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From: dhosek@sif.claremont.edu (Hosek, Donald A.)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: emtex, TUG
Message-ID: <8242@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>
Date: 31 Aug 90 03:54:25 GMT
Sender: news@jarthur.Claremont.EDU
Reply-To: dhosek@sif.claremont.edu
Organization: Harvey Mudd College
Lines: 55

In article <25456@boulder.Colorado.EDU>, monk@boulder.Colorado.EDU (D. Monk) writes...

>	I agree with the criticizm of Vulis concerning TUG. I think
>that the TUG editors should make a conscious effort to publicize
>public domain stuff; perhaps a regular column, or some inclusion of
>the British list of TeX listservers. 

Umm, I'd say that the "TeX Resources" column is a decent step in
that direction. Do you read TUGboat? Do you even know what I'm
talking about here? Consider also, that Barbara Beeton does
TUGboat in her spare time. She does not get paid for the immense
amounts of times she puts in on that journal. The last version
of the TeX Resources column

There's an awful lot of stuff out there. The ymir archive has
5280 files in 196 directories (ignoring the whole fonts tree).
I'm missing an awful lot. Printing the directory listing from
Aston in 8point type two-up gave me a stack of paper of around
50-some-odd pages. Jon Radel's collection of PD software for the
PC fills some huge number of disks in PKZIP format. There are an
awful lot of places to get these things. I could fill a screen
with a list of FTP sites alone (and remember, not everyone has
access to FTP, or electronic networks at all, for that matter).

The DVI driver information I have fills a manilla folder with
half an inch of paper. There's a significant amount of effort
that goes into just keeping that up to date, let alone my poor
attempts at answering driver queries.

Let me say again, TUGboat is the journal of the users group, for
the users group and BY the users group. Barbara Beeton is
practically BEGGING people to write articles. (And as long as I'm
droning on and on here, if you would like to write an article for
TUGboat or have something for them, just send a note to
tugboat@math.ams.com).

Do you know what I'd like to see? I'd like to see someone take
sbTeX, emTeX and DosTeX and compare them and tell me what each's
strengths and weaknesses are. I'd like to see people like Wayne
Sullivan, Eberhard Mattes and Gary Beihl write articles for
TUGboat saying that they've written nice public domain pieces of
software like the software they've written. 

I'll tell you what. If you have some concrete suggestions about
TUGboat, send them to me, I'll collect them and forward them to
the rest of the TUGboat editorial committee.

-dh

---
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