That said, and despite your yourself having mentioned that there is no excuse for the shortcomings, I feel like this decision in particular is just plain inexcusable anyway because if you're going to write portable document, at least use some form of UTF encoding rather than indexing into glyphs (or on top of !)

It was designed for a specific purpose- troubleshooting enterprise computers. And it does that job amazingly well. No more IT guy guiding me when he can just do all the clicks himself.

One technology that has stood the test of time- amazingly well designed TeX by Donald Knuth and LaTeX by Leslie Lamport.

Plain TeX can be a bit beginner unfriendly because most beginners use LaTeX and experienced people have their own 'coding style' but it's amazingly powerful.

I only wish somebody would add the minimum required primitives to plain TeX to render reflowable text in browsers and ebook readers

TeX was designed for "beautiful" typesetting but it gives you much more control than that IMHO. I'd urge everyone to try it out once, I use it offline but I think overleaf.com allows for plain TeX too. (XeTeX may work best for unicode, it's plain tex + minimal additions for Unicode)

On that note- I am not fond of PDFs because of their awfully poor unicode search support- does anybody knowledgeable know of a good target format I should use (and the appropriate drivers?)

I have personally seen people who, for example, not only use powershell (on Linux of all places) but also build tooling around it and file issues on the GitHub repo. The same people left GitHub when MS acquired it.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19776653

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