Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!haven!uvaarpa!mcnc!duke!romeo!gm
From: gm@romeo.cs.duke.edu (Greg McGary)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: TeX
Message-ID: <13775@duke.cs.duke.edu>
Date: 8 Mar 89 01:46:04 GMT
References: <1324@ndmath.UUCP> <1795@uwovax.uwo.ca> <2735@usceast.UUCP>
Sender: news@duke.cs.duke.edu
Reply-To: gm@romeo.UUCP (Greg McGary)
Organization: Duke University CS Dept.; Durham, NC
Lines: 30

In article <2735@usceast.UUCP> sridhar@usceast.UUCP (M. A. Sridhar) writes:
>I obtained SBTeX from Simtel20. It seems as if one cannot build preloaded
>versions of TeX and LaTeX from SBTeX. Is this true? How much of a time penalty
>is involved when using such non-preloaded versions? If not, how do I build
>preloaded versions from SBTeX?

No you can't preload with SBTeX, but my experience has been that SBTeX
is so fast that it's not worth worrying about any time-penalty.  SBTeX
loads quickly because of its small-size, and because the .fmt files are
designed for rapid loading.  There's a disk-space bonus in that you
need only one copy of sbtex for use with any of your .fmt files.  I use
plain.fmt, latex.fmt, and my own hacked gmplain.fmt.

I use the MKS toolkit and have these aliases in ksh:

alias tex 'sbtex \&plain'
alias latex 'sbtex \&lplain'
alias gmtex 'sbtex \&gmplain'

If you don't use MKS, you can always create batch file `tex.bat' like so:

sbtex &plain %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9

Don't be put off by SBTeX's lack of preloading.  It's so good,
it doesn't need it!

-- Greg McGary
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