I'm not the person you're replying to, but that's not really pretty surprising. Merely typesetting a book in TeX does not guarantee good typesetting. TeX is just a program that makes it possible to typeset like “real books”; one still needs to know (and care) enough about book design (as Knuth did) to actually produce something aesthetically pleasing. (For an extreme example: if you just run TeX and don't pay attention to the warnings, you'll have plenty of underfull or even overfull lines, resulting in even worse typesetting than you'd get from something like Microsoft Word.) The standard LaTeX classes also make some poor typographic choices, because Lamport unlike Knuth was more interested in logical/structured markup than typesetting.
Nor does being published by a reputed publisher guarantee good typesetting. The story of TeX is itself a good example: TeX came into existence because Addison-Wesley, whom Knuth had chosen specifically for their great typesetting, was compromising on their typesetting for the 2nd edition of TAOCP vol 2 as they moved away from hot-metal typesetting. I'd expect that things are even worse today.
In the case of HtDP specifically, just opening the print edition of the book and flipping through the pages, I can see how its typesetting is indeed below average for a textbook. Look at the ugly table on page 21 (and throughout the book), the uneven typographic “color” on pages like 23 and 31, and just the whole mishmash of mismatched fonts on most pages. The book also has a lot of short paragraphs (two or three lines long), so the choice of indentation for paragraphs in the book is an odd one. A good book designer would have changed a lot of this.
Overall it's perfectly readable, and sure, all typographic subtleties fade away once a reader gets sufficiently engrossed in the content (which is what ultimately matters), but the book is not a delight to hold in one's hands even before that, as in the case of TAOCP. (Probably unfair to compare with something well above average (TAOCP), so compare with SICP which is probably at about the average for a textbook from MIT Press.)
Nor does being published by a reputed publisher guarantee good typesetting. The story of TeX is itself a good example: TeX came into existence because Addison-Wesley, whom Knuth had chosen specifically for their great typesetting, was compromising on their typesetting for the 2nd edition of TAOCP vol 2 as they moved away from hot-metal typesetting. I'd expect that things are even worse today.
In the case of HtDP specifically, just opening the print edition of the book and flipping through the pages, I can see how its typesetting is indeed below average for a textbook. Look at the ugly table on page 21 (and throughout the book), the uneven typographic “color” on pages like 23 and 31, and just the whole mishmash of mismatched fonts on most pages. The book also has a lot of short paragraphs (two or three lines long), so the choice of indentation for paragraphs in the book is an odd one. A good book designer would have changed a lot of this.
Overall it's perfectly readable, and sure, all typographic subtleties fade away once a reader gets sufficiently engrossed in the content (which is what ultimately matters), but the book is not a delight to hold in one's hands even before that, as in the case of TAOCP. (Probably unfair to compare with something well above average (TAOCP), so compare with SICP which is probably at about the average for a textbook from MIT Press.)