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+\def\DANTE{\textsc{Dante}}
+\title{Editorial}
+\begin{article}
+\section{Welcome back}
+It is a pleasure to thank Robin Fairbairns for his sterling work in
+masterminding our special \BV\ `FAQ' issue at the end of 1994. Many
+people assisted him in getting good, reliable, questions and answers,
+and we will maintain them in future. \emph{Please}, therefore,
+report back to Robin any inaccuracies or omissions. We will reissue the
+list at the end of 1995, but in the meanwhile it is on the CTAN
+archives, on a WWW site, and in Acrobat format, for easy consultation.
+Contact a \ukt\ committee member if you need help finding it.
+\section{\BV\ articles needed}
+As \BV\ starts a new year, determined to keep on coming
+out on time, your help is badly needed.
+It's time to write \BV\ articles for 1995. Get your writing hats on
+to `delight fellow \TeX\ users with your words of wisdom'.
+\emph{Please note the following copy deadlines}:
+
+\def\Thead#1{\makebox[1.7cm][c]{\rotatebox{35}{{\raggedright
+\parbox{2.2cm}{#1}}}}}
+\begin{quote}
+\begin{tabular}{llll}
+\em \rotatebox{35}{Issue}&
+\em \Thead{Submit material}&
+\em \Thead{Last-minute notices}&
+\em \Thead{Posting date}\\
+5.2&Apr 10&Apr 14&May 5\\
+5.3&Jun 5 &Jun 9 &Jun 23\\
+\end{tabular}
+\end{quote}
+Each issue of \BV\ has a special theme, although articles on any
+\TeX-related subject are always welcome.
+\BV\ 5.2 will have papers on SGML, Acrobat etc following the
+January meeting which is briefly reported in this issue.
+\section{A dozen from 1994: 9--3 to the good}
+\newcount\Hit
+\Hit0
+\def\YY#1{\advance\Hit by 1 \paragraph*{($-$) #1}}
+\def\XX#1{\advance\Hit by 1 \paragraph*{($+$) #1}}
+Last year was a pretty good one for \TeX, I think. A lot of action, a
+lot of changes, and plenty of discussion. How can you keep up with it
+all? I find it a big job to scan the messages on various mailing
+lists, browse the Usenet \texttt{comp.text.tex} and read some \TeX\
+publications; and I am not as assiduous as many. I do have an
+advantage over most people, though --- I see all the Comprehensive
+\TeX\ Archive Network activity, as
+one of the small team of volunteer managers; just skimming the nightly
+logs of the mirroring process gives a fascinating insight into
+the busy world of developers continuously making new versions of
+things available; it's a rare day when there is \emph{no} change in the
+archives. So maybe it will not be too unreasonable of me to attempt a
+review of the my favourites of 1994, and some of the turkeys. I'll
+take the chance to off\-load some favourite prejudiced opinions.
+
+
+
+\XX{\LaTeXe, of course} Aided and abetted by the `three men and a dog'
+\emph{\LaTeX\ Companion}, \LaTeXe\ has been a great success so far
+as I can tell. It was so undeniably needed, and so (largely) well
+done, that it has made \LaTeX\ use a pleasure again. \LaTeXe\ itself
+perhaps is most valuable for style designers and maintainers, but
+taken in conjunction with the \emph{Companion}, there can be few users
+who do not find life a little easier this year. As an example of the
+hidden treasures, do you realize that if you use T1 encoding, and mark
+up accented words in the conventional way, they are translated on
+input into 8-bit codes and thus hyphenated?
+
+\XX{NTG sensible article
+ class} Who amongst you has never cursed the default \LaTeX\
+`article' style? Have a look at the Dutch `artikel' styles in the
+`ntgclass' directory on the archives, recently updated for \LaTeXe. I
+use them for lots of my work now, and find them very refreshing.
+
+\XX{Eddi4\TeX, the corner shop \TeX\ shell} Ulrich Jahnze's shareware
+DOS shell for \TeX, Eddi4\TeX, is based around a friendly, but
+powerful, editor (the right way of going about it, in my view). It has
+extensible menus, a good macro language, online help, and is easy to
+maintain. Many have found that the superstore 4\TeX\ CD suits them,
+but I prefer something simple that doesn't run my life. This shell is
+admirably humble, but really does have the features you need.
+
+\XX{MetaPost at last} Groupies of Donald Knuth will know
+that he swears by John Hobby's MetaPost\footnote{Oh, a pox on logos!
+ No, this isn't set properly, because I never seem to have Knuth's
+ slightly amended \emph{logo} font to hand.}
+ as his drawing tool of choice;
+this is a version of \MF\ which produces PostScript code rather than
+GF font format. It has been around for a few years, but just at the
+end of the year, AT\&T finally allowed John to make it publicly
+available. Now everyone who is so inclined can use the enormously
+powerful \MF\ engine to describe their pictures (and use \TeX\ for
+labelling, of course) and get good portable output. John Hobby has
+recently written a graphing add-on, which is a joyful prospect for those
+of us who have been keening for \emph{grap} ever since they stopped
+using \emph{troff}.
+
+\XX{Poor man's PostScript previewing} P.
+Pianowski and B. Jackowski have written a little set of PostScript
+procedures which magically add zooming, page selection, and so on to
+plain GhostScript; if you don't want to run up Windows, and its cranky
+Ghostview, then this is extraordinarily liberating. If you have never
+needed such things, forget you read this, but for cognoscenti, it's on
+CTAN in \texttt{support/psview}.
+
+\XX{BaKoMa, or The Man from Protvino} I don't know how he does it, but
+the quality of Basil Malyshev's PostScript Type1 versions of the CM
+fonts, and the newly added AMS fonts (the BaKoMa family) is excellent,
+and means that I really can forget complicated \MF\ sources and weird PK
+fonts, without spending any money.
+
+\XX{CD relief}
+I do a lot of \TeX\ at home, un-networked. How wonderful it
+has been to have the Prime Time Freeware CD of the CTAN archives to
+hand. No more directories full of `just in case' copies. No more
+expensive and slow downloads of vital \texttt{.bst} files. OK, so some
+bits are out of date now, but there'll be a new release in the summer,
+so I can continue my more relaxed \TeX\ lifestyle.
+
+\XX{Hyper\TeX, and rich Acrobat from \LaTeX} Adobe released version 2
+of Acrobat this year, and their Portable Document Format; it coincided
+with maturing work by the loose Hyper\TeX\ group (described by Arthur
+Smith in \emph{Baskerville} 4.5), and the release of an enhanced
+\emph{dvips} which can pass on hypertext information via the `pdfmark'
+operator to PDF. This means that \LaTeX\ can be set up to produce,
+automatically, very rich Acrobat documents. The whole Hyper\TeX\ thing
+is encouraging, because it shows that there is plenty of life yet in
+\TeX.
+
+\XX{The AMS} The American Mathematical Society has stuck by
+\TeX; they have kept up alongside \LaTeXe\ with a major update to
+\AMSLaTeX; they document and support their macros and fonts. Better
+yet, they think creatively about the electronic future of scholarly
+publishing and maths, and look at SGML working with \TeX\ as the way
+forward. I hope they keep showing us the way.
+\YY{\TeX\ under DOS} I
+am writing this article in a hotel in New York. Luckily, I was able to
+borrow a portable PC from work just before I left; but, my goodness,
+what a palaver it was to put together a useful \TeX\ system to take
+with me to prepare \emph{Baskerville}! I ended up with:
+\begin{enumerate}
+\item An em\TeX\ kernel set of programs, and a \LaTeX\ format;
+\item the RSX loader to allow em\TeX\ to work in a Windows DOS box;
+ usage requires only 10 years of experience;
+\item dvips, which I had to recompile myself to get dynamic
+ decompression of PostScript files;
+\item GhostScript, to preview pages properly (I like to see my
+ figures, my colours, my rotations etc --- is that unreasonable?);
+\item A set of Type1 PostScript fonts---Baskerville, Computer Modern,
+ Monotype Times, Lucida (maths fonts for work), and (unreleased
+ beta) DC fonts (we do \emph{Baskerville} with T1 encoding, and use
+ Computer Modern as the typewriter font);
+\item Gnuemacs, to edit files in a civilised way; and Eddi4\TeX, as a
+ DOS \TeX\ shell for when I felt strange;
+\item Battalions of \texttt{sty}, \texttt{cls}, \texttt{fd},
+ \texttt{tfm}, and \texttt{vf} files I might end up pulling in by
+ accident or design.
+\end{enumerate}
+If only Y\&Y drivers understood virtual fonts, or I had three weeks to
+spare sorting out the reencoding of my fonts to the bizarre Windows
+encoding, I'd have brought the excellent \emph{dviwindo} as a
+previewer. But I still couldn't have previewed my pictures.
+
+What a mess. It took me hours to make it all go together. Why can't I
+use, or recommend, an unequivocally good and complete \TeX\ for DOS
+and Windows, at any price?
+
+\YY{\TeX\ user group politics} Like rats
+packed in a cage, \TeX ies just can't stop mauling each other. TUG is
+rendered impotent by the inability of its directors\footnote{The
+ author of this piece is a director of TUG, and as guilty as others.}
+to agree on what to do about \TeX\ worldwide; \DANTE{} withdrew its
+Special Director from TUG in pique at something no-one else
+understood; the French quarrel publicly about disk sets; the British
+slyly insert prima donna activists into all \TeX\ projects. Thousands
+of \TeX\ users and developers worldwide happily help each other in a
+great spirit of cooperation --- why can't the user groups work
+together?
+
+\YY{\LaTeXe, I'm afraid} `They' keep changing it, you know.
+Documents come out differently before and after Christmas, styles
+mysteriously crack in new places with brace fatigue; \AMSLaTeX\
+appears and vanishes like the Cheshire cat. Colour madness permeates
+the kernel. Can the redoubtable Frank Mittelbach hold together his
+talented team?
+
+\section{News section}
+\subsection{Winter \LaTeX\ Release}
+
+The second full release of \LaTeXe\ was placed on the CTAN archives on
+December 17th. This release fixes problems reported since June and
+incorporates the new `inputenc' package as a standard method of
+supporting 8-bit input.
+
+The document \texttt{ltnews02.tex} contains more details of the new features.
+See also the WWW page on \texttt{http://www.tex.ac.uk/CTAN/latex/}
+
+\LaTeX\ is available from CTAN hosts in the directory
+\path|macros/latex/base|, and a ready `unpacked' version
+is available in \path|macros/latex/unpacked|. Note that
+this includes all the files in `base' so you do not need both
+directories.
+
+Unfortunately a couple of small bugs are present in the release.
+These are fixed in the file
+\path|macros/latex/base/ltpatch.ltx| which is
+automatically applied when you install.
+
+
+\subsection{UKTeX is dead, long live TeXhax}
+
+({\itshape David Osborne posted the following on 23rd December:})
+
+With the welcome emergence of the Comprehensive \TeX\ Archive Network,
+there's no longer any need for a UK-oriented digest, originally
+created to announce developments of the UK \TeX\ Archive which Peter
+Abbott set up at Aston University. The digest was Peter's idea,
+modelled on the TeXhax Digest, and he acted as editor/moderator for
+the first few years of its existence. Looking back, I see I (DO) took over
+the editing of the digest with the V90 \#21 issue and that from the
+beginning of 1987 to date, 336 digests were produced.
+
+However, don't despair! The intention is to merge UKTeX into TeXhax,
+which will continue to act as a question, answer and announcement
+forum for the global \TeX\ community. The electronic distribution lists
+of the two digests will be merged and, for a while at least,
+contributions addressed to UKTeX will still be accepted but will
+appear in TeXhax, starting early in 1995. Initially, it's intended to
+produce TeXhax at weekly intervals, to maintain the timeliness of
+UKTeX for announcements, but this frequency may be modified in the
+light of experience, depending on the volume of contributions.
+
+So, my sincere thanks go to all those who have encouraged and
+supported UKTeX in the past, particularly to Peter Abbott. I
+encourage your support of the TeXhax Digest and welcome your
+contributions to it in 1995 and beyond.
+
+\end{article}
+\endinput