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Comment by lallysingh | Hacker News Reader

ps.gz? It's 2015!

When you design and write your own typesetting system in order to publish seven volumes on "The Art of Computer Programming", you get to choose whatever format you want.

I am not sure how it is related to 2015. I actually prefer a ps file that I can render to a PDF easily instead a Javascript heavy messy website where everything is distracting you from the content. On the top of that Knuth invented Tex to be able to write scientific documentations with ease[1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX

I vastly prefer HTML with searchable text, easy copy-pasting capability, easy indexability, etc. to PDF with its outdated printed-page metaphor.

On the other hand, it's Knuth and TAOCP, so I can't really complain much.

Better for you. Not better if you're writing and publishing a book.

That's a good point.

Books.... that's what our forefathers used in the distant past, right.

HTML (that is, widely-available browsers) can't be trusted to break equations well.

Well, he has accepted electronic versions of his book. It's unfortunate that all but the pdf versions don't meet his standards:

"Note: However, I have personally approved ONLY the PDF versions of these books. Beware of glitches in the ePUB and Kindle versions, etc., which cannot be faithful to my intentions because of serious deficiencies in those alternative formats."

I prefer electronic books simply because they take zero physical space in my apartment. I do wish we could fix the issues.

To be fair, books on PDF are electronic books. Kindles don't handle them well, but tablets do.

Also, I agree with him! ePUB and Kindle markup/typesetting just don't look as good yet, and they certainly can't handle complex mathematics with any amount of grace.

> books on PDF are electronic books. Kindles don't handle them well, but tablets do.

Pdfs on current generation kindles (300dpi) look great, actually, as long as they are computer-generated. Scanned documents can be hit-or-miss, though.

Really? Last I tried, it'd display a page at a time, leaving you to scroll around. Particularly terrible with 2 column layouts like those loved for papers.

Have you tried looking at any documents that are equation heavy on your kindle?

Can it handle figures too?

Yes, and yes. The viewer automatically crops whitespace in the margins to make best use of display space. Most documents will be smaller compared to the printed version, but still very readable. Anything with the "article" style looks great. Nearly every document with more than one column needs to be reformatted though.

I suspect someone like Knuth might attract quite a bit of mail from "math cranks" [0]; this tiny little hurdle might actually discourage a few of them.

[0] https://empslocal.ex.ac.uk/people/staff/mrwatkin/isoc/crank.... (this an an excerpt from a paywalled NYT article here: http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/020999sci-ma... )

Knuth uses vanilla TeX (which he wrote, btw). Also, the typesetting on the linked text is absolutely gorgeous. It looks much nicer than most LaTeX documents that I have seen. Wouldn't mind checking out the source.

I've heard people say that TeX typesetting is so nice that people will do scientific research just so that they can publish papers using it.

You don't know much about Knuth, do you?

Not sure why the parent is getting downvoted -- the ps.gz file lacks searchable text, which is a reasonable thing to expect in 2015. But, of course, the file is freely made available by Don Knuth, so all is forgiven :)

One click to download, two double-clicks (one for the gzip, one for the PS) to open on my Mac.

http://view.samurajdata.se/

http://view.samurajdata.se/psview.php?id=1778783f&page=1

I can automate it for you... :)

I wasn't complaining that this was particularly onerous (in fact, I am always pleased how easily PostScript files open on Macs)!

On my Mac it opens directly in preview, after I clicked the link in Safari. I have not done anything for that functionality, so I'm pleased.

So what?

Use sumatraPDF + ghostscript if you're on windows

Paper is even older and people still use that.

The problem is...?

Indeed. I much prefer .txt.

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