trunk/doc/ltnews10.tex

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  29 % Filename: ltnews10.tex 12/01/1998
  30
  31 % This is issue 10 of LaTeX News.
  32
  33 \documentclass
  34 %    [lw35fonts]
  35    {ltnews}[1999/02/23]
  36
  37 % \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
  38
  39 \publicationmonth{December}
  40 \publicationyear{1998}
  41 \publicationissue{10}
  42
  43 \begin{document}
  44
  45 \maketitle
  46
  47
  48 \section{Five years of \LaTeXe}
  49
  50 Since this is the 10th edition of \LaTeX{} News, the (no longer) New
  51 Standard \LaTeX{} must have hit the streets almost this long ago.  In
  52 fact it was only the beta-version that some people got just in time for
  53 Christmas~1993, and since then there has been a lot of tidying-up and
  54 smoothing of rough edges (not to mention a few bug fixes!).
  55
  56 Maybe it is time for something more radically different to emerge and
  57 be hungrily adopted by the world; but don't panic, we shall be
  58 maintaining what you have now for a long time yet.  Amongst the more
  59 polite things that have been written about our efforts, we found that this
  60 quote (somewhat censored to protect the guilty) well reflects some of
  61 our feelings about working on \LaTeX{} over the years: \textit{the mere
  62 existence of \LaTeXe{} is a great miracle}.
  63
  64
  65   \section{Restructuring the \LaTeX{} distribution}
  66
  67   Since the (once) `new' standard \LaTeX{} has reached such a venerable
  68   age, we are reviewing the way in which the system is presented to the
  69   world.
  70
  71   An early intention is to define, given the wide variety of good
  72   packages now available, what now constitutes a useful installation of
  73   \LaTeX{}. We also hope that such a definition will help document
  74   portability if it leads to a future in which a \LaTeX{} class
  75   designer can reasonably assume that a known list of
  76   facilities will be there for all users (so that each class
  77   need not supply them).
  78
  79   As a first small step towards this definition, we shall replace the
  80   \texttt{latex/packages} subdirectory on \ctan{}.
  81   This directory was a curious mixture of the important, such as the
  82   \LaTeX{} \texttt{tools}, that any self-respecting \LaTeX{}
  83   installation ought to have, and the esoteric or experimental.
  84
  85   The esoterica from \texttt{packages} will be moved to
  86   new locations, as follows:
  87   \begin{quote}
  88     \texttt{expl3}  to \texttt{latex/exptl/project}\\
  89     \texttt{mfnfss} to \texttt{latex/contrib/supported/mfnfss}
  90   \end{quote}
  91
  92   The subdirectory that replaces \texttt{packages} will be called
  93   \texttt{latex/required}; all the other sub-directories of
  94   \texttt{packages} will be moved there.
  95
  96 \vspace{17pt}
  97 \pagebreak
  98
  99  \section{\LaTeX\ Project on the Internet}
 100 A new \texttt{latex-project.org} domain has been registered.
 101 The web site is not yet fully functional but the old \LaTeX\ pages from
 102 \ctan\ are available at \texttt{http://www.latex-project.org/} and the
 103 \LaTeX\ bug reporting address has been changed to
 104 \texttt{latex-bugs@latex-project.org}.
 105
 106   \section{Restructuring the \LaTeX{} package licenses}
 107
 108 Several people have requested an easy mechanism for the distribution
 109 of \LaTeX\ packages and other software ``under the same conditions as
 110 \LaTeX''.  The old \texttt{legal.txt} file was unsuitable as a general
 111 licence as it referred to specific \LaTeX\ authors, and to specific
 112 files.
 113
 114 Therefore, in this release \texttt{legal.txt} contains just the
 115 copyright notice and a reference to the new \emph{\LaTeX\ Project
 116 Public License} (LPPL) for the distribution and modification
 117 conditions. The \texttt{tools}, \texttt{graphics}, and \texttt{mfnfss}
 118 packages also now refer to this license in their distribution notices.
 119
 120   \section{Support for Cyrillic encodings}
 121
 122 Basic Cyrillic support, as announced in \LaTeX{} News~9, is now
 123 finally an official part of \LaTeX{}.  It includes support for the
 124 following standard Cyrillic font encodings (this list may
 125 grow):~\mbox{\texttt{T2A T2B T2C X2}}.
 126
 127 It also includes various Cyrillic input encodings (20~in total,
 128 including commonly used variants and Mongolian Cyrillic
 129 encodings). This provides platform independent and
 130 sophisticated basic support for high-quality typesetting in various
 131 Cyrillic-based languages.
 132
 133 For further information see the file \texttt{cyrguide.tex}.
 134
 135 \section{Tools distribution}
 136
 137 The \texttt{varioref} package has been extended to support textual
 138 page references to a range of objects: e.g.,~if \texttt{eq-first}
 139 and \texttt{eq-last} are the label names for the first and last
 140 equation in a sequence, then you can now write
 141 \begin{verbatim}
 142   see~\vrefrange{eq-first}{eq-last}
 143 \end{verbatim}
 144 This results in different text depending on whether both
 145 labels fall on the same page.
 146
 147 Some additional user commands, as well as building-blocks for writing
 148 private extensions, are described in the accompanying documentation.
 149
 150
 151
 152 \end{document}
 153