[cl-typesetting-devel] Couple of silly questions

[C Y]

--- Marc Battyani <marc.battyani at fractalconcept.com> wrote:

> "C Y" <smustudent1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> >How resource intensive is a "pass" over a small typesetting
> expression?
> 
> It uses a lot of memory. Each char has several double float
> associated with it.

Hmm.  OK.  Oh well, you pay for quality :-).

> >I'm hoping the STIX fonts will be out soon - that should 
> >make for a VERY interesting tool.
> 
> I look at the Stix font site every now and then and I will 
> put them in cl-typesetting as soon as they are available.

Yay!  I'm really looking forward to those being released - they will
probably (if they live up to hype) be the best thing for consistent
typesetting since TeX.

> >I'm curious to see how Knuth handled mathematical 
> >typesetting - certainly his solutions seem to be the most
> >effective to date.
> 
> Yes, as far as math typesetting is concerned, AFAIK everybody
> uses TeX inspired algorithms.

He seems to have gotten the "correct" solution, at least judging by his
output.  Line breaking of course is another matter, but he knew there
wasn't a "general" solution to the problem so I'm not surprised he
avoided it.

> >OK, I'm interested :-).
> 
> Great :)
> 
> If you want, I can give you a contact with a friend of mine
> who is TeX expert as well as Lisper. He would probably be able
> to help you if he has some time ;-)

Cool!  I don't think I'd be skilled enough yet to benefit from his
help, but hopefully in a couple months that could be very useful!  I
kinda figured the best way to begin would be to do a cl-gardner's style
approach - read through the code, add docstrings, begin writing a
"howto use this" type document, and learning as I go.  I must confess
I'm not a skilled Lisp programmer either, so both of those constraints
must be addressed before I'm ready to start adding TeX's algorithms in
a sane way.  cl-doc seems to be a decent tool, so perhaps I can begin
there and work my way through the code.

I was able to get things up and working last night well enough to be
able to generate most of the examples (I was using sbcl though so I
fear unicode is out at the moment).

Cheers,
CY


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