Subject: TeXhax Digest V89 #78 From: TeXhax Digest Errors-To: TeXhax-request@cs.washington.edu Maint-Path: TeXhax-request@cs.washington.edu To: TeXhax-Distribution-List:; Reply-To: TeXhax@cs.washington.edu TeXhax Digest Tuesday, August 29, 1989 Volume 89 : Issue 78 Moderators: Tiina Modisett and Pierre MacKay %%% The TeXhax digest is brought to you as a service of the TeX Users Group %%% %%% in cooperation with the UnixTeX distribution service at the %%% %%% University of Washington %%% Today's Topics: Re: Organizing a volunteer corps (Vol 89, Issue 72) Pronunciation of TeX Re: clarkson address Workshops, European TeX Conference LaTeX style for abstracts for APS meetings Japanese TeX Large fonts -- cmr & cmbx LaTeX-XeT anywhere? BIGTEX, ctex Source of "nabla" in TeXbook? TeX performance Re: Re: TeX vs troff DVI-to-Imagen software ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 18 Aug 89 22:33 EDT From: tlimonc@drew.bitnet Subject: Re: Organizing a volunteer corps (Vol 89, Issue 72) Keywords: suggestions First, I'd like to thank the people that suggested that once DVI->whatever and download it to my PClone, that I use COPY/B file prn. It works great! Secondly, we have installed the DECUS TeX collection and it works fine, but the example TEX$EXAMPLES:comp_manual.tex (which incompasses many \input files) compiles with many errors. The printout looks ok, but I wonder if some other file is the main document to pass through LaTEX. Or, is it not a complete example? Lastly, I like Max Hailperin's suggestion of a organized corp of TeXperts answering the questions on this list, but has anyone considered splitting this list into one for experts and one for "just started" users? Another possible suggestion is to post a monthly "commonly asked questions... and their answers" message. This works in many Usenet newsgroups to clear up common questions. Tom ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 19 Aug 89 13:33:16 MET From: Victor Eijkhout Subject: Pronunciation of TeX Keywords: TeX, pronunciation Someone remarked that the sound of the 'X' in TeX seems to exist in Dutch. This is true globally speaking, but the exact pronunciation of this 'g' is subject to regional variations. It ranges from almost the mere sound of breathing (south-east part of the Netherlands) to a gutteral sound (west part) that inspired an Englishman to remark 'Dutch is such a charming language, and so useful for clearing the throat'. By the way, this whole discussion is typical for what the Dutch call 'the cucumber season'. Meaning the low-tide in real news this time of year. Victor Eijkhout Department of Mathematics University of Nijmegen Toernooiveld 5 "Far out in the uncharted 6525 ED Nijmegen, the Netherlands backwaters of the unfash- ionable end of the 080-613169 western spiral arm of the galaxy" u641000@HNYKUN11.BITNET -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 28 Aug 89 14:49:06 -0400 From: mrd@sun.soe.clarkson.edu Subject: Re: clarkson address Keywords: clarkson, archive-server >Both "clarkson.edu" and "sun.soe.clarkson.edu" are listed in TUGBoat >and I have for a long time tried both addresses in numerous attempts >to get some .bst files. I have been able to contact >postmaster@sun.soe.clarkson.edu so now I have proof that I am very sorry that you are having troubles with the archive-server. In the future please mail to archive-managment@sun.soe.clarkson.edu. I will always respond to query sent to that address (if possible - if I can't get mail to you after 3 tries then I give up. This is normally only a problem with uucp sites) I don't get mail sent to postmaster. I suspect Rob Logan gave you a suitable path because you seem to be requesting more files. Just in case, the following path should work path bt%irfu.se@uunet.uu.net Our mailer sometimes gets confused by unusual mail addresses (read those that don't end in .edu .com .gov and .bitnet). The service of that mailer is out of my control and I have found that uunet.uu.net is very stable and complete. We have added another service to help peole who are having troubles with mail. To obtain archives on tape via US-mail then mail to Rob Logan ERC Clarkson University Potsdam NY 13676 a self addressed stamped tape (8mm, 1/4 inch, 1/2 inch) with a check for $20 made to Clarkson University and a list of the archives that you want (eg latex-style and texhax). You can ask for as many archives as will fit on the tape but you can not ask for individual files. The tape will be written in Unix tar format. Unless you specify otherwise the tape will be written at the highest possible density. NOTE: if the tape is not self addressed and stamped we will keep that tape and use it for backups. For your information that money is used to pay a student to copy the tapes and any money left over is put into an account to be used to eventually buy a disk drive dedicated to the archive server. Contributions are strongly encouraged. Michael DeCorte // H215-546-0497 W386-8164 Fax386-8252 // mrd@clutx.bitnet 2300 Naudain St. "H", Phil, PA 19146 // mrd@sun.soe.clarkson.edu Clarkson Archive Server // commands = help, index, send, path archive-server@sun.soe.clarkson.edu archive-server%sun.soe.clarkson.edu@omnigate.bitnet dumb1!dumb2!dumb3!smart!sun.soe.clarkson.edu!archive-server -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 28 Aug 89 13:39 GMT+0200 From: anne.brueggemann-klein@sun1.ruf.uni-freiburg.dbp.de Subject: Workshops, European TeX Conference Keywords: Workshops, European TeX Conference There are still some places available in the workshops "Introduction to METAFONT" and "Advanced macro writing and developing LaTeX styles" before and after the European TeX Conference 1989 in Karlsruhe, West Germany. The fee for the workshops is DM 200,-- (no meals, accomodation etc. included). If you want to register, please contact Rainer Rupprecht Rechenzentrum Universitaet Karlsruhe Postfach 6800 7500 Karlsruhe 1, FRG Telephone: (0721) 608-4031 e-mail: RZ32 at DKAUNI2 (bitnet) or send a note to me at abk@sun1.ruf.uni-freiburg.dbp.de (Anne Brueggemann-Klein) immediately. Please find enclosed the description of the workshops copied from the previous announcement. --> Advanced macro writing and developing LaTeX styles --> Joachim Schrod, Detig Schrod TeXsys and TH Darmstadt --> September 14th/15th, 10--15 participants Joachim Schrod is both an experienced programmer and TeX macro specialist, working on TeX portations, new members of the WEB language family and macro development since 1981. He is contributing frequently to TeXhax and tugboat. He is the author of a highly portable driver family, YADD (Yet Another DVI Driver family) and participant of the DVI driver standards committee. His course addresses people having some experience with TeX and in writing simple macros, probably often struggling with the unexpected side effects caused by the non-modular structure of LaTeX. As LaTeX style development is always (Plain) TeX macro development, the course will first introduce you to the principles of the programming language Plain TeX, namely dynamic/static binding, expansion, and interrupt handling (output routines). Then the LaTeX programming interface is presented, not formally specified, but as an informal description of the most important macros for style development. The workshop is a mixture of lectures and hands-on practical sessions. Prerequisites: A good working knowledge of TeX and LaTeX is assumed. Bring your own \TeX{}book. --> Introduction to METAFONT --> Don Hosek, Pitzer College --> September 9th/10th, 10--15 participants Don Hosek of TeXmag fame is an active member of the TeX Users Group, TUG, participating in the TUGboat editorial committee and the DVI driver standards committee. In addition, he has been teaching courses for TUG for some time now. The workshop will cover the basic concepts of METAFONT, beginning with what it does and what good it is. Participants will become familiar with using METAFONT to generate characters from existing METAFONT programs and to develop characters and logos on their own. Topics will include an explanation of METAFONT's mode_def's, drawing shapes using METAFONT's capabilities, an introduction to METAFONT's mathematical abilities, and macros and variables in METAFONT. Prerequisites: No METAFONT knowledge is assumed. Experience with TeX is recommended. Bring your own METAFONTbook. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 17 Aug 89 04:43:58 PDT From: KARNEY%PPC.MFENET@CCC.MFECC.LLNL.GOV Subject: LaTeX style for abstracts for APS meetings Keywords: LaTeX, abstracts, APS I have written a LaTeX style, apsabstract.sty, for formatting abstracts for meetings of the American Physical Society. I have submitted it to the LaTeX style collection at Clarkson. If you have problems getting it from that source, I can mail you a copy. Charles Karney Plasma Physics Laboratory Phone: +1 609 243 2607 Princeton University MFEnet: Karney@PPC.MFEnet PO Box 451 Internet: Karney%PPC.MFEnet@NMFECC.LLNL.GOV Princeton, NJ 08543-0451 Bitnet: Karney%PPC.MFEnet@LBL.Bitnet -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 18 Aug 89 22:00:32 CST From: Tsong-Min Wu Subject: Japanese TeX Keywords: TeX, fonts, Japanese In his report on JTeX (Japanese TeX), in TUGBoat vol. 8, NO. 2, Yasuki Saito, the designer of JTeX, says that the whole Kanji Characters are divided into 33 subfonts. Since most of these subfonts have identical TFM file (except, of course, the fontname), "The control sequence jfont is introduced to save JTeX's memory space for font information." For example, jfontfontname=fontfile1 fontfile2 enables to load fontfile1 as fontname using the already loaded font information for fontfile2. Thus it does not consume any font space at all. I am doing an application which requires this technique. Can anyone tell me how this can be done? Since I don't think this is of general interest, I would appreciate you send me your hints or solution to me directly. I would really appreciate any help on this! ntut019@twnmoe10.BITNET Tsong-Min Wu Dept of Econ, National Taiwan Univ. Taipei, Taiwan ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 17 Aug 89 21:47:01 EDT From: "David F. Rogers" Subject: Large fonts -- cmr & cmbx Keywords: fonts, cmr, cmbx G'day, I am looking for the cmr and cmbx fonts in approximate points sizes of 24, 28, 32, 36, 40 for 300 dpi write-black (Canon Engine) laser printers and at 118 dpi for crt screens. Does anyone have these fonts, preferably in .pk format or less desirably the Metafont files to generate them or know from whence they can be ftp'd. Thanks Dave Rogers --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 27 Aug 89 20:26:31 EET DST From: steed%TECHUNIX.BITNET@UWAVM.ACS.WASHINGTON.EDU (Ze'ev Shtadler) Subject: LaTeX-XeT anywhere? Keywords: LaTeX-XeT, Hebrew I have been using LaTeX for about a year, and I cannot think of going back to troff. However, I am required to print my M.Sc. thesis in Hebrew. I would like to do it in LaTeX-XeT, but I cannot figure out how. We have created INITeX-XeT, VIRTeX-XeT and even (plain) TeX-XeT. However, creating a usable LaTeX-XeT seems to be more complicated: the \everypar construct copied form the TeX-XeT article in TUGBoat: \def\RLtext{\everypar{\kern-\parindent\beginR\indent}} that forces every paragraph into a right-to-left direction, does not work within LaTeX. I hnly get the section header in right-to-left direction. The section itself is set in the usual left-to-right direction. I'm not a TeXpert, so I have to guess LaTeX makes use of the \everypar construct to do it's own work. Has anyone modified the LaTeX package to handle a right to left language as a (possible) main language? If not, how complicated should that change be? Any hints concerning the change? I'd appreciate any response, since my deadline is nearing :-). Thanks in advance, Ze'ev. Ze'ev Shtadler. ARPANET: steed%techunix.bitnet@cunyvm.cuny.edu Computer Science Faculty, UUCP: ...!psuvax1!techunix.bitnet!steed Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, BITNET: steed@techunix Haifa Israel Domain: steed@techunix.technion.ac.il Phone (work): (+972) 4-294304 CSNET: steed%techunix.bitnet@csnet-relay.csnet -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 27 Aug 89 18:08 EST From: Henning Schulzrinne Subject: BIGTEX, ctex Keywords: VMS TeX, BIGTeX, ctex The current capacity of our VMS TeX version (65000 words) seems insufficient for many of our more complicated documents. I would like to hear from fellow Texers about the ease and feasibility of doing one of the following: 1) get ctex (where? how? - FTP preferable) and compile it with the VMS C compiler, hoping that it is compatible enough. 2) use BIGTEX.PATCH from june.cs.washington.edu to fix the WEB files and then reWEB. The details and steps, however, are less than clear to me. Is there a reference that actually ``explains'' the necessary procedures or is this part of the oral tradition of TeX? 3) any other suggestions Thanks in advance for any advice. Henning Schulzrinne (HGSCHULZ@CS.UMASS.EDU) Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Massachusetts at Amherst Amherst, MA 01003 - USA phone: (413) 545-3179 (EST) FAX: (413) 545-0724 ------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Thu, 17 Aug 89 23:27:05 -0400 From: amgreene@athena.mit.edu Subject: Source of "nabla" in TeXbook? Keywords: nabla %% Moderator`s note: Solutions to the nabla mystery were also %% offered by Bernie Cosell, Doug MacMartin, Wilhelm Mueller %% and Fritz Keinert. I believe "nabla" was an ancient Hebrew lyre shaped like a gradient symbol. My Bantam-Megiddo Hebrew/English dictioary has an entry for `nevel' as `harp,' so this is not unlikely. (My calc teacher told us this, in any case) Andrew Marc Greene SIPB Secretary and MIT Project Athena Watchmaker --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 19 Aug 89 14:25:22 EDT From: "David F. Rogers" Subject: TeX performance Keywords: TeX, performance G'day Here is an interesting statistic on TeX performance. On a Silicon Graphics Iris 4D/70GT (10 mips MIPS RISC processor) running the recently reported TeX installation for the SGI, 234 pages comprising Chapters 5 & 6 of Mathematical Elements for Computer Graphics, 2nd Edition was TeX'd in 153.8 sec. This is about .66 sec/page. The figplace macros previously reported here and in TUGboat were used for automatic figure placement. This is about 5 times faster than either a Sun 3/50 or an IBM 386 (16.67 Mhz) machine. With this kind of performance, interactive TeX can only be just around the corner. Dave Rogers ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 27 Aug 89 13:49:14 PDT From: stan@ana.com (Stan Osborne) Subject: Re: Re: TeX vs troff Keywords: TeX, troff, Unix In TeXhax Digest V89 #77, Gary S. Wagman gives an excellent comparison of troff and TeX. I found nothing with which I could disagree. (I have worked with both products extensively over the past five years.) I would like to add a bit on the history of troff, as I know it, to give some insight into why troff has not changed much in over 10 years. AT&T and Unix became dependent on troff. The Unix "man" pages are all formatted with troff (nroff to the screen). This linked Unix and its documentation tightly with troff from the earliest years of Unix. When cheaper raster printers arrived (1980-85), AT&T was not yet a computer manufacturer. (Unix used to be something that ran mostly on computers made by Digital Equipment Co.) AT&T was planning to be broken into the Regional Bell Operating Companies. If it was a computer company during this time, it might have realized the importance of troff and done more to support its competitiveness. Only in the last five years have AT&T and Unix become significant in the computer industry. Its tight link with Unix and AT&T has kept troff alive long after its author's premature death. The significant improvements made to troff since its inventor died, that I can recall, have been supporting a troff device independent output, making its source code more portable, adding line/circle/spline drawing commands, and making execution performance improvements. Typesetting tools are complex in their internal structure. troff is not a formalized computer language. This makes it hard to write troff macros. Its existing functionality is intertwined with Unix. Adding or changing how it works usually results in something else no longer working correctly. For these reasons no one dared to rewrite or redesign it. Its author did not live long enough to evolve his prototype into a product along with the rest of Unix. (At one point Don Knuth completely rewrote TeX and he is still around to fix the remaining bugs as they are discovered.) troff has never been an example of good software engineering nor has it had the opportunity to become a good example. It works, it is useful, people use it and rely on it, so it survives. Stan Osborne, ana-systems, Foster City, California internet: stan@ana.com Fax: (415) 341-1784 uucp: uunet!ana.com!stan Phone: (415) 341-1768 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 18 Aug 89 13:02:54 EDT From: todd@narnia.ecs.rpi.edu Subject: DVI-to-Imagen software Keywords: dviware, Imagen, TeX I am doing my first-ever installation of TeX. I have succeeded in getting TeX, LaTeX, dvi2ps, etc. running, but I also need a DVI-to-Imagen driver. Looking through DVIware, I see the DVIIMP and the Imagen1 drivers. Is there reasons to choose one over the other? One problem is that this system (an Ultrix RISC) system) does not have Pascal installed, so if I used DVIIMP, I would need to figure out WEB-to-C. On the other hand, it is not clear to me what fonts Imagen1 is looking for. Any help is appreciated! R. Lindsay Todd Systems Programmer Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- %%% Further information about the TeXhax Digest, the TeX %%% Users Group, and the latest software versions is available %%% in every tenth issue of the TeXhax Digest. %%% %%% Concerning subscriptions, address changes, unsubscribing: %%% %%% BITNET: send a one-line mail message to LISTSERV@xxx %%% SUBSCRIBE TEX-L % to subscribe %%% or UNSUBSCRIBE TEX-L %%% %%% Internet: send a similar one line mail message to %%% TeXhax-request@cs.washington.edu %%% JANET users may choose to use %%% texhax-request@uk.ac.nsf %%% All submissions to: TeXhax@cs.washington.edu %%% %%% Back issues available for FTPing as: %%% machine: directory: filename: %%% JUNE.CS.WASHINGTON.EDU TeXhax/TeXhaxyy.nn %%% yy = last two digits of current year %%% nn = issue number %%% %%%\bye %%% End of TeXhax Digest ************************** -------