trunk/doc/ltnews26.tex

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  29 % Filename: ltnews26.tex
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  31 % This is issue 26 of LaTeX News.
  32
  33 \documentclass{ltnews}
  34 \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
  35
  36 \usepackage{lmodern,url,hologo}
  37
  38
  39 \publicationmonth{December}
  40 \publicationyear{2016}
  41
  42 \publicationissue{26}
  43
  44 \begin{document}
  45
  46 \maketitle
  47
  48 \section{\eTeX{}}
  49
  50 In \LaTeX{} News~16 (December 2003) the team announced
  51 \begin{quotation}
  52 We expect that within the next two years, releases of \LaTeX{} will
  53 change modestly in order to run best under an extended \TeX{} engine
  54 that contains the \eTeX{} primitives, e.g., \eTeX{} or pdf\TeX{}.
  55 \end{quotation}
  56 and also said
  57 \begin{quotation}
  58 Although the current release does not \emph{require} \eTeX{} features, we
  59 certainly recommend using an extended \TeX{}, especially if you need to debug
  60 macros.
  61 \end{quotation}
  62
  63 For many years the team have worked on the basis that users will have \eTeX{}
  64 available but had not revisited the above statements formally. As of the
  65 January 2017 release of \LaTeXe{}, \eTeX{} is \emph{required} to build the
  66 format, and attempting to build a format without the extensions will fail.
  67
  68 Practically, modern \TeX{} distributions provide the extensions in all engines
  69 other than the ``pure'' Knuth \texttt{tex}, and indeed parts of the
  70 format-building process already require \eTeX{}, most notably some of the UTF-8
  71 hyphenation patterns. As such, there should be no noticeable affect on users of
  72 this change.
  73
  74 The team expect to make wider use of \eTeX{} within the kernel in future;
  75 details will be announced where they impact on end users in a visible way.
  76
  77 \end{document}