Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

Posted Feb 17, 2022 12:59 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse by excors
Parent article: Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

I think it turns out he was wrong. Nobody was asking for PDF or Unicode or OpenType support in 1990, but they became important over time, and those features had to be added in forks like e-TeX and pdfTeX and XeTeX and LuaTeX.

Remember that Knuth started TeX (and METAFONT) mostly because he was unhappy with the way his own books were being typeset. If you think of TeX as an engine for typesetting The Art of Computer Programming, it's probably fine to freeze it because at least the system is very well documented – as long as you have a way of putting black pixels onto a white sheet of paper, you'll always be able to use TeX and METAFONT to typeset Knuth's books, even if you're a space alien from the 43rd century. (I'm saying this as someone who spent quite some time developing DVI-to-device software in the late 1980s and early 1990s.)

PDF, Unicode and all that only come in if you insist on using fonts that aren't Computer Modern, or languages that aren't English. It's true that that applies to many if not most of us these days, but to be fair, it wasn't really part of the original specification. We can probably count ourselves lucky that the original system was open enough to admit that sort of radical change, and that now, 40 years after it originally came out, it is still a force to be reckoned with.