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<head>
<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label NTS</title>
</head><body>
<h3>The <i>NTS</i> project</h3>

<p>The <i>NTS</i> project was established in 1992, to produce a typesetting
system that's even better than TeX.  The project is not simply
enhancing TeX, for two reasons: first, that TeX itself has been
frozen by Knuth
(see <a href="FAQ-TeXfuture.html">the future of TeX</a>), and second,
even if they <em>were</em> allowed to develop the program, some members
of the <i>NTS</i> team feel that TeX in its present form is simply
unsuited to further development.  While all those involved in the
project are committed to TeX, they recognise
that the end product may very well have little in common with TeX
other than its philosophy.
<p>The group's first product was nevertheless a set of
extensions and enhancements to TeX, implemented through the standard
medium of a change-file.  The extended system is known e-TeX, and is
100% compatible with TeX; furthermore, e-TeX can
construct a format 
that <em>is</em> "TeX", with no extensions or enhancements present.
<p>The most recent base source of e-TeX (i.e., the Web change file) is
available on CTAN.  Following a suggestion from the
<a href="FAQ-LaTeX3.html">LaTeX project</a>, most (La)TeX distributions now
make <em>all</em> their LaTeX executables with the
e-TeX extensions (that is, <i>latex</i> is really e-LaTeX,
<i>pdflatex</i> is really PDFe-LaTeX, and so on).  In
this context, some of the newer LaTeX packages are designed to
require the e-TeX extensions.
<p>The project has now produced a beta-version of
TeX written (from scratch) in Java.  Since it <em>isn't</em> TeX
(it remains slightly incompatible in microscopic ways), it's known as
<i>NTS</i>.  As might be expected, this first re-implementation runs
rather slowly, but its operation <em>has</em> been demonstrated in
public, and the beta-release is available on
CTAN.
<dl>
<dt><tt><i>e-TeX</i></tt><dd>Browse <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/e-tex/">systems/e-tex/</a>
<dt><tt><i>NTS</i></tt><dd><a href="ftp://cam.ctan.org/tex-archive/systems/nts.zip">systems/nts</a> (<a href="ftp://cam.ctan.org/tex-archive/systems/nts.tar.gz">gzipped tar</a>, <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/nts/">browse</a>)
</dl>
<p><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=NTS">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=NTS</a>
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