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First, Knuth did TeX, Plain TeX, and was not the primary force behind LaTeX.

Second, IIRC, Knuth did proudly use TeX to print dinner menu, invitations, or some such.



>Knuth did proudly use TeX to print dinner menu

That's hilarious. Any sources on that?

That man is incredible.


I was typing quickly from memory. With The TeXBook, on page 411 he has a concert program; on page 248 he has a genealogy chart; on page 247 he has some nicely formatted stock tables; on pages 233, 236-7 he has some recipe stuff from Julia Child.

So, instead of a menu, I found a concert program and some recipes. Maybe there is a menu in there someplace.

He also has an addressed envelope where he used his Metafont in some tricky way to get something like a stamp. He might also be able to get from TeX with Metafont the whatever they are called little boxes of geometric gibberish used as identifiers.

I did some TeX macros for foils -- I get a nice box around each foil. Some more macros I did let me do a simple drawing in, say, old Microsoft Photodraw, include it in a picture in a TeX document, and then position TeX math as annotation overlays on the drawing. So, I can, say, draw a right triangle and put the standard Pythagorean theorem annotation on the figure. Can put darned nearly any TeX expression as annotation. TeX is nice and for math nearly essential.


>little boxes of geometric gibberish used as identifiers

in which context?


I struggled to understand that as well. Couldn't tell if it was about USPS barcodes (1) or QR codes (or other 2D barcodes) or something else?

[1] - https://www.neodynamic.com/Products/Help/BarcodeCF2.0/barcod...


I meant QR codes! I don't really know what they are!




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