L^{A}TEX News

Issue 3, June 1995

Welcome to L^{A}TEX News 3

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.

June 1995 release of L^{A}TEX

June 1995 sees the third 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.

In the last L^{A}TEX News, we said “we don’t expect so much activity in the next six months,” which has turned out not to be true!

Additional input encodings

In the last release of L^{A}TEX we distributed a test version of the inputenc package which allows the use of input characters other than just a–z and A–Z. The package has proved to be robust, so we are now distributing an expanded version. The new release comes with a number of input encodings:

• ascii the standard encoding,

• latin1 the ISO Western European alphabet,

• latin2 the ISO Eastern European alphabet,

• cp437 the IBM codepage 437,

• cp850 the IBM codepage 850, and

• applemac the Apple Macintosh encoding.

These can be used by specifying an option to the inputenc package, for example:

\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}

The new input encodings are currently being tested, but we don’t expect any major changes.

L^{A}TEX getting smaller

In the past releases of L^{A}TEX 2ε, the amount of memory L^{A}TEX requires has increased, but we are pleased to say that this trend has been reversed. We hope that future releases of L^{A}TEX will continue to get smaller.

For example, on this document, the December 1994 release used 52,622 words of memory, and the June 1995 release uses 51,216 words of memory, which is a 2.7% reduction.

We are currently experimenting with other ways of reducing the size of L^{A}TEX. For example, we are experimenting with an option to remove the picture and tabbing environments from the L^{A}TEX kernel, and to load them from a file the first time they are used. This should help L^{A}TEX to run on machines with limited memory. See autoload.txt for details.

Distribution and modification

One topic of discussion that has kept us busy is the distribution and modification conditions of L^{A}TEX. We are committed to keeping L^{A}TEX as free reliable software, and ensuring that (as far as possible) L^{A}TEX documents will produce the same results on all systems.

The modification conditions are currently under discussion, and we would like to hear from anyone interested. Please read modguide.tex for more information.

AMS-L^{A}TEX full release

The AMS-L^{A}TEX packages were still in beta test in the December 1994 release of L^{A}TEX, and the full release came out in January 1995.

AMS-L^{A}TEX is described in the User’s Guide (amsldoc.tex) and in The L^{A}TEX Companion.

PostScript fonts

There is a new test release of the PSNFSS packages for accessing PostScript fonts in L^{A}TEX 2ε. This includes an update to all of the fonts, to remove many of the underfull and overfull \hbox warnings, and improve the setting of non-English languages.

The new release of L^{A}TEX removes all of the ‘hidden’ uses of Computer Modern mathematics. For example, the footnote markers used to use math mode, so always used Computer Modern digits rather than ones from the current text font. This has now been fixed.

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.

The L^{A}TEX home page is

http://www.tex.ac.uk/ctan/latex/ and contains

links to other WWW resources for L^{A}TEX.

L^{A}TEX News, and the L^{A}TEX software, is brought to you by the L^{A}TEX3 project team; Copyright 1995, all rights reserved.