----- Original Message -----
From: "Matthew Gates" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <lyx-users@lists.lyx.org>
Sent: Sunday, November 13, 2005 3:19 AM
Subject: Re: Pdf utilities and fonts, an off topic jot
On Sunday 13 November 2005 11:03, Stephen Harris wrote:
Probably you thought that I was going to lead up to something
profoundly philosphical ...
Two free reader/writer tools I thought appropriate for writers
who want to have other free tools in their toolbag besides LyX.
...when actually it seems all you want to do is spam us. Thanks a bunch.
You don't seem your usual witty self. Still having pagination problems?
Actually, I thought a majority of the readers would find the
post interesing. Perhaps I'm wrong, if you are respresentative.
Of course, I also think that the "Forget Windows" thread was
considerably more off topic as well as inflammatory. Come to
think of it, nearly eveyone of note thought they had something
important to contribute to the justification of that FU thread,
so perhaps an expert on documentation like youself, is right.
I could have contributed to the Forget Windows thread. There
are a hundred Windows users to every Linux user. At the moment
there are a majority of Linux Lyx users. But I think the course will
run like Emacs to Xemacs which was once a paradigm of *nix.
There are now more Windows Xemacs users than Linux users.
That will of course happen for LyX if it continues to improve.
If the LyX powers that be did not want to support this trend
it seems to me that they should not have announced an official
endorsement of Windows and released easy to use installation
software. Politically, I think that is a cross-platform decision
which does not cater to the goals/whims of *nux egocentrists.
Anyway, I thought the Foget Windows thread was spam, but
I didn't have to read it, the Subject: was descriptive enough.
I am going to express my opinion of your perception:
Title: The Concept of a Meta-Font Vol: 16.1
Author(s): Knuth, Donald E.
Abstract: A single drawing of a single letter reveals only a small part
of what was in the designer's mind when that letter was drawn. But when
precise instructions are given about how to make such a drawing, the
intelligence of that letter can be captured in a way that permits us to
obtain an infinite variety of related letters from the same specification.
Instead of merely describing a single letter, such instructions explain
how that letter would change its shape if other parameters of the design
were changed. Thus an entire font of letters and other symbols can be
specified so that each character adapts itself to varying conditions in
an appropriate way. Initial experiments with a precise language for pen
motions suggest strongly that the font designer of the future should not
simply design isolated alphabets; the challenge will be to explain exactly
how each design should adapt itself gracefully to a wide range of changes
in the specification. This paper gives examples of a meta-font and explains
the changeable parameters in its design.
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Title: Meta-Font, Metamathematics, and Metaphysics: Comments on
Donald Knuth's Article (16:1) Vol: 16.4
Author(s): Hofstadter, Douglas R.
Abstract: It is argued that readers are likely to carry away from
Donald Knuth's article "The Concept of a Meta-Font" a falsely
optimistic view of the extent to which the design of typefaces and
letterforms can be mechanized through an approach depending on
describing letterforms by specifying the setting of a large number
of parameters. Through a comparison to mathematical logic, is it
argued that no such set of parameters can capture the essence of
any semantic category. Some different way of thinking about the
problem of the "spirit" residing behind any letterforms are suggested,
connecting to current research issues in the field of artificial
intelligence.
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Douglas Hofstadter quoting philosopher and composer John Myhill:
"Myhill is bold enough to speculate as follows: "The analogue of
Godel's theorem for aesthetics would therefore be: There is no
school of art which permits the production of all beauty and
excludes the production of all ugliness." To each coin there are
two sides; and the obverse side of beauty is ugliness. By a rather
ironic coincidence, the complementary set to a productive
(or prospective) set is called, in the jargon of mathematical logic,
creative. It must be admitted that it would take a stupendously
brilliant, if perverse, sort of creativity to produce all possible
ugly objects."
"The American logician John Myhill has proposed a metaphorical extension
of the lessons that we have learned from the theorems of Godel, Church,
and Turing about the scope and limitations of logical systems. The most
accessible and quantifiable aspects of the world have the property of
being computable: There exists a definite procedure for deciding if any
given candidate either does or does not possess the required property.
Human beings can be trained to respond to the presence or absence of
this property. Truth is not in general such a property of things; being
a prime number is.
A more elusive set of properties are those that are being merely listable.
For these, we can construct a procedure that will list all the quantities
possessing the required property (even though you might have to wait an
infinite time for the listing to end), but there is no way of systematically
generating all the entities that do not possess the required property. Most
logical systems have the property of being listable but not computable: all
their theorems can be listed but there is no automatic procedure for
inspecting a statement and deciding whether or not it is a theorem.
If the mathematical world had no Godel theorem, then every property of
any system that contained arithmetic would be listable. We could write a
definite program to carry out every activity. Without the restrictions of
Turing and Church on computability, every property of the world would be
computable. The problem of deciding whether this page is an example of
grammatical English is a computable one. The words can be checked against
a reference dictionary and the grammatical constructions employed could be
checked sequentially. But the page of text could still be meaningless to a
reader who did not know English. As time passes, this reader could learn
more of the English language and more and more of the page would become
meaningful to him. But there is no way of predicting ahead of time which
bits of page they will be. The property of meaningfulness is thus listable
but not computable. On the other hand, the question of whether this page
might be something the reader might want to read in the future is a listable
but not a computable property.
Not every feature of the world is either listable or computable. For
example, the property of being a true statement is neither listable nor
computable. One can approximate the truth to greater and greater accuracy by
introducing more and more rules of reasoning and adding further axiomatic
assumptions, but it can never be captured by any finite set of rules. These
attributes that have neither the property of listability nor that of
computability--the "prospective" features of the world--are those that we
cannot recognize or generate by a series or sequence of logical steps. They
witness to the need for ingenuity and novelty; for they cannot be
encompassed by any finite collection of rules or laws. Beauty, simplicity,
truth; these are all properties that are prospective. There is no magic
formula that can be counted upon to generate all the possible varieties of
the attributes. They are never fully attainable. No program or equation can
generate all beauty or all ugliness; indeed, there is no sure way of
recognizing either of these attributes when you see them."
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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and that is the only truth ye need to
know.
Fontly ugly yours,
Stephen
