[HN Gopher] The Errors of TeX [pdf] (1989)
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The Errors of TeX [pdf] (1989)
Author : gus_leonel
Score : 47 points
Date : 2024-12-12 10:57 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (yurichev.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (yurichev.com)
| Syzygies wrote:
| I too kept a log of my errors in the 1980's, hoping to become a
| better C programmer. I imagined that with careful enough
| reflection, I would never make the same mistake twice.
|
| I found the log many years later. Last entry: "Forgot to eat. Got
| sick."
| bluenose69 wrote:
| Why is it that pretty much everything Knuth writes is wildly
| detailed but yet, somehow, deeply engaging?
|
| Maybe I'm such a fan because of many great experiences with tex
| (and latex). The output is just so beautiful. And the notation
| (once you get used to the backslashes etc) is so clean.
|
| But, heck, I got hooked when I studied Figure 12 of [1], as an
| undergraduate leafing through a math journal. At first, I thought
| "what's wrong with this nutcase, those "s" letters all look fine
| to me". Then I started to see differences. And then some looked
| ugly. That one in the middle, though, looked better and better,
| the more I studied the figure. Pretty soon, I was hooked.
|
| 1. Knuth, Donald E. "Mathematical Typography." Bull. Amer. Math.
| Soc. (N.S.) 1, no. 2 (March 1979): 337-72.
| bombcar wrote:
| Ok. Knuth makes mistakes, nice to know. Let's read about them.
| Oh, he categorizes them nicely.
|
| WAIT A MINUTE HE HAS A LIST OF CATEGORIES FROM A-T THAT ARE NAMED
| TO COINCIDE WITH THE LETTER!
|
| _And they alliterate!_
| taeric wrote:
| Knuth is delightfully fun in pretty much all he does. Read his
| manuals for TeX, where he has exercises. And consider his
| versioning schemes.
| morning-coffee wrote:
| While enjoying that read, I kept thinking along the way "I wish
| the original TeX source of this PDF were available somewhere as
| I'd love to see this rendered for my high resolution display the
| way Knuth intended."
| taeric wrote:
| I'd be surprised if you couldn't find the sources?
| svat wrote:
| It's linked in another comment, but repeating anyway: a high-
| resolution PDF (i.e. using vector fonts and not a scan) of the
| error log itself is available here:
| https://mirrors.ctan.org/info/knuth-pdf/errata/errorlog.pdf
| (typeset from source: https://mirrors.ctan.org/systems/knuth/di
| st/errata/errorlog....)
|
| The 37-page paper that precedes the error log, _The Errors of
| TeX_ , has been reprinted (as always, with minor corrections)
| as Chapter 10 of the book of collected papers titled _Literate
| Programming_ https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/lp.html -- Knuth
| has not published its .tex source, though it's not impossible
| to find...
| WillAdams wrote:
| While not an article, a more recent listing (current as of 15
| January 2021) is:
|
| https://ctan.math.washington.edu/tex-archive/info/knuth-pdf/...
|
| and he also keeps track of errors in his books:
|
| https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/books.html
|
| and issues certificates for the Bank of the Island of San Seriffe
| for finding them (used to be physical checks --- I got one for an
| error and a minor point of improvement in his book on _Digital
| Typography_).
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