From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!mx02.eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!news.glorb.com!Xl.tags.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.earthlink.com!news.earthlink.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 03 Dec 2014 21:41:10 -0600 From: Dennis Lee Bieber Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: The enormous potential that programming LaTeX in Ada presents. Date: Wed, 03 Dec 2014 22:41:14 -0500 Organization: IISS Elusive Unicorn Message-ID: <87lv7at2mn293o2qcbrura4avs124prn14@4ax.com> References: <16bc91a8-7d25-4b39-a88c-3423e5bdecf4@googlegroups.com> <587e236f-123f-4897-b73e-264082a62806@googlegroups.com> X-Newsreader: Forte Agent 6.00/32.1186 X-No-Archive: YES MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 108.79.217.60 X-Trace: sv3-J2VsY1n4BBRdXF3BA/NF1K4Y2nwIKQXTieP+X79Yz0DMLoTM62VUG2LSO9qQ0hz7aPe2i4eJYPg5fOT!+k4dNJ6k2ipBClbrO9nK5c7lr4DJ+TfX2/bdj7ufzaziKhyQsZQUxWLuociEgTjamYCchzp3lT61!WjuS8LsHcPEl7Nxrj2DQLREg9Rk= X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 X-Original-Bytes: 3913 Xref: news.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:23853 Date: 2014-12-03T22:41:14-05:00 List-Id: On Wed, 3 Dec 2014 12:48:19 -0800 (PST), Austin Obyrne 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/