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+\def\PDF{PDF}
+\def\textsmaller#1{#1}
+\title{Editorial and News}
+\author{Sebastian Rahtz}
+\begin{article}
+It seems a long time since I last wrote a \BV\ editorial, but it is no
+less pleasurable to be able, once again, to share some \TeX ery with
+you. ``Why'', however, the keen-eyed reader will ask, ``is this \BV\
+volume \emph{8}, and not \emph{7} still?''. For an explanation of the
+\uktug\ committee's decisions regarding this, I refer you to the
+report by the outgoing Chairman, Robin Fairbairns, following this editorial.
+You'll also find information about other glories the committee has
+planned for the members.
+
+\section{Why \protect\TeX?}
+Just after the New Year, I had the pleasure of travelling to India for
+the first meeting of the Indian \TeX{} Users Group (a report on this
+trip can be found elsewhere in this \BV). In the opening session, I
+tried to give an explanation of why \TeX{} was still relevant, and it
+seems appropriate to offer the points I made to UK readers as well.
+
+When Donald Knuth started \TeX, he thought he was undertaking the
+simple task of writing a typesetting program which he could use to
+prepare volumes of his monumental series,\emph{The Art of Computer
+ Programming}; in the event, it called for 10 years work, and the
+creation of not only \TeX, but a companion font-drawing program,
+\MF, and the Computer Modern family of fonts. During the years of
+development, Knuth made some significant decisions:
+\begin{itemize}
+\item He decided to place the program in the public domain for all to
+ use; not only was this generous in itself, but it prompted many
+ people to try it, confident in the knowledge that they could find
+ out what it was doing, that it had no secrets.
+\item He worked on the design substantially alone, albeit with a group
+ of graduate students and the help of research grants;
+ this meant that the main \TeX{} programs have
+ a single architecture, and are to all intents and purposes free of
+ bugs, the work of an individual not a team.
+\item Knuth listened to feedback, and encouraged it. This led to the
+ creation of the \TeX\ Users Group in about 1980, which did much to
+ popularize the software.
+\item He wrote the programs using his \texttt{WEB} system of literate
+ programming, in which the program code and its documentation are
+ inextricably woven. The closely-documented nature of the code has
+ made it possible for others to understand it. He even
+ \emph{published} the source code in a book, an almost unprecedented
+ action.
+\item He did not commit himself to a specific output device (unlike
+ \textsf{troff}, which did not achieve the same success as \TeX), but
+ separated out the `driver' functionality into external programs, by
+ defining \TeX's output as a neutral device-independent format.
+\item He recognized that if the program were to have a long
+ shelf-life, he could not commit himself to the graphical and colour
+ capabilities of the period. A conscious decision was made to
+ \emph{omit} any specific functionality of this kind, and instead to
+ provide an all-purpose \verb|\special| command
+\item Lastly, Knuth froze \TeX{} when he felt it was complete
+ enough. This means that it stays forever as a fixed reference point,
+ generating the same output from the same input and exhibiting no
+ known errors. This allows some to build on it with confidence,
+ others to write their documents knowing that they will always be
+ able to processs them.
+\end{itemize}
+
+But things have moved on since Knuth wrote \TeX; nowadays the talk is
+of desktop-publishing, word-processing packages, HTML, the Internet, PDF, SGML
+--- was it an anachronism to start a new \TeX{} Users Group in India in
+1998? I believe it was not, and I have followed Don Knuth's
+favourite game of playing with numbers to explain why. Since this is
+(just) 1998, I have attempted to find 9.8 reasons why \TeX{} is still
+relevant today, and why the Indian group will have much to work on.
+I will go over my 9 reasons as reflections on the way \TeX{}
+and its users are \emph{evolving} to meet today's needs.
+
+
+\begin{enumerate}
+\item[1] The Internet. \TeX{} users (well, not all of them,
+ since it makes sense only if you use structured markup) can interact
+ with the Internet in a variety of ways:
+\begin{itemize}
+\item Converting \LaTeX{} into HTML, using \textsf{latex2html},
+ \textsf{Tex4ht}, or a variety of other programs.
+\item Having \LaTeX{} read directly by a browser add-on, of which
+ IBM's \textsf{techxplorer} seems to be the most fully developed.
+\item Producing Portable Document Format for display using Acrobat
+ Reader inside a Web browser. Using Han The Thanh's \TeX{} variant,
+ pdf\TeX{}, or a dvi to PostScript program with Acrobat Distiller, we
+ can make PDF files; even better, we can add macros such as my \LaTeX{}
+ \textsf{hyperref} package, or Hans Hagen's Con\TeX{}t, and
+ automatically produce PDF of a richness unsurpassed by almost any
+ other program.
+\item There is also now XML making a very welcome appearance in the
+ Web world, and its maths application, MathML. Can we hope for a happy
+ co-existence between MathML and \TeX?
+\end{itemize}
+\item[2] Unicode, and its superset standard ISO 10646-1. 16-bit encoding
+ is a reality, and is alive and well in the \TeX{} world, with the
+ extension of \TeX{} called
+ Omega, by John Plaice and Yannis Haralambous. Among many other
+ things, this will allow Indian \TeX{} users to typeset scripts such as
+ Malayalam to a high standard without recourse to pre-processors or
+ any limitations on transcriptions.
+\item[3] Font control. Perhaps we are not in an ideal situation with
+ regard to font encoding and usage in normal \TeX, but we are getting there.
+ While in the \LaTeX{} world T1 encoding is widely accepted, we can
+ hope for similar agreement on 8-bit maths font encoding.
+\item[4] Pictures. Has the \TeX{} user ever had such a rich variety of
+ ways to draw high-quality pictures? Choose from MetaPost, XYpic, or
+ PSTricks for general purpose drawing, Musix\TeX{} for music,
+ PPCH\TeX{} for chemisty, FeynMF for Feynman diagrams, or dozens of
+ others.
+\item[5] Macro packages. With the decline of most of the original
+ plain-based macro packages put together in the mid-late 1980s,
+ \LaTeX, with its huge collection of add-on packages, now has a
+ slightly unhealthy domination of the \TeX-using world. Perhaps 1998
+ will be the time for some new competitors, such as CON\TeX{}t, to
+ start a serious challenge?
+\item[6] \TeX{} extensions. For a good many \TeX{} users, all that is
+ really needed is the Plain format, and a few (just a few) tweaks to
+ \TeX{} to solve some of those nagging programming issues. For some
+ other users, what is needed is a complete re-implementation of \TeX{}
+ in Java, to provide the basis for serious experimentation with
+ modularisation and spreading resources across the Internet. The
+ first group can rejoice, as the second version of $\varepsilon$-\TeX{}
+ is almost released, offering a variety of new features, without
+ compromising \TeX's integrity in any way. The second group can also
+ start to uncross their fingers, as the NTS group will start work on
+ a rewrite of \TeX{} in Java during 1998.
+\item[7] \TeX{} implementations. Does any \TeX{} user still need to
+ compromise on their implementation? With the standard Unix web2c
+ implementation now available for DOS, Windows 32, Amiga, and any
+ Unix platform, healthy competition in Windows 32 from MikTeX, ably
+ maintained shareware Macintosh systems (OzTeX and CMacTeX), it almost
+ seems an embarassment of riches to mention the commercial Y\&Y TeX,
+ Textures, and Scientific Workplace, each offering very significant
+ advantages.
+\item[8] The relationship with SGML. We are reaching an understanding
+ of how to use \TeX{} as a backend formatter for SGML, and also how
+ to use it as a front-end, by converting \TeX{} mss to SGML. Not an
+ easy area to work in, perhaps, but \TeX{} can hold its head high,
+ and say that it is not afraid to work with SGML.
+\item[9] DSSSL, the ISO 10179 standard for a `Document Style Semantics
+ and Specification Language', is now not only a reality, but in daily
+ use, thanks to James Clark's free implementation, \textsf{jade}.
+ By separating style specification from paragraph makeup, this
+ keeps a firm place for \TeX{} in the universe, since DSSSL
+ implementations (or the subsets, such as XSL, which may be implemented
+ for the Web) need a batch-oriented formatting engine to assist them.
+\item[9.8] User groups. Not a whole reason, because we do not yet have
+ user groups to help \TeX{} users all over the world. But by adding the
+ Indian \TeX{} Users Group, we are making a significant
+ contribution to filling that missing 20\%.
+\end{enumerate}
+But a word of warning to conclude --- let us not take \TeX{} into a
+ghetto. Let it work \emph{alongside} other tools and technologies, not
+against them.
+
+\section{The 1997 AGM meeting}
+Those members who had the opportunity, or good sense, to come to the
+\uktug{} annual general meeting had a rare treat of listening to five
+very different, but all entertaining and interesting, speakers:
+\begin{enumerate}
+\item Peter Flynn talked about what it \emph{means} to archive
+ documents, a very salutary reminder that there is more to preserving
+ your work than occasionally copying \texttt{*.tex} on to a floppy
+ disk\ldots
+\item Hans Hagen described his work in developing the hugely-powerful
+ \TeX{} macro package Con\TeX t, and some of the ways he uses it to produce
+ interactive \PDF{} documents, carefully designed for screen use;
+\item Timothy Murphy meditated on \TeX{} and friends redone in Java,
+ and offered a compelling vision of a network-enabled, distributed,
+ \TeX{} world;
+\item Han The Thanh gave an introduction to pdf\TeX, the \TeX{}
+ variant which produces \PDF{} instead of \DVI{};
+\item Philip Taylor described the mouth-watering programmer's
+ enhancements to be provided in $\varepsilon$-\TeX, and the plans for
+ \acro{NTS}.
+\end{enumerate}
+\BV{} plans to bring you a flavour of all these presentations. In this
+issue we print articles by Phil Taylor and Han The Thanh; Peter Flynn and Tim
+Murphy should follow in the next \BV, and we hope to devote an entire
+issue to Con\TeX t.
+
+\section{\TeX{} Live 3}
+We are preparing to make a new \TeX\ Live CD-ROM, with an anticipated
+release date of mid March 1998. It will be distributed to all \uktug\
+members. The changes and enhancements since last year include:
+
+\begin{itemize}
+\item Updated macro, font and documentation packages
+\item December 97 \LaTeX
+\item Improved install scripts
+\item Unix, Win32, DOS (DJGPP) and Amiga binaries based on web2c 7.2
+\item WIN95/NT system runnable directly from the CD-ROM
+\item Omega, $\varepsilon$-TeX and pdfTeX for Unix and Win32
+\item Latest CMacTeX, OzTeX, and MikTeX distributions
+\item Addition of the extra utilities
+\texttt{lacheck},
+\texttt{dvidvi},
+\texttt{dtl},
+\texttt{psutils},
+\texttt{t1utils},
+\texttt{dviselect},
+\texttt{dviconcat} and
+\texttt{TeX4ht}
+ for all the Unix and Win32 binary sets
+\item The full Con\TeX t macro package
+\item Joliet CD-ROM support, so that win32 users see long/mixed-case
+ filenames
+\end{itemize}
+We hope that these improvements make an attractive package for
+members, and take another step towards the painless free \TeX{}
+installations many of us dream of.
+
+\end{article}
+
+
+
+
+