Mint Is Not TeX

mint.ubavic.rs

28 points·ubavic··5 comments

With all the @ symbols, it reminds me a lot of Lout.

Unfortunately, Lout never really took off, but I have fond memories of it. I liked it more than LaTeX, too.

[0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Lout

That is something I accidentally discovered. TexInfo also uses @.

Texinfo ultimately gets the @ convention from Brian Reid's Scribe[1], as developed at Carnegie Mellon during the late 70s and commercialized by Unilogic[2,3] in the 80s. Coincidentally, there was a close derivative of Scribe called Mint[4], also developed at Carnegie Mellon in the early 80s for the PERQ (an early personal workstation competing in the category of things like the Sun-1 or Lisp Machines).

[1] https://bitsavers.org/pdf/cmu/scribe/Scribe_Introductory_Use... [2] https://bitsavers.org/pdf/unilogic/Scribe_Document_Productio... [3] https://bitsavers.org/pdf/unilogic/Scribe_Pocket_Reference.p... [4] http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/cmu/spice/Users_Manual_for_Mint...

same, I used to use it to add PDF generation to my small projects because it was really easy to synthesise and output lout

What about Typst? Looks to me as a valid TeX successor with a streamlined syntax and much better programming abilities without the limitations of 1977/1982.

Typst is on my list, I wanted to have a look at this year, but unfortunately no time and no need. Except for one letter every one or two years I did not use LaTeX since my diploma thesis.

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