On Fri, 30 May 2008, Maurício wrote:
Hi,
Just because I'm curious: how could a typesetting system like TeX be if it was created today? I've tried google and wikipedia, and all I found different from TeX is a system called 'Lout', but it seems dead.
There is ant http://ant.berlios.de/, but it is supposed to be saner form of TeX (in terms of source code, and easy of configuration) which was developed from scratch. The user interface is quite similar to TeX. I do not know much about the internal differences between Ant and TeX.
Does anyone knows about novel or interesting ideas that could be used if we would write a new typesetting system from scratch?
River detection, which is done by ant, but not by TeX. Also since the computers now are more powerful, I think that doing page breaking on a global manner (or atleast by looking two three pages down, rather than just the current page), will make certain things (like long mathematical forumlas, and complex footnotes) appear nicely without a lot of manual tweaking. Aditya