The Errors of TeX [pdf] (1989)

I too kept a log of my errors in the 1980's, hoping to become a better C programmer. I imagined that with careful enough reflection, I would never make the same mistake twice.

I found the log many years later. Last entry: "Forgot to eat. Got sick."

Ok. Knuth makes mistakes, nice to know. Let's read about them. Oh, he categorizes them nicely.

WAIT A MINUTE HE HAS A LIST OF CATEGORIES FROM A-T THAT ARE NAMED TO COINCIDE WITH THE LETTER!

And they alliterate!

While not an article, a more recent listing (current as of 15 January 2021) is:

https://ctan.math.washington.edu/tex-archive/info/knuth-pdf/...

and he also keeps track of errors in his books:

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/books.html

and issues certificates for the Bank of the Island of San Seriffe for finding them (used to be physical checks --- I got one for an error and a minor point of improvement in his book on _Digital Typography_).

While enjoying that read, I kept thinking along the way "I wish the original TeX source of this PDF were available somewhere as I'd love to see this rendered for my high resolution display the way Knuth intended."

Why is it that pretty much everything Knuth writes is wildly detailed but yet, somehow, deeply engaging?

Maybe I'm such a fan because of many great experiences with tex (and latex). The output is just so beautiful. And the notation (once you get used to the backslashes etc) is so clean.

But, heck, I got hooked when I studied Figure 12 of [1], as an undergraduate leafing through a math journal. At first, I thought "what's wrong with this nutcase, those "s" letters all look fine to me". Then I started to see differences. And then some looked ugly. That one in the middle, though, looked better and better, the more I studied the figure. Pretty soon, I was hooked.

1. Knuth, Donald E. “Mathematical Typography.” Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (N.S.) 1, no. 2 (March 1979): 337–72.