“i found that
writing software
was much more
difficult than
anything else i had
done in my life. i had
to keep so many
things in my head
at once. i couldn’t
just put it down
and start something
else. it really took
over my life during
this period.”
the spring of 1977, I could be found
mostly in the Stanford Library reading
about the history of letter forms. Before I went to China that summer I had
drafted the letters for A to Z.
PHO TOGRAPH B Y TIMO TH Y ARCHIBALD
One of the greatest disappointments in my whole life was the day I
received in the mail the new edition of
The Art of Computer Programming Volume 2, which was typeset with my fonts
and which was supposed to be the
crowning moment of my life, having
succeeded with the TeX project. I think
it was 1981, and I had the best typesetting equipment, and I had written a
program for the 8-bit microprocessor
inside. It had 5,000 dots-per-inch, and
all the proofs coming out looked good
on this machine. I went over to Addison-Wesley, who had typeset it. There
was the book, and it was in the familiar
beige covers. I opened the book up and
I’m thinking, “Oh, this is going to be
a nice moment.” I had Volume 2, first
edition. I had Volume 2, second edition. They were supposed to look the
same. Everything I had known up to
that point was that they would look the
same. All the measurements seemed
to agree. But a lot of distortion goes
on, and our optic nerves aren’t linear.
All kinds of things were happening. I
