🚀 go-pugleaf

I have released a new version of web2c, the port of the basic TeX
project web programs to Unix.  You can get it by ftp from
	ftp.cs.umb.edu [192.12.26.23]:pub/tex/{web,web2c}.tar.Z

and soon from
        ics.uci.edu [128.195.1.1]:TeX/{web,web2c}.tar.Z.
(among other archives, no doubt)

Send bug reports to me.

Thanks to all the many people who contributed to this release; I tried
to record the names in the ChangeLog.  Special thanks to Bernd Raichle,
who did most of the work to make the format/base file sharing work.
(But if it still doesn't work, it's my fault, not his!)

This updates web2c to the latest master WEB sources, as released by
Professor Knuth in March 1992.  Aside from the usual bug fixes and
(mis)improvements in the installation, I made the following changes.

* big TeX, big Metafont, and big BibTeX are the defaults.  I increased
  some of the constants slightly.  The trie patch is installed in the
  main sources.

* the path searching code has been completely rewritten and (in some
  ways) simplified.  The *_SUBDIR variables are gone; instead, you just
  put two trailing slashes in a path component to get subdirectory
  searching, as in TEXFONTS=/usr/local/lib/tex/fonts//.  Also,
  subdirectory searching is recursive.  All the search paths
  are treated the same way.

  ~ and ~user are expanded as usual in pathnames and filenames.  Except
  that, of course, in plain TeX `~' is an active character which expands
  into various TeX primitives before the filename code ever sees it; so
  `~/foo' still won't work when it wants another filename.  I don't see
  any good solution to this.  You could add a local macro \HOME which
  is a catcode 12 ~ to your plain.tex; then users could say
  `\HOME/foo'.  But this can't be done by default, since it's not 100%
  backward-compatible.

  I haven't implemented %-substitutions in paths yet.  Next time.

  I've modified dvips and xdvi to use this same code; they are in
  xdvi-k.tar.Z and dvips-k.diff.Z.

* patgen2, an update for the 8-bit features in TeX written by P.
  Breitenlohner, is included.

* format files are (finally) byte-order-independent, which is necessary
  (but not sufficient) for sharing them across architectures.  If the
  format creates any glue_ratio words in TeX's memory, the .fmt file
  will not be sharable, since it will have floating-point; but the
  common formats don't do this, so they *are* sharable.

* `foo.tex' is tried before `foo'.

karl@cs.umb.edu
Member of the League for Programming Freedom---write to league@prep.ai.mit.edu.