🚀 go-pugleaf

>>>>> On 25 Oct 89 02:22:25 GMT, smithda@cpsvax.cps.msu.edu (J. Daniel Smith) said:

 > Any insights as to what kind of "dramatic changes to TeX" will be
 > made?  I thought TeX "frozen" and that changes would no longer be
 > made.  This is the first I've heard of this....does anyone have any
Don was being a bit mischievous using the word `dramatic', perhaps;
the changes affect support for non-American users, viz acceptance of
8-bit input, multi-language hyphenation and hyphenation of accented
& ligatured words. I think Knuth's proposal appeared in texhax; the
latest news from Stanford (dated 3am...) is that he has a complete
version 3 and is working on the new TRIP. I suppose the bottom line
for the majority of American users is that version 3 won't make the
slightest difference to their daily work.

I think Lamport's agreement to a rewrite of LaTeX is rather more
interesting; that could make life better for all of us.

Re the professor of writing who has never heard of LaTeX and thinks
its a heap of ****, does he teach PostScript? it depends whether his
course (I'd drop it, if I was the questioner!) is teaching theory or
practice. There is no doubt at all that PostScript and TeX are
fascinating examples of the sort of languages you need to do
typesetting; the doubt is whether you should dress them up in better
front-ends. Wordperfect (ugh! you think those function keys are
mnemonic?) has a formatting engine, and an underlying markup language,
its just that someone has bolted on a front-end. Maybe the infamous
prof. should be encouraged to look at Publisher


 
--
Sebastian Rahtz                        S.Rahtz@uk.ac.soton.ecs (JANET)
Computer Science                       S.Rahtz@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Bitnet)
Southampton S09 5NH, UK                S.Rahtz@sot-ecs.uucp    (uucp)