The lingua franca of LaTeX
This is a good article! A couple of corrections to the early history in the introductory paragraphs:<p>• It is indeed true that the first edition of Volumes 1–3 of <i>The Art of Computer Programming</i> and the second edition of Volume 1 (1968, 1969, 1973, 1973) had been done with hot-metal typesetting (pieces of lead, laid out to form the page) with a human doing the typesetting&#x2F;compositing (with a Monotype machine). And that for the second edition of Volume 2 in 1977, the publisher Addison-Wesley was switching to a cheaper alternative. But the cheaper alternative was not electronic; it was <i>phototypesetting</i> (the letterforms made with light and lenses instead of metal). It was Knuth who noticed a book that <i>had</i> been electronically typeset (Patrick Winston&#x27;s AI book), realized that electronic typesetting machines actually had enough resolution to print like “real books” (unlike typewriters or printers of the time), and decided to solve his problem for himself (as he felt that he could make shapes with 0s and 1s).<p>• The summer of 1977, Knuth spent in China, thinking he&#x27;d specified his program in enough detail and his two students would be able to complete the program by the time he came back. He came back and saw they had only implemented a small subset, and decided to spend his sabbatical year writing the program himself. He mentions that as he started writing it he realized the students&#x27; proto-TeX was an impressive effort, because there was a lot missing from his specifications. Knuth&#x27;s article <i>The Errors of TeX</i> (reprinted in his collection <i>Literate Programming</i>) goes into excellent detail on the development process.<p>Also: a suggestion to try plain TeX (instead of LaTeX), if you haven&#x27;t tried it. The book <i>A Beginner&#x27;s Book of TeX</i> by Seroul and Levy is especially good. It might surprise you.