summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/macros/latex-dev/base/ltnews20.tex
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
Diffstat (limited to 'macros/latex-dev/base/ltnews20.tex')
-rw-r--r--macros/latex-dev/base/ltnews20.tex103
1 files changed, 68 insertions, 35 deletions
diff --git a/macros/latex-dev/base/ltnews20.tex b/macros/latex-dev/base/ltnews20.tex
index 44acd1ec3e..89d166b49c 100644
--- a/macros/latex-dev/base/ltnews20.tex
+++ b/macros/latex-dev/base/ltnews20.tex
@@ -41,6 +41,12 @@
\publicationissue{20}
+\providecommand\pkg[1]{\texttt{#1}}
+\providecommand\cls[1]{\texttt{#1}}
+\providecommand\option[1]{\texttt{#1}}
+\providecommand\env[1]{\texttt{#1}}
+\providecommand\file[1]{\texttt{#1}}
+
\begin{document}
\maketitle
@@ -57,15 +63,32 @@ This situation has been rectified this year!
\section{Continued development}
-The \LaTeXe\ program is no longer being actively developed, as any non-negligible changes now could have dramatic backwards compatibility issues with old documents. Similarly, new features cannot be added to the kernel since any new documents written now would then be incompatible with legacy versions of \LaTeX.
-
-The situation on the package level is quite different though. While most of us have stopped developing packages for \LaTeXe{} there are many contributing developers that continue to enrich \LaTeXe{} by providing or extending add-on packages with new or better functionality.
-
-However, the \LaTeX\ team certainly recognises that there are improvements to be made to the kernel code; over the last few years we have been working on building, expanding, and solidifying the \textsf{expl3} programming layer for future \LaTeX\ development. We are using \textsf{expl3} to build new interfaces for package development and tools for document design. Progress here is continuing.
+The \LaTeXe\ program is no longer being actively developed, as any
+non-negligible changes now could have dramatic backwards compatibility
+issues with old documents. Similarly, new features cannot be added to
+the kernel since any new documents written now would then be
+incompatible with legacy versions of \LaTeX.
+
+The situation on the package level is quite different though. While
+most of us have stopped developing packages for \LaTeXe{} there are
+many contributing developers that continue to enrich \LaTeXe{} by
+providing or extending add-on packages with new or better
+functionality.
+
+However, the \LaTeX\ team certainly recognises that there are
+improvements to be made to the kernel code; over the last few years we
+have been working on building, expanding, and solidifying the
+\textsf{expl3} programming layer for future \LaTeX\ development. We
+are using \textsf{expl3} to build new interfaces for package
+development and tools for document design. Progress here is
+continuing.
\section{Release notes}
-In addition to a few small documentation fixes, the following changes have been made to the \LaTeXe\ code; in accordance with the philosophy of minimising forwards and backwards compatibility problems, most of these will not be noticeable to the regular \LaTeX\ user.
+In addition to a few small documentation fixes, the following changes
+have been made to the \LaTeXe\ code; in accordance with the philosophy
+of minimising forwards and backwards compatibility problems, most of
+these will not be noticeable to the regular \LaTeX\ user.
\paragraph{Font subsets covered by Latin Modern and \TeX\ Gyre}
@@ -79,28 +102,32 @@ characters for high-quality multilingual typesetting.%
}
Information about their symbol coverage in the \verb|TS1| encoding is now included
-in \texttt{textcomp}'s default font definitions.
+in \pkg{textcomp}'s default font definitions.
-% \paragraph{Private conditional switch in italic correction}
-% negligible improvement/only useful to LaTeX programmers: not worth documenting I think?
-
-% \paragraph{Improve formatting in \texttt{doc} for filenames with some punctuation}
-% negligible improvement, again?
\paragraph{Redefinition of \cs{enddocument}}
-Inside the definition of \verb=\end{document}= the \texttt{.aux} file is read back in to resolve cross-references and build the table of contents etc. From 2.09 days this was done using \verb=\input= without any surrounding braces which could lead to some issues in boundary cases, especially if \verb=\input= was redefined by some package. It was therefore changed to use \LaTeXe{}'s internal name for this function. As a result, packages that modify \verb=\enddocument= other than through the officially provided hooks may need to get updated.
+Inside the definition of \verb=\end{document}= the \texttt{.aux} file
+is read back in to resolve cross-references and build the table of
+contents etc. From 2.09 days this was done using \verb=\input= without
+any surrounding braces which could lead to some issues in boundary
+cases, especially if \verb=\input= was redefined by some package. It
+was therefore changed to use \LaTeXe{}'s internal name for this
+function. As a result, packages that modify \verb=\enddocument= other
+than through the officially provided hooks may need to get updated.
-\paragraph{Small improvement with split footnotes in \texttt{ftnright}}
+\paragraph{Small improvement with split footnotes in \pkg{ftnright}}
-If in the first column there is more than a full column worth of footnote
-material the material will be split resulting in footnotes out of
-order. This issue is now at least detected and generates an error but the algorithm used by the package is
-unable to gracefully handle it in an automated fashion (some alternatives for resolving the problem if it happens are given in the package documentation).
+If in the first column there is more than a full column worth of
+footnote material the material will be split resulting in footnotes
+out of order. This issue is now at least detected and generates an
+error but the algorithm used by the package is unable to gracefully
+handle it in an automated fashion (some alternatives for resolving the
+problem if it happens are given in the package documentation).
-\paragraph{Improvement in \texttt{xspace} and font-switching}
+\paragraph{Improvement in \file{xspace} and font-switching}
-The \texttt{xspace} package provides the command \verb|\xspace|
+The \file{xspace} package provides the command \verb|\xspace|
which attempts to be clever about inserting spaces automatically
after user-defined control sequences.
An important bug fix has been made to this command to correct its
@@ -116,27 +143,31 @@ would result in an extraneous space being inserted after `foo' in
both cases; this has now been corrected.
-\paragraph{RTL in \texttt{multicol}}
+\paragraph{RTL in \file{multicol}}
- The 1.7 release of \texttt{multicol} adds support for languages that are typeset
- right-to-left. For those languages the order of the columns on the page
- also needs to be reversed---something that wasn't possible in earlier releases.
+ The 1.7 release of \file{multicol} adds support for languages that
+ are typeset right-to-left. For those languages the order of the
+ columns on the page also needs to be reversed---something that wasn't
+ possible in earlier releases.
The new feature is supported through the
commands \verb|\RLmulticolcolumns| (switching to right-to-left typesetting)
and \verb|\LRmulticolcolumns| (switching to left-to-right typesetting) the
latter being the default.
-\paragraph{Improve French \texttt{babel} interaction with \texttt{varioref}}
-
- Extracting and saving the page number turned out to be a source of subtle
- bugs. Initially it was done through an \verb"\edef" with a bunch of
-\verb"\expandafter" commands inside. This posed a problem if the page number
- itself contained code which needed protection (e.g., pr/4080) so this got
- changed in the last release to use \verb"\protected@edef". However, that in turn failed with Babel
-(bug report/4093) if the label contained active characters, e.g., a ``:'' in French. So now
-we use (after one failed attempt pr/4159) even more \verb"\expandafter" commands and \verb"\romannumeral" trickery to avoid any expansion other
- than what is absolutely required---making the code in that space absolutely unreadable.
+\paragraph{Improve French \file{babel} interaction with \file{varioref}}
+
+ Extracting and saving the page number turned out to be a source of
+ subtle bugs. Initially it was done through an \verb"\edef" with a
+ bunch of \verb"\expandafter" commands inside. This posed a problem if
+ the page number itself contained code which needed protection (e.g.,
+ pr/4080) so this got changed in the last release to use
+ \verb"\protected@edef". However, that in turn failed with Babel (bug
+ report/4093) if the label contained active characters, e.g., a ``:''
+ in French. So now we use (after one failed attempt pr/4159) even more
+ \verb"\expandafter" commands and \verb"\romannumeral" trickery to
+ avoid any expansion other than what is absolutely required---making
+ the code in that space absolutely unreadable.
\begin{verbatim}
\expandafter\def\expandafter#1\expandafter{%
\romannumeral
@@ -148,6 +179,8 @@ we use (after one failed attempt pr/4159) even more \verb"\expandafter" commands
\z@
\csname r@#2\endcsname\@nil}%
\end{verbatim}
-Code like this nicely demonstrates the limitations in the programming layer of \LaTeXe{} and the advantages that \textsf{expl3} will offer on this level.
+Code like this nicely demonstrates the limitations in the programming
+layer of \LaTeXe{} and the advantages that \textsf{expl3} will offer
+on this level.
\end{document}