I agree that it's odd that the text-markup systems haven't been more widely discussed. Some of it may be timing: in their heyday of only a decade or so between the phototypesetting era and the DTP era, there wasn't much time for markup technology to get much of a foothold. And once the Mac/PageMaker combo came along, the markup systems could never be more than a tiny niche market.

Markup systems imply a certain amount of programming, or at least an understanding of text processing. That's pretty far away from most designers' experience, and perhaps requires a lot more explanation than the history writers want to spend on what seems to be a dead market. (Although ironically, the entire web design field is based on much of the same markup languages.)

In fact, I think you'll find that very little information about phototypesetting is mentioned in the histories, either. It's usually glossed over in generic terms, as a stopgap between letterpress and digital.

I did dig up my copy of Richard Rubinstein's Digital Typography, published in 1988, and found that he describes details and provides examples of several markup systems, including TeX, troff (or other RUNOFF descendents), as well as PostScript and other page description languages.

As an old-time user of troff-like systems (I once wrote a troff clone for a Royal laser printer, circa 1984), and a sometime-user of TeX systems, I'd have to count most of markup technology as a good pioneering try, but in the end either too specific or too technical to make much of a difference in typographic history. As you mention, troff, TeX, and to some extent Scribe has been used in the CS community for typesetting of papers and books. However, I believe these markup systems have been used primarily for more functional reasons, rather than reasons of typographic quality, including:

1. Restricting texts to being formatted in a house style.
2. Representing mathematical formulas in an acceptable notation.
3. Being "programmable," in terms of being a tool in a batch-oriented process run automatically.

These reasons are quite valid in their context. But if you look at TeX without math formatting, you find an obscure system with odd formatting defaults that only does decent typography with a lot of work. Troff is even more basic, with little to no typographic control, as you mentioned. Scribe had interesting potential, but was sold off and apparently abandoned long before its time in the limelight. (Brian Reid once worked for my father, I think just before Brian wrote Scribe.)

Perhaps later histories will revise the view that all digital typography started with the Mac. But I'm not certain that the message will be that the earlier digital typography had been so unfairly pushed under the mat.

--John

Markup systems imply a certain amount of programming, or at least an understanding of text processing. That’s pretty far away from most designers’ experience…

I don’t think that markup systems or programming are too bad: I know plenty of designers who deal with XHTML, CSS, and Javascript/Action script on a regular basis. But most of them don’t want to deal with anything as obtuse as TeX, as it’s just a pain in the butt, designed with mathematicians and CS geeks in mind.

No use complaining Jim, you should remedy the situation and state your case in the various media which are unaware of the improtance of your genre. A magazine article for eye or Print, a book for Hyphen, a talk at ATypI. Do you have a collection of exemplary scientific/technical typography? Is there a TeX awards competiton?

I'm not a designer as such, but rather an author who also designs. So, from a strictly design point of view, I can see how Tex may not be ideal. But from an author's point of view, Tex is more useful than anything else that I've used for document creation. A large chunk of that usability derives from the fact that I can create tex files which can be typeset, converted to online formats, and manipulated in many other ways. One of the problems I had with my early books (e.g. rosslaird.info/grain/ ) was that once the design was completed using InDesign, the text was pretty much set into that format, and it was quite difficult to extract material in such a way that the extraction (e.g. for web excerpts) was seamless and standards compliant. Futzing around between InDesign and standards-compliant html (not to mention css) has not, in my experience, been very fun. But Tex obviates all that. I simply create my documents in plain text, using ReStructured Text or something similar, then run the text through LaTeX and whatever other automated process I want, so that at the end I have Tex, html (with css), or whatever. From a document management point of view this is perfect: transportable, centralized, simple.

I have not used XeTex, but I do use all of my OpenType fonts with Tex. And as far as typesetting goes, the Tex algorithm is/was (I think) the basis for the algorithms used in current software such as InDesign. I am not an expert in this area, but I have never heard anyone say that Tex typography is inferior to any other system. Usually what I hear is that it is superior (but that may just be geek-speak). Sure, Tex requires knowledge of the markup; but actually not too much, and these days most people who are involved with the production of fine documents (for the web or elsewhere) are familiar with markup.

I suppose much of this boils down to familiarity, workflow, and interface. I've used pretty much everything available since 1986, and my preference, overall, is for Tex. But as I said, design is only one part of what I do, so for those whose main gig is design, Tex may not be ideal. (I'm thinking here of fixed documents that will not be required to have online versions, for example.) But for me, I appreciate Tex's way of preserving the plain text and using it with great flexibility. And the output looks great too.

Ross

I think that the main problem with TeX, and its variants, is that it has become somewhat trapped in a vicious circle. It is widely perceived as only being for suitable for writing scientific/mathematical papers with a result that only scientists and mathematicians tend to use it. This also means that most of the books and websites written about it tend to come from that angle which can put people off who are from the arts side of things. This is quite unfortunate, as TeX does produce very good looking documents and, once one has got to grips with it, it is relatively easy to use. Indeed, I don't use anything else for my day-to-day work and hate it when I am forced to do something on Microsoft Word or Open Office.

I think that where the TeX and the Document Preparation Systems are particularly strong is not as a replacement for DTP software but as a replacement for a word-processor. Therefore their target market is unlikely to be designers for whom DTP software offers WYSIWYG control.

As I see it, the great advantage of TeX is that one can just type the document, without worrying at all about formatting, and then have TeX automatically convert that into something that could quite acceptably be published. Whilst DTP software gives the designer finer control, I certainly wouldn't like using InDesign every time I write a letter.

A good example of where I think TeX is particularly useful if if one works in a field where documents with numbered paragraphs are the norm. Getting a word processor to do this accurately is a complete pain, unless one has preprepared the document and I think the same applies to most DTP (though I'm not an InDesign expert). With TeX, it is simply a case of putting two lines of code at the top of the document. Then you can forget about it, knowing that no matter how much you mess around with and revise the document, the numbers will always be right!

There are few difficulties (some historic) that I think are unfortunate:

1) Sticking my neck on the line a bit, I think that plain TeX is now much more intuitive for most people to use than LaTeX, despite the common perception of the opposite. LaTeX very much forces the user into using the LaTeX "house style", which although results in good looking documents, requires quite a lot of hackery to change. Plain TeX, gives the user more of a blank sheet from which to work. Since the advent of Word Processors and the like this much less of a problem than it was in the early 80s: most people are now quite comfortable with deciding what their section headings and the like should look like and the LaTeX defaults can somewhat get in the way.

2) Computer Modern is, ermm..., interesting as a default typeface choice!

3) The learning curve is still near vertical...For example, the two lines of code I was talking about above are:

\newcount\parnumber \parnumber =0
\everypar{\advance\parnumber by1 \the\parnumber. }

I think XeTeX, ConTeXt and LyX are, however, helping alleviate these. I especially think that if LyX could produce "purer" TeX and then strapped onto XeTeX (which has excellent OpenType support and avoids all of the old font problems associated with TeX), then its popularity would increase a lot.

-Jacob

Computer Modern was a bit of a no brainer, as "Modern" had been the main type used for scientific and academic documents for 150 years.
All the sorts are well established.
It is actually very "disambiguous" for things like math, as its complex forms enable great distinction between all kinds of glyphs. For instance, the pot-hook serifs on the italic prevent entanglement of superior and inferior letters with numbers in complex formulae--an advantage that becomes apparent when comparing with the ClearType math font.

Jacob;

Thanks for the clarification. That's what I thought you meant. Though, I find more and more that with tools such as auctex/emacs I can get two windows side by side -- one with the tex file and one with the pdf -- and have instant updating from one to the other. That's pretty cool -- but yes, when I design a poster, I don't use Tex.

I am thinking of switching to xetex. Many people seem to be doing so, and although it's very early in development, it seems to be getting lots of attention.

Ross

TeX Users Group will be participating in Google's Summer of Code. Details at http://www.tug.org .