Subject: TeXhax Digest V89 #81 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 Monday, September 11, 1989 Volume 89 : Issue 81 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: BibTeX for Macintosh How to get rid of `Device not ready' on MS-DOS machines Request for Driver for HP Deskjet *Plus* Dvi files to Macs Announcing DVItoLN03 V3.1-1 Re: Chapters beginning on odd pages only Problems including Mac figures in LaTeX with psfig Re: Easy questions Re: Organizing a volunteer corps (Vol 89, Issue 72) Re: Organizing a volunteer corps (Vol 89, Issue 72)-response Re: TeX vs troff \TeX{} at the end of a sentence Marginal hacks A question about line number \jobname etc... Extending plain.tex TeX for PRIME -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu 7 Sep 89 16:52:53-MDT From: "Nelson H.F. Beebe" Subject: BibTeX for Macintosh Keywords: BibTeX, Macintosh BibTeX is available for the Macintosh on science.utah.edu in the files APS:00README.TXT.1 APS:MACBIBTEXSIT.HQX.1 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 1 Sep 89 10:11:32 EDT From: Hal_Varian@um.cc.umich.edu Subject: How to get rid of `Device not ready' on MS-DOS machines Keywords: "Device not ready", MS-DOS In TeXhax #79.89 John Warbrick writes: "It works for me, except that I get a 'Device not ready' error just at the end of the document, which I ignore!..." If you put the following line in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file, the `Device not ready' message should go away: mode lpt1: ,,P ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 29 Aug 89 17:05 CDT From: U2804AA@VMS.UCC.OKSTATE.EDU Subject: Request for Driver for HP Deskjet *Plus* Keywords: driver, HP DeskJet+ It is my understanding that the new HP Deskjet Plus printer can be equipped with 512 K or RAM. Has anyone written a driver to take advantage of this, thus making the Deskjet Plus as useful as the Laserjet in the context of printing TeX documents? Despite the existence of a driver for the plain Deskjet, that device seems to be constrained to a life of long output times due to its lack of on-board RAM. Mark Petrovic Oklahoma State University Physics Dept. (405) 744-6742 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Fri, 01 Sep 89 12:01:08 EST From: Alan Stein Subject: Dvi files to Macs Keywords: dviware, SUN, Mac Is it possible to transfer a dvi file from a Sun to a Mac so that it will be recognized as a dvi file by the Mac. I transferred a dvi file as a text file, but cannot get it printed off the Mac. Alan H. Stein | stein@uconnvm.bitnet Department of Mathematics | stein%uconnvm.bitnet@mitvma.mit.edu University of Connecticut | ...psuvax1!UCONNVM.BITNET!STEIN 32 Hillside Avenue | Waterbury, CT 06710 | Compu$erve 71545,1500 (203) 757-1231 | GEnie ah.stein -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 29 AUG 89 15:09:49 BST From: TEX%rmcs.cranfield.ac.uk@NSFnet-Relay.AC.UK Subject: Announcing DVItoLN03 V3.1-1 Keywords: dviware Thanks to the good offices of Sankara Rao, a new version of my DVItoLN03 program (V3.1-1) has been installed on his machine and is available for anonymous FTP. Details are as follows: Host : power.eee.ndsu.nodak.edu (134.129.123.1) Username : anonymous Password : anything you like Directory: disk$ftp:[dviln03] The above directory contains the following files: AAAREADME.TXT - the file an extract from which you are reading CHANGEBAR.STY - for those without this: style file for marking changes DVILN03.HLP - on-line (DCL) help for DVItoLN03 DVILN03.LN3 - file ready to be COPYed to your LN03 DVILN03.TEX - the RMCS ``local guide'' for DVItoLN03 DVITOLN03.CH - a change file for DVItoLN03, currently V3.0 -> V3.1-1 DVITOLN03.CLD - VMS command language definition for the DVILN03 command DVITOLN03.EXE - a ``load-and-go'' executable, for VMS V5.1 DVITOLN03.UUE - UU-encoded version of the above DVITOLN03.WEB - the WEB source of DVItoLN03 V3.0 LOCAL.MF - our local parameters for METAFONTing for LN03 LOCAL_GUIDES.BIB - a BibTeX database used by RMCS --- needs BibTeX V0.99c GRAPHICS.STY - a local LaTeX style file for graphics inserts OPENCLOSE.SIX - a Sixel dump of the screen of a terminal, scaled 2:1 OPENCLOSE.SMALL - the same dump, but scaled 1:1 Version 3.1 introduced the /OUTPUT qualifier, which may be used to route the .LN3 file directly to the LN03 printer. It also reports the names of all source (.DVI and \special{ln03:plotfile xxx}) files read, and correctly reports the magnifications of fonts on the terminal and in the log file. Version 3.1-1 adds support for the Flavio Rose specials used for changebar drawing, and also therefore supports that syntax for \special graphics inclusions. At some future date, the old-style syntax (\special{SX filename}) may be eliminated. Possible future work: Suggestions??? Getting hold of the files %========================= As a first step, retrieve AAAREADME.TXT to determine which files are required. For those sites already using DVItoLN03 V3.0, the following files are unchanged since the earlier (V3.0) release, and need not be fetched again: DVITOLN03.WEB - the WEB source of DVItoLN03 LOCAL_GUIDES.BIB - a BibTeX database used by RMCS - needs BibTeX V0.99c OPENCLOSE.SIX - a Sixel dump of the screen of a terminal, scaled 2:1 OPENCLOSE.SMALL - the same dump, but scaled 1:1 All other files have had revisions. Contact %======= If anyone is experiencing difficulty in installing DVItoLN03, they are welcome to contact the author B Hamilton Kelly Royal Military College of Science Shrivenham SWINDON UK SN6 8LA Swindon (+44 793) 785252 [Direct line] or via JANET: tex@uk.ac.cranfield.rmcs INTERNET: tex%uk.ac.cranfield.rmcs@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk Bitnet: tex@rmcs.cranfield.ac.uk Good Luck! Brian HAMILTON KELLY -------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 1 Sep 89 9:51:22 EDT From: "Benjamin J. Woznick" Subject: Re: Chapters beginning on odd pages only Keywords: LaTeX, chapters In TeXhax 89.79, lang@caesar writes ... in all "real" publications that I've ever seen .. chapters start on *odd* pages only. I don't know where this idea came from, but it is simply not true. The practice of including a blank page when a chapter ends on an odd page, forcing the next chapter to begin on a even page is a matter of taste, and not a widely practiced one. You can, of course, get the effect you want in LaTeX by using \cleardoublepage. For the unbelievers among you, I happened to have exactly four books lying on my table when I read this message: Software Engineeering with Ada(R), by Grady Booch, published by Benjamin-Cummings Designing Large Real-Time Systems with Ada, by Nielsen and Shumate, published by McGraw Hill Software Engineering Economics, by Barry Boehm, published by Prentice Hall Internetworking Computer Systems, by McConnell, published by Prentice Hall All of them have chapters that start on even pages. I doubt that 20% of the "real" publications in my office follow the suggested style standard. Among the other publishers represented in my office that violate this standard are: Berkeley Books (the paper edition of Clancy's ``Red Storm Rising''), Penguin (Andrew's ``Her Magesty's Secret Service''), and Springer-Verlag (Allworth and Zobel's ``Introduction to Real Time Software''). Following lang@ceasar's style practice are Addison-Wesley and Van Nostrand Reinhold (Sewell's ``Weaving a Program''). Ben Woznick ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 29 Aug 89 15:35 EST From: Steve Bradtke Subject: Problems including Mac figures in LaTeX with psfig Keywords: Mac, LaTeX, psfig I've installed the latest version of Trevor Darrell's psfig package for including PostScript images in a LaTeX document. All of the examples Trevor gives seem to work just fine, including the figures he generated from Macintosh pictures. However, I am unable to use any of my own Mac-generated PostScript images. The specific error I get is that the operator ``waittimeout'' is undefined. But removing all reference to ``waittimeout'' just results in a message informing me that the operator ``and'' has been applied to the wrong type argument!! The two printers that I've tried this on are DEC's LPS40 and LN03R ScriptPrinter. I'm using dvi2ps-li as obtained via ftp from linc.cis.upenn.edu. I've tried Mac-generated PostScript from MacDraw II, MacDraft 1.2a, Cricket Draw 1.1, Canvas 1.01, and Canvas 2.0. I notice that the examples Trevor gives of Mac-generated PostScript include the line %%IncludeProcSet: "(AppleDict md)" 68 0 while all of mine include the line %%IncludeProcSet: "(AppleDict md)" 65 0 It seems likely that we don't have the right system software on our Macs. Please let me know if you've had any (positive) experience in porting psfig to work on a DEC environment, or if you have any suggestions on how to configure our Macs so that they'll work with psfig. Thanks, Steve Steven Bradtke Computer and Information Science Department Lederle Graduate Research Center University of Massachusetts at Amherst Amherst, MA 01003 bradtke@cs.umass.edu --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 29 Aug 89 19:59:29 EDT From: INHB000 Subject: Re: Easy questions Keywords: suggestions Let me second the comments of Walt Conley regarding the ``easy'' questions that many people ask. I don't mind them and I often send along an answer to the questioner. I have also asked ``easy'' questions, even ones that are answered in some footnote in the TeXbook or such. Until someones (actually severalones) on TeXhax answered me, I wasn't aware that expressions inside math mode that are enclosed in braces are put into an unbreakable box. There it is right in the TeXbook and I whould have known it. I also got trapped by an optional parameter in LaTeX that I should have known about (I did know about it, but I didn't see that it applied). Michael Barr ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 31 Aug 89 02:08:11 -0400 From: Ken Yap Subject: Re: Organizing a volunteer corps (Vol 89, Issue 72) Keywords: volunteer corps, easy questions > 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. I think it should be sufficient to group novice questions and replies into special issues of TeXHaX. TeXperts can then just skip these issues if they wish. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 31 Aug 1989 8:34:40 PDT From: Max Hailperin Subject: Re: Organizing a volunteer corps (Vol 89, Issue 72)-response Keywords: volunteer corps > > 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. > > I think it should be sufficient to group novice questions and replies > into special issues of TeXHaX. TeXperts can then just skip these > issue if they wish. The purpose of the LaTeX-help system is *not* simply to allow LaTeXperts to avoid looking at lots of novice questions. Rather, it is to provide a more appropriate medium for the novices to get help. The problem with a long-latency broadcast system, like TeXHaX, is that you get no response for a long time, and then you get many redundant responses (because the various helpers don't realize until too late that others have already responded). By contrast, with LaTeX-help still in it's first days of activity, approximately one novice a day has gotten a question that was holding them up answered quickly and uniquely. Special issues of TeXHaX devoted to questions with answers to those same questions would be fine. (The LaTeX-help log could be one source of such answered questions.) Special issues devoted to questions with answers to the previous batch of questions would be an even worse version of the long-latency-broadcast problem. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 31 Aug 89 08:45:31 -0500 From: svb@cs.purdue.edu (Stephan Bechtolsheim) Subject: Re: TeX vs troff Keywords: TeX, troff It's my opining that is's time to retire troff. Manual pages and the unix documentation should be translated into TeX or LaTeX and troff should be retired. The output just looks awful. This all doesn't mean that it was not a very useful product. Stephan Bechtolsheim svb@cs.purdue.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 1 Sep 89 10:31 EDT From: Robert Messer Subject: \TeX{} at the end of a sentence Keywords: TeX In TeXhax v89 #79, Chris Torek suggests using \TeX{} everywhere in place of \TeX. However, the expansion of the macro \TeX ends in an uppercase letter. Hence if it appears at the end of sentence, TeX will interpret the "X." as an abbreviation, and insert interword glue rather than the glue between sentences. As indicated in the answer to Exercise 12.6 of the TeXbook, an easy way around this is to end such sentences with \TeX\null. Robert Messer Department of Mathematics Albion College BITnet: RAM@ALBION ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 1 Sep 89 13:57 GMT From: Peter Flynn UCC Subject: Marginal hacks Keywords: marginal, hacks, manmac I need to use marginal hacks (\`a la p.415 of the \TeX book) to put explanations of jargon into the margin (sort of sidenotes instead of footnotes). I have borrowed the \output code of manmac.tex, modified so it places the notes right and left on righthand and lefthand pages, and I also defined: \def\mnote#1{\insert\margin{\vbox{\hsize=1in\parindent=0pt \spaceskip=3pt plus3pt minus2pt\baselineskip=9pt{\smaller#1}}}} The problem is, the \mnotes go into the margin OK, but always starting at the top of the page, even if the reference to them is further down. I can see why this should be, of course, as \insert\margin just adds another \vbox to \margin. What I can't figure out is how to pass across the vertical displacement down the page so that the \mnote comes out opposite where the reference is made. I'm going to have a try at (a) calculating the \dp of the note text and (b) the \dp255 at the time of reference, and accumulating them so that an \mnote will first add some \vskip to \margin before adding in the \vbox, but this seems kludgy, so any help from a \TeX hacker would be warmly appreciated. Needless to say, the user needs this doing yesterday :-) Peter Flynn Cork U Comp Cent --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 31 Aug 89 10:13:02 EDT From: w25@riemann.psu.edu (Shann Wei-Chang) Subject: A question about line number Keywords: TeX, macro I am communicating with my thesis advisor with plain TeX files. It would be convenient for us if the printout has line number to the left of each line of text. Although we can use \eqno for displayed math, it is still better if a line number could be generated automatically also for each displayed math. Would someone spend a little time to write the macro for me. Thank you in advance. Wei-Chang Shann w25@euler.psu.edu P.O. Box 10037 State College, PA 16805 -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 31 Aug 89 12:36:20 EDT From: arie@theory.lcs.mit.edu Subject: \jobname etc... Keywords: TeX, \jobname, \filename Hi, I have a couple of questions, and hope you could help me. I have already figured out that \jobname answers q. 1) 1) I would like to have a \filename command so that I could include the .tex file name in my draft headers. 2) a similar \filetime returning the last modified time would be great. 3) an alternative, or a good feature by itself, would be a \argument command, returning a string from the command line such as in : latex -arg "@$#@%$#^%" a.tex Thanks, Arie --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 1 Sep 89 14:46:15 EDT From: "Karl Berry." Subject: Extending plain.tex Keywords: plain.tex I have often found myself wishing that plain.tex provided a few more features than it does, but I have no wish at all to become involved in LaTeX. I am involved in a book project, and part of the project is to extend plain.tex in this way. Although I believe that LaTeX has the right idea, of separating form from content, of specifying things intensionally and not extensionally, the styles available do not suit everyone's needs, and are certainly not useful for typesetting custom-designed books. On the other hand, anybody could use certain features, like symbolic cross-references. I could give the list of things I have already thought of, but I would rather not constrain anybody's ideas. Please send mail to me if you have any such wishes! By the way, I should be clear: the macros that I write, while they will be part of this book, will also be available publically, and will be freely redistributable. So do not fear that you are contributing to a proprietary project. Thanks. Karl Berry karl@umb.edu (CSNET) ...!harvard!umb!karl (UUCP) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 31 Aug 89 17:36 EDT From: MGTSHUK@ubvmsc.cc.buffalo.edu Subject: TeX for PRIME Keywords: TeX, PRIME, Primos I would like to know if there are any versions of TeX for PRIME and how to obtain them. We are talking about a PRIME 6350 running Primos Rev. 22.0.2. It also has a Primix Rev 3.3 (guest UNIX system under Primos). Thank you. Ravi Shukla MGTSHUK@BROCK1P ----------------------------------------------------------------------- %%% 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 ************************** -------