13, 2017 7:48 PM   Subscribe

What makes Knuth’s role in typographical history so special was just how much he cared about the appearance of typography in the 1970s—and the fact that he used his technical abilities to emulate the art he so appreciated from the Monotype era. Eddie Smith at Practically Efficient essays some 6000 words on the history of mathematical typography.
posted by cgc373 (33 comments total) 46 users marked this as a favorite
 
I cannot speak too highly of Digital Typography, which is Knuth's collection of lectures and on and notes from the creation of both TeX and Metafont. There is a section of diary entries over several weeks while he was getting "S" to look right that make you appreciate how knife-edge focused he was on the task. The combination of technical accuracy and aesthetic sense is super fun to "witness". It is totally unsurprising that he has also built and played organs.
posted by andorphin at 9:00 PM on October 13, 2017 [7 favorites]


This is great! I just finished reading Shady Characters, too, and I’ve found myself wanting an excuse to need TeX. I don’t write many books, though, so ultimately I suppose it’s unnecessary for me. Ah well.
posted by DoctorFedora at 10:20 PM on October 13, 2017


I dearly wish I could go back in time and interview my grandfather about this. He was a Professor of Mathematics and Education [i.e. the pedagogy of math] at the University of Chicago -- and may well have known the "technical typist" that current UC faculty member J. Peter May alludes to in that included anecdote.

Indeed, my grandfather's perhaps greater achievement was in textbooks, particularly the once-ubiquitous Seeing Through Arithmetic series (a "New Math" mainstay, building a foundation for understanding math in set theory -- which to be sure terminated around HS algebra and geometry, and its greater use was in grade school teaching) and even more germane, a series of manuals for the surprising variety of Pickett Slide Rules, the engineering computers of their day. I've corresponded with the Dutch enthusiast who runs the fortunately extant Slide Rule Museum on the web. From my observation Pickett produced these manuals using a typewriter approach -- certainly some of the equations I see are inconsistent enough that they may have involved a manual adjustment of the platen (the rubber roller holding the paper).

In any event, TeX came along well after any time he would have been intimately involved with any publishing details. I'd love to know how he and his publisher handled these challenges, though.
posted by dhartung at 11:56 PM on October 13, 2017 [6 favorites]


I have a deep, visceral hatred for that TeX font. It brings me back to group work with classmates in my engineering program who insisted on making us suffer for their political beliefs / use of a Linux desktop.
posted by groda at 3:02 AM on October 14, 2017 [2 favorites]


groda, I think I once heard the phrase 'TeX Taliban' used to describe that mindset.
posted by Major Clanger at 3:56 AM on October 14, 2017 [3 favorites]


If you're a regular LaTeX user I feel the need to plug tectonic. It's still beta software but works great, I've been using it for everything. The "tectonic" command becomes a replacement for "pdflatex" or whatever other command you use. It's just generally a little nicer than the usual suite of command line tools, and crucially it downloads packages and styles as needed, even non-default ones from CTAN.

Pandoc is an absurdly powerful tool for converting between different text formats including TeX. So if you write things in Markdown, Pandoc is a great way to typeset them using TeX.

Also, DoctorFedora, you should just give TeX a shot if you're looking for an excuse to use it. I use it for lots of short documents (admittedly in a field where that's the norm) and for slideshows (via Beamer).
posted by vogon_poet at 4:12 AM on October 14, 2017 [6 favorites]


insisted on making us suffer for their political beliefs / use of a Linux desktop

Can't have been true Scotchmen, a half-decent LaTeX workflow is so much smoother for collaboration than the horror of MS Word tracked changes in a math-heavy document.
posted by Dr Dracator at 4:15 AM on October 14, 2017 [5 favorites]


For anybody who's curious to play around with TeX but not to the point of downloading, installing, and configuring it, there's overleaf, a free cloud based editor that's really easy to use.
posted by dbx at 4:56 AM on October 14, 2017 [3 favorites]


To be honest, TeX kind of disappeared from my radar for years after I first learned about it, and then not long ago they added TeX and MathML support for equations to Pages, which is pretty neat at least, even if it isn’t as powerful a piece of typesetting software.
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:03 AM on October 14, 2017


…I never knew that about Gutenberg! About his actual invention being typecasting techniques. That's awesome.
posted by nebulawindphone at 5:09 AM on October 14, 2017


The galleys returned to Knuth by his publisher were photocomposed. Knuth was distressed: the results looked so awful that it discouraged him from wanting to write any more.
Yikes. I'm not at all convinced I'd want to spend much time talking with Knuth at a cocktail party. But, I sure am glad he exists.

This article is great fun. And the best part is that, as a TeX user who thinks this kind of stuff is sorta neat as a brief historical anecdote to read while drinking coffee, I don't have to actually learn any of it to benefit from this history. I'm glad there are people who pay attention to typography; and I'm even more glad that I don't have to be one of them, or even talk to them, to generate nice looking material.

All the tiny technical details that make TeX look good are interesting. But, I'm tempted to argue that "don't go out of your way to make input needlessly frustrating or to make the default options look awful" is actually the groundbreaking innovation. It's surprising no other typesetting software has yet copied the idea.
posted by eotvos at 7:20 AM on October 14, 2017 [3 favorites]


Surprised not to find prior mention of ShareLaTeX here--I've found it to be a very solid online LaTeX editor. Still free for personal use!
posted by retronic at 9:59 AM on October 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


Thanks for posting. For work I'm forced to use word, but I might as how elegant things look in LaTeX. Plus, word now kind of lets you use some TeX using the math autocorrect settings.
posted by Valancy Rachel at 10:07 AM on October 14, 2017


When I was quite young I had a tour of a Linotype system where a friends father worked, it was like being inside of a gigantic Rube Goldberg typewriter, hitting a key triggered liquid lead to fill a mold, cooled and run along a conveyor that shuttled the letter slug into the line being set. Incredible whirring, clunking and large amount of liquid metal was intense!

The entirety of math page markup is not a resolved topic, getting technical literature converted to ebook formats that look good and flow well in the constraints of that tech is far from solved.
posted by sammyo at 10:48 AM on October 14, 2017 [4 favorites]


It's surprising no other typesetting software has yet copied the idea.

I will hazard a guess here that you have never had the pleasure of working on a type job in InDesign and then midway through the process remembered what would have been involved when you were first trained as a typesetter using a non-WYSIWYG phototypesetting system designed and manufactured in the 1970s.
posted by mwhybark at 12:23 PM on October 14, 2017 [2 favorites]


Knuth would only make one more major update to TeX in 1989: TeX 3.0 was expanded to accept 256 input characters instead of the original 128. This change came at the urging of TeX’s rapidly growing European user base who wanted the ability to enter accented characters and ensure proper hyphenation in non-English texts.

Does this mean that TeX is forever frozen in the pre-Unicode Dark Ages of iso-8859-1, or has someone modern-day Prometheus defied its creator and created a version that could theoretically typeset scientific papers that happen to be in Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, or CJK scripts, or, for that matter, Ugaritic, the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabary, or—heavens forfend!—emoji?
posted by acb at 12:51 PM on October 14, 2017


Well, since Knuth's Art of Computer Programming is full of citations and names in non-Roman characters (sometimes to the extent that you wonder if he's just showing off his program), TeX must be able to do it.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 12:58 PM on October 14, 2017


has someone modern-day Prometheus defied its creator

Yes. IIRC XeTeX has ~full unicode support.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 1:01 PM on October 14, 2017 [3 favorites]


I have a deep, visceral hatred for that TeX font. It brings me back to group work with classmates in my engineering program who insisted on making us suffer for their political beliefs / use of a Linux desktop.

Yeah, for all that TeX and Metafont were supposed to open up beautiful typesetting and typefaces to the control of humans using computers, what you actually see is the same font, the same layout, the same look for everything. If you walk into a Computer Science department today and glance at the printed papers prepared for publication, they're visually identical to those from 30 years ago.

My guess is that Donald E. Knuth is the only person capable of using TeX and Metafont for creative purposes, and he only did that once, back in the '70s. Decades of innovation have continued in typography and layout and font design, but the people doing so aren't deeply mastering Knuth's tools.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 1:07 PM on October 14, 2017 [2 favorites]


This may already be familiar to some people here, but one of the descendants of TeX is music engraving software called LilyPond. Not only technically, but philosophically, it is a descendant of Tex, as it was the dissatisfaction of two practitioners in the aesthetics of modern music publishing techniques that led to its creation. Just as one of the stated goals of TeX was to emulate the aesthetics of earlier publishing techniques (Monotype), the stated goal of LilyPond is to emulate the aesthetics of traditional music engraving. An essay was written that describes what makes hand-engraved music beautiful, what makes most music notation software ugly, and how LilyPond is designed based upon those factors. In particular I love that because all but the most trivial examples of engraving will need to balance a series of compromises, LilyPond is designed to score different potential layouts with "ugly points" and will choose the least "ugly" one by default.
posted by WaylandSmith at 4:15 PM on October 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


  TeX and Metafont were supposed to open up beautiful typesetting and typefaces to the control of humans

Making fonts is hard. Like, even the stupid ones I make can take weeks of work for a single design. Picking the right fonts for a document is also hard. TeX can't fix any of that.

One day I need to visit a neighbourhood facility, Don Black Linecasting. They still sell hot metal equipment.
posted by scruss at 5:17 PM on October 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


Decades of innovation have continued in typography and layout and font design, but the people doing so aren't deeply mastering Knuth's tools.

Making fonts is hard. Like, even the stupid ones I make can take weeks of work for a single design. Picking the right fonts for a document is also hard. TeX can't fix any of that.

Yeah, TeX would never be as popular as it is today if it weren't so good at typesetting math. And Metafont's premise of allowing continuous variations in typefaces doesn't seem actually useful, unless you're a type designer — moreover, designing a truly continuous family of typefaces that looks good at any point along any of the dimensions of variation seems like it would be awfully hard compared with designing a few useful weights and widths whose design tradeoffs don't have to blend seamlessly into one another.

And while the justified text layout algorithm is nifty, in my experience it still requires lots of manual tweaking, especially when math is involved (like multi-line equations, or equations that you would like to set inline but screw up the justification).
posted by mubba at 6:58 PM on October 14, 2017 [3 favorites]


LaTeX actually has quite a good font library. However, a lot of math and CS types don't see the need to change away from a quite good set of fonts (Computer Modern/Latin Modern). If you use XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX you can use any ttf/otf font you want. It is also possible to convert ttf and oft font for use on pdflatex, but it is a fair bit of work.

XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX both can use UTF-8 natively. However, they are not 100% backwards compatible with pdflatex documents for (IMO stupid) reasons, and as such almost everyone actually uses pdflatex since that is what scientific journals and archives use. There are ways to insert UTF-8 characters into pdflatex, it is just a little bit of a pain to type in it natively. Or rather, it is a pain to type in more then one codepage. (My undergrad thesis I kept forgetting that I'd already done this once, and so by the end of it I had three seperate ways of inserting UTF-8 characters stored in macros and used at separate points.) None of them are hard, per-say, just look up and copy and past code.

Plus there is a package that accounts for most common European accents so you don't have to worry about them.
posted by Canageek at 10:28 PM on October 14, 2017


However, a lot of math and CS types don't see the need to change away from a quite good set of fonts (Computer Modern/Latin Modern).

This is not a good opinion.

Did proper kerning run over Donal Knuth's dog as a child?
posted by groda at 1:27 AM on October 15, 2017 [2 favorites]


My guess is that Donald E. Knuth is the only person capable of using TeX and Metafont for creative purposes, and he only did that once, back in the '70s.
Only if you restrict your definition of creativity to the fonts themselves, and ignore the incalculable innovation and beauty that has been produced in Computer Modern by people with other passions in the last five decades.

I've no problem with people who care about kerning and tiny font details that nobody but a graphic designer would notice, just I have no problem with people who design new hammers for a living. But I can't take their criticism of my hammer, which works great and let's me build cool stuff easily, too seriously.
posted by eotvos at 6:27 AM on October 15, 2017


Pure-OG-(la)tex folks' insistence that CMR is Perfectly Good kinda drives me up a wall, that fucker is hideous. (Though Computer Modern Sans is actually surprisingly nice...)

But yeah, everyone I know who's invested in typography has switched to xe(la)tex or context at this point, and most have adopted non-latex documentclasses. Xelatex + Memoir + Fontspec + Microtype gets you full OpenType support and better justification and linebreaking than anything short of doing it by hand, plus still-very-good equation setting.
posted by nebulawindphone at 6:34 AM on October 15, 2017 [3 favorites]


OK, I'm sure you all have great fonts you love, but I've got to say: LaTeX with default CMR/LMR is a mile better then Word with Times New Roman, and a fair sight better then word with Cambria.
posted by Canageek at 5:55 PM on October 15, 2017


I've believed in "CMR is Good Enough" for a long time, partly because it usually is good enough, and partly because, between me and my collaborators, I need files that compile on half a dozen different TeX installations with various operating systems and update frequencies. But this thread has convinced me that maybe I should try something new. XeTeX/ConTeXt is probably out of the question, but I'd be glad to hear about any good, common, cross-platform fonts with full math support.
posted by ectabo at 8:59 PM on October 15, 2017


There are good Palatino, Utopia, and Charter versions for plain latex that have been around forever and are widely distributed. There's a New Century Schoolbook that's good for placating CMR purists, because it's even the same style/genre of font, just less spindly and more readable. Linux Libertine is good and free, has excellent unicode support, and most latex distributions that have been updated in the last ~decade should have it, and it comes with a companion sans serif that it works very well with.

Alternate math fonts is harder, because most fonts don't come with all the extra metric information that TeX needs to do a really solid job of setting superscripts and subscripts properly and etc. Euler is my favorite in plain latex, though it's a bit distinctive-looking — it's a Herman Zapf font, quite attractive and readable, designed specifically to be used in math typesetting, and looks great next to Palatino. Linux Libertine/Biolinum plus Euler is another nice one. If you want a math font that looks like Generic Math and isn't full of Zapfically Elegant Whimsy, then Fourier is a good bet.
posted by nebulawindphone at 7:19 AM on October 16, 2017 [2 favorites]


@ectabo: Anything in http://www.tug.dk/FontCatalogue/mathfonts.html should be available with pretty much LaTeX installation if it is in TeXLive, the most restrictive one.

newtxtext provides a much nicer set of Times clones then the ones in Word. I used to hate Times, but that was largely just that Words version sucks.

There are also a few decent Garamond versions, and I've used both KP Serif and Kurier in the past.
posted by Canageek at 12:11 PM on October 16, 2017


Another note: Computer Modern was designed to be printed with ink. Part of the reason it doesn't look as good on the computer screen, was it was designed to have the ink spread a bit on the page.
posted by Canageek at 12:12 PM on October 16, 2017


Yeah, Fourier is nice. Palatino/Euler seemed a little too whimsical, and Times is hard to judge objectively because it just reminds me of MS Word and college essays. One of the things that I find a little bit awkward about Computer Modern is that it's a little light and hard to read on a screen without magnification, and Fourier looks like it could be better for that.
posted by ectabo at 4:07 PM on October 16, 2017 [1 favorite]


Oh! Also! \usepackage[charter]{mathdesign} has a good math font for Charter, ditto for \usepackage[garamond]{mathdesign} and \usepackage[utopia]{mathdesign}.

And if nonfree fonts are an option, \usepackage{MinionPro} gets you Minion text and a really nice matching math font, but you need to buy the license for Minion Pro.
posted by nebulawindphone at 5:28 PM on October 16, 2017


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