Computers and Typesetting
by Donald Knuth · first published 1986
43% recommend57% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Exhaustive, carefully polished documentation of TeX and METAFONT, known for clear exposition and fine detail. It serves as the reference for anyone who wants to understand or modify TeX itself.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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I’m also one of those who prefers troff. I read all five volumes of Knuth’s Computers and Typesetting cover to cover, and TeX is a beautiful piece of work. But in my preferred alternate universe, two things would be different: Joe Ossanna would not have died young, and AT&T would have been more open with…
on “MathML is a failed web standard” ↗An even better presentation (although lacking bug fixes after publication) is volume D of Computers & Typesetting, Metafont: The Program. It's not just the output of weave (which is what's in the linked mf.pdf file), but also includes "mini-indexes" for quick cross-referencing of parts of the code. I'd also note that while TeX is primarily the work of Knuth, MF was more of a collaboration between
on “Metafont (1984)” ↗…don't hold your breath while waiting for it. If you want to write a better TeX yourself, then start with Knuth's voluminous, exemplary, polished, very finely detailed documentation in volumes A-E of 'Computers and Typesetting'. After reading that material, you may decide that you have better things to do than writing a better TeX. Don't think that TeX and HTML compete: They are designed for very different purposes.
on “Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?” ↗The .web files aren't meant to be read raw; you should instead read the typeset version (http://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/generic/knuth/mf/mf.pdf) Even better to read from volumes C, D, E of the Computers and Typesetting series (https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/abcde.html). Specifically in this case, Volume D (METAFONT: The Program) — the mini-indices on each page spread are useful if you're trying to understand the program,…
on “METAFONT (1984)” ↗…cultural background or whatnot, I don't know, but some people find those cartoons to be a nice touch, and they admire the clarity of exposition of The TeXbook. I'm the proud owner of the entire 6 vol Computers and Typesetting series (of which the former title is vol A), and have worked through sizable portions of those. I also read mot of the 680 pages of Knuth's Digital Typography monograph. I also owned one LaTeX book at…
on “LaTeX Cookbook – Collection of LaTeX Recipes” ↗Read this instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_and_Typesetting
on “Making Software: How to make a font” ↗…by writing a program for drawing that letter, instead of simply drawing it. He came up with something vaguely similar (pens of varying thickness, erasers, etc). The program is described in Volume C of Computers and Typesetting (The METAFONTbook), and Volume E is a thick hardcover book somewhat like this page, which gives the definition of (program for) each character next to a picture of its shape. More Metafont-related links,…
on “CSS Sans – A font created in CSS” ↗> I haven't read any of Knuth's stuff because doesn't having 7 volumes kinda imply it can't possibly be well edited? That's a very bad assumption in this case. The contents of TAOCP are very well edited, just massive in scope and it's one man putting it all together. However, those aren't his only books. Concrete Mathematics is a completed text that expands on, in particular, the math in Chapter
on “Ask HN: Most interesting, mildly impractical, well-written books on software?” ↗In the same way, Knuth wrote a set of books on typesetting. Procrastination at its finest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_and_Typesetting
on “Writing my PhD using groff” ↗It's available as a book (TeX: The Program, volume B of Computers and Typesetting), and Knuth considers the book as the canonical thing to read. You almost surely don't have a PDF of the entire book, but it's easily available in good libraries: http://www.worldcat.org/title/tex-the-program/oclc/826569131…
on “Programs to Read” ↗…and debugged. (See https://texfaq.org/FAQ-triptrap for details.) Apart from this report there isn't a separate book about testing TeX specifically, though there is a TeX manual (The TeXbook, Volume A of Computers and Typesetting), the TeX source code as a book (Volume B, roughly equivalent to this: http://texdoc.net/pkg/tex), and there's also a nice paper called The Errors of TeX (https://yurichev.com/mirrors/knuth1989.pdf),…
on “Donald Knuth was framed” ↗Slightly off-topic, but I've got a copy of Knuth's Computer Modern Typefaces (Book E in the Computers And Typesetting series). I don't think many people get to see this book. You can see where some of Kunth's time went. Here's a quote from the preface: "Another piece of luck came my way in 1984, when I learned that…
on “Metafont (1984)” ↗Didn't Knuth solve this problem in his Computers & Typesetting books?
If any non-lawyers are interested in what a well-executed agreement with commentary looks like, I highly recommend The LSTA's Complete Credit Agreement Guide, which covers an industry-group standard loan securitization agreement. It's 600 pages. There are others, like commentaries to the ISDA Master agreements, but they're niche and very, very expensive. For lawyers interested in what a masterful
on “YC Open-Source Sales Agreement” ↗As you indicate, the language described in Jensen and Wirth's 1975 "Pascal User Manual" didn't have a way to open files with a name computed at runtime, nor was there a way to close a file. TeX needed to be able to do these things, as well as to have what C programmers would call a "default" case on a switch statement, which was also missing from standard Pascal. Happily, almost all Pascal compile
on “Pascal at Apple” ↗