L^{A}TEX News

Issue 2, December 1994

Welcome to L^{A}TEX News 2

An issue of L^{A}TEX News will accompany every future release of L^{A}TEX. It will tell you about important events, such as major bug fixes, newly available packages, or any other L^{A}TEX news.

December 1994 release of L^{A}TEX

December 1994 sees the second release of L^{A}TEX 2ε. We are on schedule to deliver a release of L^{A}TEX every six months, in December and June.

This release has seen quite a lot of activity, which is not too surprising as it’s only been a year since the first test release of L^{A}TEX 2ε. We don’t expect so much activity in the next six months.

Many of the changes are minor improvements and bug-fixes—see L^{A}TEX 2ε for authors (usrguide.tex), L^{A}TEX 2ε font selection (fntguide.tex) and our change log (changes.txt) for more details.

However, there are two important new packages available for L^{A}TEX: inputenc and AMS-L^{A}TEX.

Accented input

One of the problems with writing non-English documents in L^{A}TEX is the accent commands. Reading documents containing text like na\"\i ve is frustrating, especially if your keyboard allows you to type naïve.

In the past, L^{A}TEX has not supported input containing accented characters such as ï, because Windows, Macintosh and Unix all have different ways of dealing with accented input, called input encodings.

However, the inputenc package allows you to specify which input encoding your document is written with, for example to use the ISO Latin-1 encoding, you type:

   \usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}

At the moment, inputenc supports the ascii and latin1 input encodings, but more will be added with future releases.

The inputenc package is currently a test release. The user interface for the full release will be upwardly compatible with the test version.

AMS-L^{A}TEX

AMS-L^{A}TEX is a set of miscellaneous extensions for L^{A}TEX distributed by the American Mathematical Society. They provide superior information structure and superior printed output for mathematical documents.

There are far too many features of AMS-L^{A}TEX to list here. AMS-L^{A}TEX is described in the accompanying documentation, and in The L^{A}TEX Companion.

Version 1.2beta of AMS-L^{A}TEX was released for testing by intrepid users in October 1994. The full release of AMS-L^{A}TEX 1.2 is expected in early January 1995.

It will be divided into two bundles:

• the amsfonts packages, which give access to hundreds of new mathematical symbols, and new math fonts such as blackboard bold and fraktur.

• the amsmath packages, which provide finer control over mathematical typesetting, such as multi-line subscripts, enhanced theorem and proof environments, and improved displayed equations,

For compatibility with older documents, an amstex package will be provided.

L^{A}TEX on the internet

L^{A}TEX has its own home page on the World Wide Web, with the URL:

                                                      http://www.tex.ac.uk/CTAN/latex/

This page describes L^{A}TEX and the L^{A}TEX3 project, and contains pointers to other L^{A}TEX resources, such as the user guides, the TEX Frequently Asked Questions, and the L^{A}TEX bugs database.

The electronic home of anything TEX-related is the Comprehensive TEX Archive Network (CTAN). This is a network of cooperating ftp sites, with over a gigabyte of TEX material:

                                                      ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/
                                                      ftp://ftp.shsu.edu/tex-archive/
                                                      ftp://ftp.dante.de/tex-archive/

For more information, see the L^{A}TEX home page.

Further information

For more information on TEX and L^{A}TEX, get in touch with your local TEX Users Group, or the international TEX Users Group, P. O. Box 869, Santa Barbara, CA 93102-0869, USA, Fax: +1 805 963 8358, EMail: tug@tug.org.

L^{A}TEX News, and the L^{A}TEX software, is brought to you by the L^{A}TEX3 project team; Copyright 1994, all rights reserved.