Re: The enormous potential that programming LaTeX in Ada presents.

[Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com>]

On Wed, 3 Dec 2014 12:48:19 -0800 (PST), Austin Obyrne
<austin.obyrne@hotmail.com> declaimed the following:


>Current cryptography is capable of encrypting ASCII and at most the entire Latin-1 set.  There is a vast set of mathematical symbols, special general characters, Greek language characters (often included in English language test files)that cannot be read in or keyed for encryption because they are outside of the Latin_1 character set. Nor is there any formatting facilities in the current ciphers and as far as I know message text must be formatted at the receiving end when is should be done beforehand at the sending end.
>
	WRONG... In the source file, all those characters, et al, are
represented by some stream of bytes... And all proper encryption systems
work with bytes or blocks thereof (doesn't DES use 64-bits at a time?).
Encryption systems don't care what the data is, they just transform it in
some reversible means.


>All of the foregoing can be done by deploying latex which is always entirely ASCII and can be encrypted as ASCII while possessing all sorts of non-ASCII attributes in its command code.  The input file of latex is encrypted in ASCII - the file may be encrypted and when it is decrypted it can be run so as to typeset the message in any way the entities want.  There is also a vast amount of extra prose that is outside of the scope of ASCII for the benefit of users. These are the perceived benefits of using Latex as an encryption platform in conjunction.
>

	LaTeX is nothing more than ONE typesetting program... One that just
happens to use plain ASCII as the native user interface (no surprise -- it
predates all the WIMP computers that came out in the mid-80s)... M$ Word,
for many years, has included an equation writer module which allows one to
create mathematical texts... A Word doc(x) file can be encrypted,
transferred to others, decrypted, and loaded into Word for generation of
typeset output...

	LaTeX is a language for laying out documents... So were the various
roff/troff/etc., RTF, and PostScript... All are plain text files that rely
upon some rendering engine to produce the final output form. Your LaTeX
file, regardless of any mysticism of encryption/decryption, is nothing
without the LaTeX processor (and most LaTeX environment these days just
translate the LaTeX source into PostScript page descriptions, passing that
off to GhostScript to be rendered on some printer -- presuming the printer
itself doesn't have a PostScript RIP built-in.


-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
    wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/