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From: chris@umcp-cs.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.text
Subject: Re: TeX availability
Message-ID: <7090@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 18-May-84 21:01:24 EDT
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.7090
Posted: Fri May 18 21:01:24 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 20-May-84 00:38:55 EDT
References: <7327@gatech.UUCP>
Organization: Univ. of Maryland, Computer Science Dept.
Lines: 97

(As this might (should!) be of general interest, I'm posting this
reply rather than mailing it.)

	From: arnold@gatech.UUCP

	Does anyone know anything about Donald Knuth's TeX (and
	MetaFont) system(s)?

TeX is available now.  MetaFont will likely become available in a
few months.  (It's being converted to WEB, and all the font
descriptions will probably need still more changes.)

	What language(s) is it written in?

WEB, which is ``Pascal with macros and documentation''.  It is
essentially Pascal, with some of the more obvious gaping Pascal
language problems filled in (macros (but not separate compilation,
sigh)).

	Where do I get it?

The University of Washington has been distributing Unix TeX.  Send
mail to uw-beaver!furuta or furuta@washington.

	Is it available cheap for universities?

Yes.  I think there is a tape handling charge.

	Will it handle laser printers?

Of course.  There are interfaces for the Versatec V80 and the Imagen
Imprint-10, which I know work unmodified, and some other interfaces
which I can't say anything about, not having the devices to experiment
with....

	Probable machines it would be run on:

	Vax 11/780 running 4.x BSD.

Fine; the hard work of setting up TeX for 4.1BSD and fixing the
Pascal compiler to have an ``other'' ``case''-clause has already
been done.

	Cyber 170 running NOS.

Dunno if anyone has done anything for that.

	IBM 4341 running VM.

It runs on 4341s running CMS, I think.  There are a couple of bugs
in IBM's Pascal compiler that have to be worked around, as I recall.

	Xerox 9700 laser printer

I don't know of any driver for that, but drivers aren't too terribly
hard to write.

	Preferred implementation languages: C, Pascal, PL/1.

Some of the device drivers are in C.  There should be one (DVI2LGP,
I'd guess) in WEB or Pascal.

Now---for those who have been curious enough to read through this
and are still wondering ``What's TeX?'':  TeX is a typesetting
system.  Imagine what troff would be like if it weren't ugly inside
and outside.  That's pretty close to what TeX is.  TeX can handle
a practially infinite number of fonts (well, 256 in the current
implementation).  It has an internal resolution better than that
of visible light (one ``scaled point''---scaled points are the
internal units of resolution---is 1/65536'th of a point; one point
is 1/72'th of an inch; so one scaled point is 1/4736286.72'th of
an inch).

There is another set of macros available (though problems with
fonts are delaying release) called LaTeX.  These were inspired
by Scribe, so I imagine that LaTeX and Scribe do things similarly.
>From what I've seen, LaTeX is quite fancy:  it has commands for
building tables, figures, Tables of Contents, sections, line
and circle drawings, etc.

TeX still needs a few more things, like
- an interface to refer;
- fancy drawing stuff like pic for ditroff; and
- a way to print stuff on low-resolution typewriter-style devices
  (i.e., daisy wheel printers).

The TeXbook is available in bookstores now (``The TeXbook'',
D. E. Knuth, Addison-Wesley).  This is a complete description
of TeX from the user's viewpoint.

Oh well, this article is long enough already.  \bye % Plain TeX's
						    % file-ender, of
						    % course.
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci (301) 454-7690
UUCP:	{seismo,allegra,brl-bmd}!umcp-cs!chris
CSNet:	chris@umcp-cs		ARPA:	chris@maryland