KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Portable Graphics in TEX
Malcolm Clark · 1992
To a very large extent, TEX was designed for the placement of characters on a page. It was implicitly assumed that the characters were probably alphabetic or mathematical. Nevertheless, Knuth notes If you enjoy fooling around making pictures, instead of typesetting ordinary text, TEX will be a source of endless frustration/amusement for you, because almost anything is possible... While it is well able to draw horizontal and vertical lines, or even to plot dots more or less at random (see, for example, Knuth, 1986, p.389, and Figure 1), most people expect a little more from their graphics. There is also an architectural limitation: although TEX could easily simulate an arbitrary continuous curve by placing a very large number of small dots (or rules) on the page (or screen), TEX was only granted a finite memory. You quickly run out of memory. This is all the more distressing since there now exist versions of TEX with small and large amounts of memory (basically related to the addressing ability: 64-bit TEX ona Cray has potentially much more memory than 16-bit TEX onapc: TEX-in-unix is generally somewhere in between). Sadly, this has had the effect of making TEX documentsless portable, and seriously undermines TEX’s claim to universality. TEX is universal, but the documents may be restricted to certain versions — and you won’t necessarily know until you try to process them (and run out of memory, or not).