On Monday 22 October 2012 01:10:18 Mike Speciner wrote:
Well, maybe I'm just too fussy. (My first job, in the early '70s, was writing software to typeset mathematics beautifully, and I always thought that TeX was a big step backwards from the state of the art.) Your png looks quite similar to what I see. Should I not expect the first two 1s to be at the same height? Should I not expect the ; between 1/qz and 1/q to be vertically centered around the fraction bars so that the semicolon's dot doesn't look like a center dot? And should I not expect the spacing to be a bit looser in several places?
I'm fairly sure that texify.com is not in fact running TeX; it's doing some simpler cheaper thing, probably involving MathML or something. If you typeset that same formula in TeX then ... well, actually you still get something pretty ugly, but it's ugly in quite different ways. What was the state of the art of computerized mathematical typesetting before TeX? -- g