The non-monetary value of the cheques is, to me, minimal. I'm well aware of the Knuth's work and the confidence required to post a logarithmic reward for bugs. But the concept of 'bug' has been artificially limited.
The primary goal of TeX is "to allow anybody to produce high-quality books using a reasonable amount of effort". It is clearly buggy, as it certainly has failed at that goal.
The problem is that engineers are to focused on algorithms to care about usability or even realize that this is a problem.
It is a problem, and it prevented TeX from achieving it's stated goal.
The same attitude in other projects would ensure their failure too.
I was browsing through some mathematics books earlier, and a large proportion of them were typeset in TeX - whether they be Introduction to Algorithms, Visual Complex Analysis or Guide2 Mechanics, and I'm sure plenty more books are done in TeX that don't mention explicitly mention how they were typeset.
If that's your idea of a failure, what's your idea of a success?
I think TeX doesn't take more than a "reasonable amount of effort" otherwise I, and many others, would use the alternatives.
And I'm interested where you got the "reasonable amount of effort thing" from. The TeXbook says nothing of the sort, for example:
"TeX, a new typesetting system intended for the creation
of beautiful books---and especially for books that contain a lot of mathematics."
Note the emphasis on the "beautiful" and "mathematics" rather than ease of use.
> I think TeX doesn't take more than a "reasonable amount of effort" otherwise I, and many others, would use the alternatives.
Sure. But most people who write documents don't use TeX. That might be because TeX seems to prefer using its own custom font system which doesn't work with any of their fonts, and lacks and modern GUI. TeX should have, and could have, been Word, with an emphasis on structure.
The projects goals came from its Wikipedia page, which admittedly isn't referenced.
Perhaps this misunderstanding of the goals for TeX is what makes your posts sound trollish. Most people who write documents don't need anything but the simplest of typesetting. The web is a collection of millions of documents, but it is built off about six fonts (of which only three get much use), using a very limited character set.
Most people who need good typesetting for technical documents use TeX, particularly if they want to typeset mathematical notation. Wikipedia requires minimal typesetting for the majority of its content, but the maths is set using TeX.
Why no TeX viewer? The goal for TeX was to typeset printed documents, books. PDFs work fine online, you could easily send someone a resume on paper or in a PDF, typeset using TeX.
Why no bundled TeX GUI? TeX didn't set out to be a text editor, it just handles typesetting for people who don't own printing presses. If it had tried to be a text editor, it would probably have been much less successful, and would be probably be forgotten by now.
Writing a WYSIWYG text editor is a very different challenge to writing a typesetting program. For example, TeX will try and lay out a paragraph so that there is no trailing single word on the last line. (And will produce warning messages if it can't find a way to make it look good.) To do that, you need to have access for the whole paragraph of text. However, in a WYSIWYG editor, as soon as the type hits the page, you want it to stay there. You don't want it moving about as you add text to the end of a paragraph, because it will feel like unpredictable, leading to a poor user experience.
Typesetting formulae graphically has similar problems, but they are even worse. The few GUIs for TeX that do exist are largely unremarkable, but notably they are GUIs which use TeX, it isn't a goal for TeX itself to provide one.
TeX's goal is beautifully typeset books, a goal it achieves.
(Specifically the typesetting of The Art of Computer Programming series of books, though obviously it is used in a much wider context.)
Maybe not absolutely "anybody," but it allows a lot of people with no sense of aesthetics to make decent-looking documents, which is still pretty successful. If you don't need to do any mathematical notation, TeX is not difficult to use, especially if you can just use a preexisting package.
"In several technical fields, in particular computer science, mathematics and physics, TeX has become a de facto standard. Many thousands of books have been published using TeX, including books published by Addison-Wesley, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, Oxford University Press and Springer. Numerous journals in these fields are produced using TeX or LaTeX, allowing authors to submit their raw manuscript written in TeX."
In my field, Tex (used with macro packages) is the standard. We format book chapters and papers for publication using these macros. We communicate with other scientists using the product of these tools. We could easily produce journals and/or books ourselves using these tools, and many people do.
They are excellent for that purpose. They are free. They work. They work better than anything else I know.
Someone should have done that many years ago, when TeX had a chance of succeeding as a mainstream typesetting language, along with allowing people to use their not-bitmapped, TTF (and later OTF) fonts without conversion tools.
Here's some free advice: never mistake rudeness for intolerance of utter nonsense.
But, ok, I read your post again:
You: "The primary goal of TeX is 'to allow anybody to produce high-quality books using a reasonable amount of effort'. IT IS CLEARLY BUGGY, AS IT CERTAINLY HAS FAILED AT THAT GOAL."
Wikipedia: "Many THOUSANDS of books have been published using TeX, INCLUDING books published by Addison-Wesley, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, Oxford University Press and Springer..."
And here: found in 30 seconds of time spent in Google, are some excerpts of descriptions of what a few other people use Tex for (http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/:
"This is a set of maps that I made for the frontispiece of a bound volume of my mother's journals that she wrote during a sailing trip in the Greek islands..."
"It's a poster I made for presenting at a linguistics conference. I was wary about trying to do something like this with LaTeX at my level, but I was astonished at how easy it turned out to be..."
"As an experiment, I typeset the second chapter of the book of Esther from the Hebrew Bible. "
This is an example of how well TeX can be adapted to all different languages, even typesetting from right to left
"I'm attaching two files that use the CJK package to typeset Chinese. "
"A piece of Tibetan text which describes the Story of a Brahman and his family."
"Another fine typesetting example showing how well TeX can produce beautiful books. It is created with the ConTeXt package."
"Inclusion of these submissions in the TeX showcase might be helpful for biologists to venture into learning LaTeX, once they understand what they can do with this wonderful software. I made these figures for an article that was published in The PracTeX Journal."
"This Master's Thesis has no math at all. This is my Master's Thesis for sociology..."
"...from The Book of Tea by Okakura Kazuko"
"Here are a few pages of 352 from a chess book...Typesetting was done by PDFLaTeX..."
"The book is Exiles from a Future Time by Alan M. Wald, University of North Carolina Press. The design is by Richard Eckersley, whose achievements in book design have earned him the designation of Royal Designer for Industry by the Royal Society of Arts..."
"This is a document that introduces Early Music to all audiences..."
"A Music example submitted by Norbert Preining. This is from the Andante KV 315, W.A. Mozart, transcription from D. Taupin..."
"An example of a catalog entry automatically created from a vendor's database. You can find it among around 800 siblings at www.erco.com"
"From a critical edition of Saranadeva's Durghatavrtti, in Sanskrit..."
"These two pages are taken from the Greek edition of Giambattista Bodoni's Manuale Typographico (published by Agra, in 2003), a landmark in the history of typography..."
"A page from the book Mikael by Theophan�s Ioannou, published in Greece by Indiktos (May 2003)."
"A page from the journal Inscriptiones graecae..."
"A text in Judeo-spanish, from The Judeo-Spanish Ballad Chapbooks of Yacob Abaraham Yon..."
Now let me ask once again, what did I miss? I'm interested in you citing people who have failed to publish their book(s) because of TeX' failings...or was it "bugs"?
* I have been in classes in math, physics, economics, and political science departments, at three universities, which not only recommend doing schoolwork in TeX, but provide templates to facilitate the process.
* I know dozens of people who made resumés in TeX.
* A huge number of technical journal publishers (in some fields, the majority) use TeX
* Write a math or very technical science book. Submit it in anything other than TeX. Some places may still accept it. They are by far the minority.
I suggest you think my posts are nonsense because you haven't read or understood them, particularly the part about the difference between having some users in a limited set of fields and allowing anyone to produce typeset documents easily.
I know many people who use OpenBSD. I could list them too.
That doesn't mean that OpenBSD allows anyone to compute securely. OpenBSD has a high barrier to entry, requiring a lot of technical skill and prerequisite knowledge.
Which is fine, as OpenBSD never stated that was their intention.
TeX, on the other hand, intended to allow anyone to easily create typeset documents. But it's difficult to use, and hence only rarely used for modern typesetting.
For example, I would be flabbergasted if any of your 24+ friends who have TeX resumes didn't have those resumes refused by most companies or recruiters.
No, TeX is not intended to allow anyone to easily create documents. It is intended to allow Donald Knuth to make beautiful books out of TAOCP. That it has allowed (by this point) a generation of mathematicians, scientists, and increasingly tens of thousands (at least) of others writing structured documents, particularly academics, to also create beautiful books and journal articles, and is the backbone of mathematical publishing these days, is incidental.
If corporate documents are mostly created with Microsoft products, it is certainly not about the ease with which those products can be used to create structured documents (hint: it's nearly impossible to use them for that), but rather about market-share network effects, highly effective monopolistic tactics on Microsoft's part, and (a wrong) general perception about the relative merits of different methods.
I'll agree with you that TeX (or even LaTeX or ConTeXT) is no walk in the park, but to suggest that it has a particularly high barrier to entry, especially compared to the knowledge required to, e.g., write out a high-level mathematical formula longhand and have any clue what it's saying, is so overblown it becomes absurd.
The market for document preparation systems is brutal, and TeX has never had effective evangelism or much real attempt to make it "newbie-friendly". But so what? The world is a big place, with plenty of space for different approaches. I use (La)TeX for math, InDesign for political science papers, and Text Edit for reading letters sent to me in .doc format by my uncle. All of them work well for these purposes; again, so what?
Also, PDF resumes, whether created with TeX or anything else, are accepted nearly universally in many fields.
