Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!eru!luth!sunic!mcsun!ukc!icdoc!sot-ecs!spqr From: spqr@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Sebastian Rahtz) Newsgroups: comp.text Subject: Re: TeX/LaTeX are not stagnant! (was Re: Help me defend LaTeX) Message-ID: Date: 25 Oct 89 11:48:18 GMT References: <1762@naucse.UUCP> <71781@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <2601@jarthur.Claremont.EDU> <5105@cps3xx.UUCP> Sender: spqr@ecs.soton.ac.uk Organization: Southampton University Computer Science Lines: 34 In-reply-to: smithda@cpsvax.cps.msu.edu's message of 25 Oct 89 02:22:25 GMT >>>>> 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)