Excursus

There is a nice piece in the Stanford Magazine about Donald Knuth author of TeX and METAFONT. Frustration with the quality of mathematical typesetting and the fact that publishers were moving from manual to digital layout prompted Knuth to write TeX:

It had changed into a problem of bits, zeroes and ones. You put the one where you want ink on the page and zero where you don’t want ink. So I figured, okay, I’m good at zeroes and ones.

The motive was not merely aesthetic (though of course the output of TeX and its cousins is beautiful) but cognitive:

“The worst of it was the spacing, the way the letters would jam up against each other,” Knuth says. “It was like if you took every letter and you wiggled it and made some of them go up and some of them go down. It wasn’t random—it was systematically bad.” Because the letters in some words got smooshed together, it gave them the illusion of being darker than the others. The eye is naturally drawn toward dark spots, so the reader’s focus would jump all over the page.