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From: karl@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu (Karl Berry)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re:  The Books
Message-ID: <13526@life.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 24 Feb 91 16:16:36 GMT
References: <9102212329.AA18023@autarch.acsu.buffalo.edu> <1991Feb22.165234.8830@digi.lonestar.org>
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Reply-To: karl@cs.umb.edu
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In-reply-to: kgallagh@digi.lonestar.org's message of 22 Feb 91 16:52:34 GMT

> It's the 17th printing or later of the SOFT COVER edition of The
> TeXbook that applies to TeX 3.0.  If you wish to obtain the HARD COVER
> edition of the TeXbook, you want the 9th printing or later.
This is true.

> "TeX for
> the Impatient" appears to have assumed that Addison-Wesley kept the
> soft cover and hard cover printings in sync.
No, we didn't assume it; at the time we wrote the sentence about the
17th printing, the hardcover edition hadn't been updated.  Admittedly,
we should have said 17th softcover printing.  Incidentally, the 18th
printing has at least one addition to the 17th, namely, \topglue.

> I believe I read somewhere that volumes B, C, and D are being (or have
> been) updated for TeX 3.0, but I could be wrong.  
I'm sure that Knuth has updated the manuscripts.  Our editor at
Addison-Wesley (Peter Gordon) told me that A-W still has a large stock
of volumes B&D, and so they weren't planning on going back to press
for quite some time.  I pointed out to him that I didn't see why anybody
would want to buy the old versions of B&D (except for people who are
only interested in them as WEBs, surely a tiny fraction of the number of
people who buy the books), but he didn't seem impressed.  Same goes for
the Metafontbook, both hardcover and softcover.

karl@cs.umb.edu