\title{Malcolm's Gleanings}
\author[Malcolm Clark]{Malcolm Clark\\
\texttt{m.clark@warwick.ac.uk}}
\begin{Article}
\section{Whom the gods would destroy\dots} 
At a recent (networking) conference I received a pamphlet about an
organisation named Dante (Delivery of Advanced Networking Technology
to Europe). What or whom do you associate with this name? Naturally I
think first of Dante Alighieri and his romance with Beatrice, then the
firm who presses my favourite extra virgin olive oil, and lastly our
German sister \TeX\ organisation. I was therefore fascinated to hear a
bit of unsupported scurrilous gossip which maintained that the German
\textsc{Dante} were challenging this new network organisation to change its
name --- presumably to avoid any possible confusion. This story is
probably untrue. Another piece of unsupported news was that \textsc{Dante} was
reluctant to support Haralambous' and Plaice's Omega project since it
was thought to compete with NTS. Such a sad and blinkered view is
clearly not worthy of the largest \TeX\ organisation in Europe, which
boasts openly of its financial health. This gossip must therefore be
malicious and\slash or mischievous. Expunge it from your minds!

\section{Garnered gleanings}
In a flier headed \emph{Quality without compromise} the Royal
Society announces its intention of using \TeX\ to handle papers for
\emph{Proceedings: Mathematical and Physical Sciences}. The plan
seems to be to encourage authors to submit \TeX\ files on disk. Wonder
why they don't get an email link? A positive intention is to reduce
publication times, with a `fast stream' time of only 15 months. I'm
sure we wish them luck.

And in the Royal Statistical Society's \emph{News} the virtues of
the 4\TeX\ CD is extolled, and is given a `best buy' rating. Allan
Reese (for it was he) omits to reveal how one might obtain this gem
(albeit flawed), and more important, misses an opportunity to bring
this group to the attention of those purveyors of lies and damn lies.

\section{Chimes at midnight} 
I have a weakness for the late Orson Welles. I doubt if there is any
of his work that I can say that I didn't enjoy to some (positive)
extent. Even his last rambling and chaotic film, \emph{Don Quixote},
has moments of poetry and grace which provide echoes with his youthful
output. There is an obvious identification between Quixote and Welles.
The film was a labour of love which spanned something like twenty
years, and absorbed the proceeds of less `honourable' projects, like
those sherry ads. In the end, it was unfinished, andit was his
widow(?) who completed the film. To adopt the mantle of the venerable
Don is a perilous undertaking, and perhaps the relative lack of
success that Welles enjoyed in the latter part of his career was a
response to this identification. What then can we expect for another
who has adopted this same mantle, Don Hosek? Don, or as he is now,
D~A~Hosek, is the prime mover of \emph{Quixote Digital Typography} (I
suspect he \emph{is} the entirety of QDT\dots). The latest venture of
QDT is \emph{Serif} (sub-titled \emph{The Magazine of Type \&
  Typography}). This is a quarterly magazine, and so far I have seen
only the inaugural issue which was published late in 1994.

What is \emph{Serif} about? I've lost the prospectus (which was
interesting enough to encourage me to part with some money for a
subscription), so we depend on the contents to guide us. Oddly there is
no manifesto or statement of aims in the magazine. The contents include
discussions of typefaces, analogue and digital, a taxonomy of
letterforms, examination of the output of some contemporary foundries,
book reviews\dots\ On the whole quite varied and potentially
different. QDT has managed to acquire a number of quite
notable type-people to contribute: Robert Bringhurst (who I hadn't
heard of as a typographer, despite an excellent pedigree, but who I
recall as a poet), Charles Bigelow (probably known to \TeX ies under
the guise of `Bigelow and Holmes', joint creators of Lucida), Gunnar
Swanson (a frequent contributor to the \texttt{typo-l} list server),
and of course, Don Hosek himself.

I have to admit I found the contributions hard to thole. There was an
air of introspective, insider exclusivity which I found frankly
irritating. The whole thing came across as either precious or
precocious. Take for example the insistence of describing Trump
Medieval as Trump Medi\"eval. In German it is often necessary to
indicate a `missing' `a' with a dieresis or umlaut. It isn't needed in
English where both medieval and mediaeval are acceptable (according to
the OED). Nor is this a form used by either Linotype or Monotype in
their catalogues. So why use it here, unless as a form of snobbery?
Maybe I'm just irredeemably ignorant. So much read like Irene Handl's
famous send up of a Critics' Forum, although I would change her quote
from `there was a certain ragged earnestness, combined with a subtlety,
about it, which I found irresistible' to `entirely resistible', and I'm
uncertain about the subtlety.  Maybe that's it: maybe it \emph{is} a
send up --- but how elaborate. No, I suspect that we are being expected
to take it earnestly.

Probably there is much good stuff here (although I'd take issue with
describing photography as `modern' in 1890: the daguerreotype dates
from 1839, and the glass negative from 1851), but it seems designed to
impress rather than to inform. But who is it intended to impress? It
can't be those with merely a passing interest in type: it must be those
devoured by the subject --- are there enough of them, and will they
read this? Typographers (in a wide sense) are just as pig-headed and
opinionated as the rest of us, perhaps even more so, and one could
easily see factional in-fighting developing between them.

An interesting feature of the magazine is that it is set entirely in
\TeX. Don did discuss and demonstrate some of the techniques he used to
achieve this at last year's TUG conference in Santa Barbara (a most
excellent talk). But: I do notice a few infelicities --- not to do with
\TeX\ particularly, but to do with proof reading. There is one \TeX\
failing however: there are far too many hyphens. Three successive
hyphens are not uncommon, but the maximum number in a row (or at the
end of a row) was at least~5. This occurs in a paragraph of~23 lines,
where there are, in total, 10~hyphens. Let's be entirely fair and
note that the magazine is set double column, with a measure of about
35--38 characters. That is fairly short: we are talking about 8~words
to the line.  Hyphens can be tweaked by appropriate loading of the
right parameters, but I think this demonstrates that \TeX's line
breaking algorithm is not actually as good as we claim it is. Working
with lines of the length that Knuth uses in the \TeX book, it is
possible to minimise hyphens and to ensure that successive hyphens are
rare. Working with narrow measure, \TeX\ all too often throws up
its hands and rolls over on its back.  Still on hyphenation, I found
\mbox{coor-dinates} rather unexpected. There are also a couple of
widow lines which could have been avoided, but this I suspect has more
to do with proofing than \TeX. Otherwise we have both Morris' and
Morris's, `teh' for `the' (not uncommon, but even a spell checker finds
this), Updikes' (who was this man Updikes? is he related to Updike?)
and the odd \mbox{`e nd'} (again easy to find with a spell checker).

I'll be interested to see what the next few issues bring, but right at
this moment I'm not too sanguine. Maybe if I knew why the issue was
dedicated to St Therese of Lisieux (no accents this time) I would be
enlightened. I just hope we shouldn't be lighting candles to St Jude.

\section{Message in a bottle} \TUB\ 15(2) arrived some time before
Christmas, looking thin and wan at about 70~pages. I have bemoaned the
late arrival of \TUB\ in this column before. Daily I await the other
two promised editions for~1994. One will be the conference proceedings,
but I suspect the other normal issue will also be thin and
weedy. I tried raising the issue of the timeliness of \TUB\ at the TUG
AGM at Aston in~1993, to have the discussion turned round by Phil
Taylor who viewed any criticism of \TUB\ as a criticism of its editor,
the inestimable Barbara Beeton.  Better to have it high quality but
late I was told, and the audience applauded.  I despair. If \TeX\ is a
production quality tool then we have to explain the non-appearance of
\TUB\ very carefully. A few years ago, when \TUB\ was similarly late,
rumours started to circulate that TUG itself had gone out
of existence. This warning was obviously not enough. Perhaps the
changes in editorial policy noted in this issue will eventually
overcome the scheduling difficulties.


There were a few gems however: the report of the NTS (New Typesetting
System) comprises ten (canonical?) points. One discusses the logo they
should use.  As I think Thora Hird used to say, `get the shoes right,
and everything else falls into place'. Sebastian was right: `a pox on a
logos'. And apparently the \LaTeX3 project team has decided that
\LaTeXe\ is \LaTeX, and \LaTeX\ is \LaTeX209. I'm reminded of the
venerable Leslie Lamport's wisdom on the pronunciation of \LaTeX\ (or
was that \LaTeX209?) `\dots\ best determined by usage, not
fiat'. Continuing a fairly recent tradition, \TUB\ also contains
abstracts of other \TeX\ journals, including these very same Annals. I
find these \emph{Gleanings} occupying an inordinate amount of space,
perhaps because it is easier to summarise trivia than substance.

\section{What next?}  Since TUG moved its offices to Santa Barbara
there have been earthquakes and floods. The Los Angeles earthquake of
94 didn't do much damage locally --- only a few more cracks in the
building TUG inhabits. The floods earlier this year did affect SB quite
badly, although again the TUG office survived. Maybe the Tugboat notion
wasn't so bad after all. As for plague --- well, phylloxera is endemic
in the Napa Valley. Were I in philosophical mood, I might see
these events as an allegory on TUG itself.

\end{Article}
\endinput
\section{Morphic resonances} By one of those amazing coincidences, the
meeting held by the group in January this year on SGML, Acrobat and
\TeX\ was closely paralleled by a similarly titled meeting held by
\textsc{Gut}enberg. This isn't the first time we have independently
come up with very similar themes for meetings (the \LaTeXe\ meetings
occurred about the same time too). The easy answer to why this should
be is that they are the relatively hot subjects of the time. No
collusion at all, although maybe our editor's frequent trips to Geneva
to talk to Michel Goossens (President of \textsc{Gut}enberg) could
explain a lot.\footnote{`Talk'? Honest hard labour, he means --- Editor.}

