Texcraft is an attempt to re-implement TeX with a modular/LLVM software architecture. These UIs take the same code in Texcraft that has identical behavior to TeX, and illustrates some of the inner workings of TeX. The lig/kern one is missing instructions :)
I have also found at least one bug in Knuth's TeX recently and am currently writing it up.
Thank for the suggestion, implemented it! Now all suggestions have at least one hyphen and one position where the patterns disagree (one pattern says hyphenate, another to not hyphenate). I discovered you don't necessarily need long words to get "interesting" hyphenation results; e.g. https://hyphenate.dev/zero.
The motivation behind METAFONT is amusing to me because it seems to have some of the same hubris of the most extreme AI proponents nowadays: we can replace art by technology. I'm fascinated with TeX (and have spent a lot of my life rewriting it http://github.com/jamespfennell/texcraft) but I always found the situation with fonts in the TeX ecosystem a bit odd. There are people in our society whose vocation is font design (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Slimbach). But the TeX ecosystem landed in a place where we use fonts created by computer scientists rather than font designers.
Hi (looks like I've already starred your repo at some point months/years ago)!
The motivation was not to replace art with technology, but to preserve/resurrect an art that was going away, by truly capturing the human understanding[^1]. When the rest of the industry was perfectly content with the deterioration of typesetting, Knuth set out to capture the aesthetics of the best journals of the past. A quote from the Mathematical Typography paper I linked above (https://websites.umich.edu/~millerpd//docs/501_Winter13/Knut...):
> At this point I regretfully stopped submitting papers to the American Mathematical Society, since the finished product was just too painful for me to look at. Similar fluctuations of typographical quality have appeared recently in all technical fields, especially in physics where the situation has gotten even worse.
Frankly, I think the "replace art by technology" impression is a very shallow one, that I alluded to earlier. When Knuth wrote his “The Concept of a Meta-Font” in a journal (Visible Language) mostly read by designers/typographers, many of them wrote letters in response (https://shreevatsa.net/tex/metafont/concept#reactions). What you can see is that the best of them were supportive (even bringing up new points like how it could be useful in educating the next generation of font designers), but some were sharply critical, more or less resenting this intrusion of technology into their art medium. But now a few decades later, basically all fonts are distributed and stored digitally anyway, except that (without METAFONT) the shapes of letters are now basically just stored as binary blobs / sequences of numbers, without any METAFONT-like understanding of typographically relevant quantities like (say) x-height, comma depth, slab thickness, etc. Which one is truer to the art?
(Not a rhetorical question BTW: as in the Bigelow/Southall quote above, one could say that Knuth's approach is to achieve typographical/artistic excellence through understanding, but the artistic approach is visual and intuitive without a cognitive component. But this is a different complaint from the "replace art by technology" take.)
(BTW apart from the default Computer Modern fonts designed by Knuth, who based them on earlier Monotype fonts, almost all fonts used by people with TeX too are designed by font designers, not computer scientists.)
[1]: Related quote from Knuth (sorry paraphrasing from memory): “People say that the best way to understand something is to teach it. I say no: the best way to understand something is to teach it to a computer.” But then again he has also said: "Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do."
I had a slightly different reaction, though I'm only going by what I read in this thread. It wasn't to replace art with technology for everyone, but to scratch a personal itch. He liked the artist-made typography just fine, but it was going away regardless and that was demotivating to him. I think this is in the finest tradition of hacks, even if it took decades.
Your annoyance is understandable, but it's worth remembering: he is not your slave. He does not exist to do things for you. His providing you with something good for a time does not obligate him to provide it to you forever. Because he is not your slave.
Some smaller doses of friction include not putting icons of entertaining apps on home screen or removing such apps entirely and e.g. using a browser if you need a particular service. Making sure unlock requires entering a (long) code. Making the colour scheme dull, maybe B&W mode. Removing notification permissions as much as possible. Turning off notifications on lock screen.
These stories usually have some non-trivial factor that is missing in the article. In this case there's a small visible red flag: the two tourists are British but traveling on B visas, rather than using the visa waiver program. Why? Well according the DHS they both have multi-year overstays in the US.
This doesn't justify the detention they went through. But it also means the lesson of the story is not "random tourists are being detained".
The article clearly says only Bill had overstayed, not Karen. "Bill’s US visa had expired; Karen’s had not.".
The B2 visa seems to be because the length of the trip exceeded the ESTA limit, "over two months", perhaps the original plan had been for a longer trip.
The Guardian article linked has chosen to omit material facts regarding Karen... This is par for the course when it comes to Guardian reporting and doubly so for immigration related articles. The Guardian only prints hit pieces nowadays that reinforce their group-think propaganda.
>What the media won’t tell you: this woman was BANNED from our country for 10 years for violating terms of her visa.
Here are the facts:
Karen Newton has violated the laws of our nation, and overstayed her visa waiver admission for almost FOUR years after visiting her spouse. Her husband, William Newton ALSO broke the law for nearly 20 years by overstaying an H-1B visa.
The Biden Administration granted her a tourist visa, and she traveled to the U.S. under this visa and was let into our nation.
When she and her husband attempted to cross the Canadian border, they did not have proper paperwork for their vehicle and were denied entry into Canada. During her inspection re-entering the U.S., she was unable to provide clear details about her situation, including her husband’s legal status.
Given her history of overstays, her husband’s unlawful presence, and the vehicle documentation issues, officers determined scrutiny and detention were warranted under the law and she was detained.
Texcraft is an attempt to re-implement TeX with a modular/LLVM software architecture. These UIs take the same code in Texcraft that has identical behavior to TeX, and illustrates some of the inner workings of TeX. The lig/kern one is missing instructions :)
I have also found at least one bug in Knuth's TeX recently and am currently writing it up.
reply