Re: Appreciation / Financial support

[David Kastrup]

Henning Hraban Ramm <address@hidden> writes:

> Am 2012-05-30 um 23:04 schrieb David Kastrup:
>
>> Henning Hraban Ramm <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> Some lunatics ;-) spent a lot of effort re-implementing TeX in Java,
>>> that was called "NTS" (new typsetting system);
>>
>> I would not call Karel Skoupy a lunatic.
>
> There’s a smiley. The LuaTeX team called itself lunatics
> jokingly. (lua = moon ...)
>
>>> they stopped after implementing TeX compatibility (alias "OTS" = old
>>> ts. system). I heard it was sluggish and ugly, but the team found the
>>> last bugs in TeX
>> Uh what?
>
> AFAIR, it was the NTS team that found the last official bug in
> original TeX, involving some dotted line stuff. I blurrily remember a
> talk on that event at some DANTE meeting.
> But maybe it was yourself? Couldn’t find it on the internets.

I was somewhat prominent on the last bug fixing run (2006 or
something?).  But I don't think that the "last bugs" category can be
closed while Donald Knuth is alive (once he isn't, all remaining bugs
are declared "features").

> See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Typesetting_System
>
> Maybe Taco wasn’t involved with NTS, but Hans was. (And since at least
> the ConTeXt devs are very close, I can’t imagine that Taco didn’t
> participate in NTS at all.)

Well, it must have been a really long time since he bowed out.  Don't
remember him being active in that area, and I _do_ remember some project
wrapup talks by Karel (I think that in order to do something more than
just a TeX reimplementation, he had implemented par shapes that could
deal with non-equally spaced lines).

> I don’t claim accuracy in all details. ;-)

Well, obviously I can only claim accuracy as far as my memory and "gut
feeling" reaches.

> It doesn’t really matter who did what when. I should write less and
> debug more.

Who are you telling that...

-- 
David Kastrup