Customer Reviews

Digital Typography (Center for the Study of Language and Information - Lecture Notes)

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This book won't teach you TeX or Metafont. It might not even teach you all that much about particular algorithms (although Chapter 3 is one of the most detailed explanations of TeX's linebreaking algorithms published anywhere). Instead, this book offers a look behind the scenes.

Instead of beholding TeX and Metafont in their almost final versions, as published in _TeX: The Program_ and _Metafont: The Program_, respectively, you see them grow from the first design studies (when Knuth thought of TeX as a program for two grad students to write over a summer) to where they are today. You see how the collaboration between Knuth and Zapf on the Euler fonts worked, and you get another glance at many facets of Knuth's mind (And a beautiful mind it is indeed, even though it is entirely sane).

If you have any deeper interest in TeX and Metafont, this book is well worth the money.

This book collects numerous writings on TeX and typography from one of the greatest coumputer scientists of all time, Donald Knuth. Here you get to read fascinating inside information on Knuth's earliest development of TeX, how doggone hard he worked to get the letter "S" just right in his computer modern fonts, how to typeset his wife's recipes, and other bits of amazing minutiae. Knuth's style is breezy and funny in a wry-dry kind of way. (He's the kind of down-to-earth genius you'd love to take out to dinner.), and I was amused to find out that he seems to be a film buff. (His journal from his early work on TeX shows that he went to see "Earthquake," for goshsakes, "to relax"!)

This is a brilliant book, a book to treasure, and with its relatively short essays, a book to keep handy for bathroom reading. But then again, you may get addicted and just keep reading one chapter after another! If you love TeX (or LaTeX or AMS-TeX) as much as I do, you'll have to have this book. It's that good, and you will not only be astounded by his genius, entertained by the presentation, but you'll learn things too. Trust me on this one.

If you haven't heard of TeX this probably isn't the place to start. But for a scintillating peek behind the scenes at twenty years of TeX and Metafont, this is the book to read.

I got this book primarily to understand the word-wrapping algorithm in TeX,
and just that chapter alone was worth the price of the book.

Having said that... when explaining algorithms, I find Knuth concentrates so
much on the minutiae that the bigger picture is often lost; but that's just
his style and the exposition is always very clear. I've gone through parts
of TAOCP, so his style of teaching wasn't a complete surprise to me.
The word-wrapping chapter itself has a very leisurely style with a lot
of history and background, and it was a very enlightening and pleasant read.

The book itself is a selection of papers, articles, transcripts
of talks and working documents by Knuth on TeX and Metafont
(for the most part.)

Some chapters were not particularly interesting to me, they dealt with
specifics of tricky typesetting with TeX, which I feel has a clumsy
programming syntax.

Other chapters were great reading as they dealt with the historical
development of TeX and Metafont. For example, he writes about his collaboration
with Hermann Zapf on the AMS Euler typeface, which gives great insights
on how fonts were developed with Metafont. There are a couple of chapters talking
about his fascination with digital typography and his gradual descent (or is that
ascent!) into developing TeX and Metafont, and they were fun to read.

If you're a Knuth fan, you'll definitely want to get this book. The historical
material makes for nice, light reading, and if you get the urge, you can plunge
into the technical chapters and see some interesting gears within TeX
and Metafont.

This is a highly stimulating collection of essays about TeX, typography, the delectable art of programming, the joy of a beautifully constructed letter A, the world, the universe and everything. Knuth's style is, as always, eminently readable and possessed of a fluidity unmatched in technical writing this century. Definitely recommended.

EXCELLENT book.... I cannot rate this one high enough.... at firstI thought it might have been expensive but it is NOT... the price is well WORTH it for what you get, Knuth is a master!