path: root/usergrps/uktug/baskervi/5_1/editor.tex

\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