Usenet isn't dead

For a lot of people, Usenet is dead—rendered useless by spam (much as I find my personal email is becoming). However, there are still groups, such as comp.lang.tcl and comp.text.tex that are still vibrant and alive.

Last night I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why the LaTeX memoir class formatted poetic verse with a different amount of trailing vertical whitespace (by default) than the stock book class.

Finally in desperation I posted to comp.text.tex, and by today Dan Luecking of the University of Arkansas had posted a reply outlining what line to edit in the memoir class source code to correct a very obscure bug that I'd been tripping over, and also explaining the reason for the buggy behavior (which his change fixes—Thank You Dan!).

Incidentally, the memoir manual's first few chapters are a superb tutorial on the art of book design. I suggest anyone even remotely interested in the subject give it a read even if they'd probably never use LaTeX for typesetting.

—Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, January 11, 2005 at 22:14