[texhax] WYSEEWYG Editors for LaTeX

William Adams will.adams at frycomm.com
Wed Nov 10 16:03:39 CET 2010


On Nov 9, 2010, at 3:13 PM, Paul Stanley wrote:

> What I'd like to know is why LaTeX isn't used in place of html and css on the web.

Interestingly, I asked that same question of Thomas Rokicki (author of dvips and NeXTstep's TeXView.app) at the recent TUG conference in San Francisco.

The bottom line is that Sir Tim Berners-Lee chose TextEdit.app's RTFview as the basis for his worldwideweb.app and that computers of that day simply couldn't swing the processing and storage requirements of composing TeX source on-the-fly (this was back when my NeXT Cube, a 25 MHz 68030 was considered a high-end workstation and a complex page might take tens of seconds to render and there were no free Type 1 math fonts at the time --- the donation of the CM and AMS fonts by Blue Sky and Y&Y was almost a decade in the future).

Fortunately now we have MathML, the Stix Fonts, and various tools which allow one to work towards nicely displaying equations on the web.

William

-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.




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