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kjellsbells 4 hours ago

I used to wonder how likely it was that the printers made some typesetting errors. Who among us could, say, type a thousand pages of APL symbols without introducing a bug?

WillAdams 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There's a reason mathematics was known as "penalty copy" and was notoriously difficult to typeset and even more difficult to turn a profit on.

For a deep dive into both ends of that, see the history of publication of Knuth's TAoCP where the text was originally published traditionally by setting metal type on a composition machine (to the extent possible), then compositors would add the additional characters and spacing material necessary to compose the equations and so forth so as to lay out a galley (which would then be proofed/corrected) --- a successive edition was then typeset using an early imagesetter, which looked so ghastly that DEK considered giving up, but when informed that the imagesetter was controlled by a computer declared, "I am a computer scientist, I can fix that." and expected to knock out a typesetting system over his next sabbatical....

Roughly a decade later, TeX 1.0 was released.... the current version is 3.141592653 (with new versions adding another decimal place as the version tends towards \pi) --- while we're still waiting on the full publication of Vol. 4, it is widely considered that TeX was worth the delay.

inigyou 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

apocryphally a typesetter saw "make x as small as possible" at the end of a math problem to be typeset, and did exactly that

taneq an hour ago | parent [-]

“Find x” <— here it is!