Not for nothing, but your dismissal here is tantamount to refuting the core thrust of this paper:
> What is important is the actual work product, which from a typographic perspective is vastly superior to most other math dissertations of the period.
They spend much of the paper attempting to figure out how this would have been typeset. I don’t think the product is quite as trivial as your comment paints it to be, at least. They ask relevant questions in the “Conclusion” section, unaddressed by your remarks.
> How did he (or some typist) manage to sustain such precision for 180 pages, with endless sequences of sub- scripts on superscripts? How did he manage the fractional spacing, especially horizontally, where so far as we know, the devices of the day did not provide a mechanism.
We are lucky I did not claim they said “trivial,” then, hey? But sure. That’s still exactly opposite the paper’s claim. They couldn’t find another
paper exhibiting those qualities, which they should have were it unremarkable.
These days LaTeX seems like an obvious choice for a thesis, yet lots of people still use Microsoft Word. It doesn't seem too suspicious that if it was several orders of magnitude harder to use LaTeX then almost nobody, except a handful or even one of the most dedicated people would use it.
> What is important is the actual work product, which from a typographic perspective is vastly superior to most other math dissertations of the period.
They spend much of the paper attempting to figure out how this would have been typeset. I don’t think the product is quite as trivial as your comment paints it to be, at least. They ask relevant questions in the “Conclusion” section, unaddressed by your remarks.
> How did he (or some typist) manage to sustain such precision for 180 pages, with endless sequences of sub- scripts on superscripts? How did he manage the fractional spacing, especially horizontally, where so far as we know, the devices of the day did not provide a mechanism.