trunk/doc/ltnews15.tex

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  29 % Filename: ltnews15.tex
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  31 % This is issue 15 of LaTeX News.
  32
  33 \documentclass
  34 %    [lw35fonts]     % uncomment this line to get Palatino
  35    {ltnews}[2004/02/28]
  36
  37 % \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
  38
  39 \publicationmonth{December}
  40 \publicationyear{2003}
  41 \publicationissue{15}
  42
  43 \begin{document}
  44
  45 \maketitle
  46
  47 %\raisefirstsection
  48
  49 \section{Anniversary release}
  50
  51 Yes, it's now 10~years since the first release in this series and, for
  52 Knuthists, this release also contains \textit{Issue 16}\,!
  53
  54 Meanwhile this \textit{Issue~15} describes the major new features in
  55 the current release whilst \textit{Issue~16} looks\newline
  56 a little way into the future of \LaTeX{}.
  57
  58
  59 \section{LPPL -- new version}
  60
  61 Most importantly, there is now a new version, 1.3, of the \LaTeX{}
  62 Project Public Licence.   Many of you will\newline
  63 be thrilled to know that, following the exchange of over 1600 e-mail
  64 messages dissecting various aspects of its philosophy such as `how
  65 many angels can appear in the name of a file before it becomes
  66 non-free', this version\newline
  67 is now officially a DFSG (Debian Free Software Guidelines) approved license.
  68 The discussions start at
  69 \url{http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200207/threads.html}
  70 with high traffic throughout August to October~2002 and further
  71 heated discussions starting in April~2003 and concluding
  72 around June at
  73 \url{http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/debian-legal-200306/msg00206.html}.
  74
  75 The important features of the new version are useful clarifications in
  76 the wording, and revised procedures\newline
  77 for making a change to the Current Maintainer of a package.  Special
  78 thanks to all those people from\newline Debian Legal who worked
  79 constructively with us\newline
  80 on this onerous task, especially but not exclusively\newline
  81 Jeff Licquia and Branden Robinson.
  82
  83
  84 \section{Small updates to varioref}
  85
  86 The English has been corrected in \verb|\reftextbefore|
  87 (an incompatible change).  There are other extensions
  88 such as \verb|\labelformat|, \verb|\Ref|, \verb|\Vref| and \verb|\vpagerefnum|.
  89 Some Dutch text has also been changed and two\newline
  90 new options added: \package{slovak} and \package{slovene}.
  91
  92
  93 \section{New and more robust commands}
  94
  95 Many of the math mode commands for compound symbols have been made
  96 robust and a new robust command has been added: \verb|\nobreakdashes|.
  97 This last is a low-level command, borrowed from the \package{amsmath}
  98 package, for use only before hyphens or dashes.  It prevents the line
  99 break that is normally allowed\newline
 100 after the following sequence of dashes.
 101
 102
 103 \section{Fixing font sizes}
 104
 105 The new \package{fix-cm} package, by Walter Schmidt, changes the CM font
 106 definition (\texttt{.fd}) files so that similar design sizes are used
 107 in both the \texttt{OT1} and \texttt{T1} encodings.
 108
 109
 110 \section{Font encodings}
 111
 112 A number of options have been added to the \package{textcomp} package,
 113 enabling only available glyphs to be used.
 114 Also, the `NFSS font families' are now divided into five different groups
 115 according to the subset of glyphs each provides from the full
 116 collection of symbols in the TS1 encoding.
 117 Given sufficient information about a font family
 118 \package{textcomp} will use this in order to limit the\newline
 119 typesetting to those glyphs that are available.
 120
 121 Use of this mechanism has also enhanced \verb|\oldstylenums|
 122 to use the current font if possible.
 123
 124
 125 \section{Displaying font tables}
 126
 127 With the \package{nfssfont} package you can now
 128 specify the font to display by giving its `NFSS classification',
 129 rather than needing to know its external font file's name.
 130 It is also now possible to generate large collections of font
 131 tables in batch mode by providing a suitable input file.
 132
 133
 134 \section{New input encodings}
 135
 136 The \package{inputenc} package has been extended as follows:
 137 \package{macce} input encoding
 138 (Apple Central European),
 139 thanks to Radek Tryc and Marcin Wolinski; \package{cp1257}\newline
 140 for Baltic languages; \package{latin10},
 141 thanks to Ionel Ciob\^{i}c\u{a}.\newline
 142 The euro symbol has by
 143 now been added to several encodings:
 144 \package{ansinew}, \package{cp1250}
 145 and \package{cp1252} (which also\newline
 146 has another addition), whilst \package{cp858}
 147 adds it to \package{cp850}.
 148
 149
 150 \section{Unicode input}
 151
 152 Partial, experimental support for text files that use the Unicode
 153 encoding form UTF-8 is now provided by the option \package{utf8} for
 154 the \package{inputenc} package.
 155
 156 The only Unicode text file characters supported by the current version
 157 are those based on the most common inputs for glyphs from the small
 158 collection\newline
 159 of standard \LaTeX{} Latin encodings.
 160
 161
 162 \section{And finally \ldots\ pict2e}
 163
 164 The old, non-functional version of this package has been removed
 165  as there is now a fully working version from Hubert G\"a{\ss}lein
 166  and Rolf Niepraschk.  It is described
 167  in \textit{The \LaTeX{} Manual}.
 168
 169 \end{document}