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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}
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