Dear Paul -- Thank you for your spirited defence of Heiko, which is accepted in the spirit in which it was made. I, too, have the greatest respect for Heiko's work (indeed, it is only a a short time since I said I had considered nominating him for the non-existent position of vice-Grand-Wizard of TeX, for his ingenuity and creativity [1]), but that does not, and will not, stop me from challenging him when I believe that he is wrong. Wrong, for example, in tacitly suggesting that ä, ö, ü, ß, ł, ę not letters but rather "arbitrary rubbisch" or "funny stuff"; wrong in suggesting that my mail client does not send UTF-8 but rather ISO-8859-1 (when my mail client was doing his mail client the courtesy of responding in kind, rather than sending UTF-8 to a client that itself converts UTF-8 into ISO-8859-1 and mangles l-bar and e-ogonek in the process). None of these challenges are in the least disrespectful : rather, they are in the normal tradition of forceful academic debate. And when I added a throw-away line to the effect that Heiko, as well as Adobe, need to put US ASCII behind them and move into the 21st Century (as DEK did in 1990, after FMi and others made representations to him concerning the need for TeX to support a character set that include at least the basic Western diacritics), again there is no disrespect, either explicit or implied. I am sure that Heiko was not offended, and if he was, he has full access to my personal mailbox and is welcome at any time to complain if he feels that I have failed to show the respect he clearly deserves.
** Phil. -------- [1] I am /seriously/ impressed, and was about to nominate you Date: Sat, 08 Oct 2011 21:48:54 +0100 From: "Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd)" <p.tay...@rhul.ac.uk> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:6.0.2) Gecko/20110902 SeaMonkey/2.3.3 To: tex...@tug.org Subject: Re: [texhax] testing if a control sequence is primitive In-Reply-To: <20111008201332.ga8...@oberdiek.my-fqdn.de> I am /seriously/ impressed, and was about to nominate you for the post of vice-Grand Wizard of TeX (no salary, I am afraid), when I thought to try the following : \Test \newif Philip Taylor -------- Heiko Oberdiek wrote : -------- Paul A Norman wrote:
I have personally had to look at depth at times at some of Heiko's packages and have the greatest respect for what he dies in trying to make the whole lot work together well across all the international standards and other difficult bits which are on no standard at present and feel that he and the others involved deserve our greatfulness, respect and honour for the work that they do. So I see these kind of perhaps cavalier and personally directed remarks as counter productive - Heiko does not make the standard(s) but has done a tremendously enormous amount to make everything work for everyone- working with the very difficultidiosyncrasies of what is on the International stage at present. "Now we clearly need to start on Adobe (and Heiko !). < I can not even see that in good humour and really believe it is needless waste of a genuine hard working developer's time to be singled out in that manner for no real purpose as far as I can discern - other than perhaps making the writer feel self important? Paul On 3 November 2011 01:21, Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd) <p.tay...@rhul.ac.uk <mailto:p.tay...@rhul.ac.uk>> wrote: Ross Moore wrote: My advice is simply that if you restrict yourself to ASCII letters, then you will not face any difficulties. This is pure pragmatism; nothing less. As was Knuth's decision to base TeX on US-ASCII. Fortunately, FMi and others were able to convince him that he was wrong, whence TeX 3. Now we clearly need to start on Adobe (and Heiko !). ** Phil. ------------------------------__-------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/__listinfo/xetex <http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex> -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
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