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Digital Typography in the New Millennium: Flexible Documents by a Flexible Engine Digital Typography in the New Millennium: Flexible Documents by a Flexible Engine Christos KK Loverdos Department of Informatics and Telecommunications University of Athens TYPA Buildings, Panepistimioupolis GR-157 84 Athens Greece [email protected] Apostolos Syropoulos Greek TEX Friends Group 366, 28th October Str. GR-671 00 Xanthi Greece [email protected] Abstract The TEX family of electronic typesetters is the primary typesetting tools for the preparation of demanding documents, and have been in use for many years. However, our era is characterized, among others, by Unicode, XML and the in- troduction of interactive documents. In addition, the Open Source movement, which is breaking new ground in the areas of project support and development, enables masses of programmers to work simultaneously. As a direct consequence, it is reasonable to demand the incorporation of certain facilities to a highly mod- ular implementation of a TEX-like system. Facilities such as the ability to extend the engine using common scripting languages (e.g., Perl, Python, Ruby, etc.) will help in reaching a greater level of overall architectural modularity. Obviously, in order to achieve such a goal, it is mandatory to attract a greater programming audience and leverage the Open Source programming community. We argue that the successful TEX-successor should be built around a microkernel/exokernel ar- chitecture. Thus, services such as client-side scripting, font selection and use, out- put routines and the design and implementation of formats can be programmed as extension modules. In order to leverage the huge amount of existing code, and keep document source compatibility, the existing programming interface is demonstrated to be just another service/module. 1 Introduction Open Source movement, which, in turn, borrowed The first steps towards computer typesetting took ideas and practices from the Unix world. Furthe- place in the 1950s, but it was not until Donald E. more, the development of TEX and its companion system, METAFONT, had made obvious the need for Knuth introduced TEX in 1978 [16] that true quality was brought to software-based typesetting. The his- properly documented programs. This, in turn, ini- tiated Knuth’s creation of the literate programming tory of TEX is well-known and the interested reader is referred to [16] for more details. program development methodology. This method- ology advances the idea that the program code and Today, the original TEX is a closed project in the sense that its creator has decided to freeze its documentation should be intermixed and developed development. As a direct consequence no other pro- simultaneously. The source code of T X and METAFONT be- grams are allowed to be called TEX. In addition, E the freely available source code of the system was a ing freely available has had enormous consequences. major step on the road towards the formation of the Anyone can not only inspect the source code, but Preprints for the 2004 Annual Meeting 3 Christos KK Loverdos and Apostolos Syropoulos also experiment freely with it. Combined with TEX’s plexity should be tackled with an emphasis on ab- (primitive, we should note, but quite effective for the straction that will eventually lead to increased pro- time) ability to extend itself, this led to such suc- ductivity, as is shown in the following figure: cess stories as LATEX and its enormous supporting requires increases codebase, in the form of packages. As a direct con- Complexity - Abstraction - Productivity sequence of the fact that the source code is frozen, ¨ ¨ ¨ stability was brought forth. Note that this was ex- TEX’s© programming language© is more or less an© actly the intention Knuth had when developing his “assembly language” for electronic typesetting. It systems. A common referred-to core, unchanged in is true that higher level constructs can be made— the passing of time and almost free of bugs, offered macros and macro packages built on top of that. But a “secure” environment to produce with and even the essence remains the same. Although it is true experiment with. that TEX is essentially bug free and its macro ex- However, in an everchanging world, especially pansion facility behaves the way it is specified (i.e., in the fast-paced field of computer science, almost as defined in [9]), it still remains a fact that it takes anything must eventually be surpassed. And it is a non-specialist quite some time to fully understand the emerging needs of each era that dictate possible the macro expansion rules in spite of Knuth’s initial future directions. TEX has undoubtedly served its intentions [12, page 6]. purpose well. Its Turing-completeness has been a The fact that one should program in the lan- most powerful asset/weapon in the battles for and of guage of his/her choice is just another reason for evolution. Yet, the desired abstraction level, needed moving away from a low-level language. And it to cope with increasing complexity, has not been is true that we envision an environment where as reached. Unfortunately, with TEX being bound to a many programmers as possible can—and the most fixed core, it cannot be reached. important, wish to—contribute. In the era of the Furthermore, the now widely accepted user-un- Open Source revolution, we would like to attract friendliness of TEX as a language poses another ob- the Open Source community and not just a few dedi- stacle to TEX’s evolution. It has created the myth cated low-level developers. Open Source should also of those few, very special and quite extraordinary mean, in our opinion, “open possibilities” to evolve “creatures”1 able to decrypt and produce code frag- the source. This is one of our major motivations ments such as the following:2 for reengineering the most successful typesetting en- \def\s@vig{{\EO@m=\EO@n gine. \divide\EO@n by20 \relax \ifnum\EO@n>0\s@vig\fi Richard Palais, the founding chairman of TUG, \EO@k=\EO@n\relax pointed out back in 1992 [12, page 7] that when \multiply\EO@k by-20\relax \advance\EO@m by \EO@k\relax developing TEX, Knuth \global\advance\EO@l by \@ne \expandafter\xdef\csname EO@d\@roman{\EO@l}\endcsname{% . had NSF grant support that not only provided \ifnum\EO@m=0\noexpand\noexpand\EOzero him with the time and equipment he needed, but \else\expandafter\noexpand also supported a team of devoted and brilliant \expandafter\csname EO\@roman{\EO@m}\endcsname\fi} \expandafter\@rightappend graduate students who did an enormous amount \csname EO@d\@roman{\EO@l}\endcsname of work helping design and write the large quan- \t@\epi@lmecDigits}} tity of ancillary software needed to make the TEX Of course, to be fair, programmers in several system work . languages (C and Perl among others) are often ac- and immediately after this, he poses the fundamen- cused of producing ununderstandable code and the tal question: well-known obfuscated code contests just prove it. On the other hand, with the advent of quite so- Where will the resources come from what will have to be at least an equally massive effort? And phisticated assemblers, today one can even write will the provider of those resources be willing, at well-structured assembly language, adhering even to the end of the project, to put the fruits of all his “advanced” techniques/paradigms, such as object- effort in the Public Domain? oriented programming. Naturally, this should not The answer seems obvious now. The way has been lead to the conclusion that we should start writing paved by the GNU/Linux/BSD revolutionary devel- in assembly (again)! In our opinion, software com- opment model, as has been explained crystal clearly 1 The second author may be regarded as one of Gandalf’s in The Cathedral and the Bazaar [15]. famuli, while the first author is just a Hobbit, wishing to have This paper is an attempt to define a service- been an Elf. 2 Taken from the documentation of the epiolmec package oriented architecture for a future typesetting en- by the second author. gine, which will be capable of modular evolution. 4 Preprints for the 2004 Annual Meeting Digital Typography in the New Millennium: Flexible Documents by a Flexible Engine We take a layered approach of designing some core documentation is of course specified in the TEX no- functionality and then define extensible services on tation. Although the TEX source is structured in a top of the core. The engine is not restricted to a monolithic style, its architecture provides for some specific programming language either for its basic/ kind of future evolution. bootstrapping implementation or, even more impor- First, TEX can be “extended” by the construc- tant, for its future enhancement. At the same time, tion of large collections of macros that are simply we are bound to provide a 100% TEX-compatible called formats. Each format can be transformed to a environment, as the only means of supporting the quickly loadable binary form, which can be thought vast quantity of existing TEX-based documents. We of as a primitive form of the module concept. intend to achieve such a goal by leveraging the pro- Also, by the prescient inclusion of the \special posed architecture’s own flexibility. Specifically, a primitive command, TEX provides the means to ex- TEX compatibility mode is to be supported and it press things beyond its built-in “comprehension”. should give complete “trip-test” compliance. Later For example, TEX knows absolutely nothing about on, we shall see that this compatibility is divided PostScript graphics, yet by using \special and with into two parts: source code compatibility and inter- the appropriate driver program (e.g., dvips), Post- nal core compatibility.
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