[LaTeX News 14 (June 2001)]
[Reformatted by me.]
LaTeX News
Issue 14, June 2001
Future releases
We are currently exploring how to best support the very large
community of individuals, organisations and enterprises that depend on
the robustness and availability of the current standard LaTeX
distribution. The results of this may lead to some changes in the
regular release schedule and the handling of bug reports during the
next year.
New release of Babel (required)
Earlier this year a new release of Babel (3.7) became available. You
can read about its new features in
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/required/babel/announce.txt
One of the bugs that got fixed in this release deals with how labels
are handled by LaTeX. Because this part of the kernel is modified by
babel, the relevant changes need to be coordinated. Therefore to use
Babel with this release of LaTeX you will need to update your version
of babel to at least 3.7.
New input encoding latin9
The package inputenc has, thanks to Karsten Tinnefeld, been extended
to cover the latin9 input encoding. The ISO-Latin 9 encoding is a
useful modern replacement for ISO-Latin 1 that contains a few
characters needed for French and Finnish. Of wider interest, it also
contains the euro currency sign; this could be the killer argument for
many 8-bit texts to use Latin-9 in the future.
According to a Linux manpage, ISO Latin-9 supports Albanian, Basque,
Breton, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish,
French, Frisian, Galician, German, Greenlandic, Icelandic, Irish
Gaelic, Italian, Latin, Luxemburgish, Norwegian, Portuguese,
Rhaeto-Romanic, Scottish Gaelic, Spanish and Swedish. The characters
added in latin9 are (in LaTeX notation):
\texteuro \v S \v s \v Z \v z \OE \oe \" Y
They displace the following characters from latin1:
\textcurrency \textbrokenbar \"{} \'{} \c{}
\textonequarter \textonehalf \textthreequarters
New tools
The new package trace provides many commands to control LaTeX's
tracing and debugging output, including the excellent new information
available with e-TeX such as the extremely useful tracing of local
assignments. You will find it in the tools distribution.
It offers the command \traceon, which is similar to \tracingall but
suppresses uninteresting stuff such as font loading by NFSS (which can
go on for pages if you are unlucky). It also offers \traceoff to
. . . guess what! Full details are in the documented source file,
trace.dtx.
In the base ifthen package we have added the uppercase synonyms \NOT
\AND and \OR.
New experimental code
In LaTeX News 12 we announced some ongoing work towards a `Designer
Interface for LaTeX' and we presented some early results
thereof. Since then, at Gutenberg 2000 in Toulouse and TUG2000 in
Oxford, we described a new output routine and an improved method of
handling vertical mode material between paragraphs. In combination
these support higher quality automated[1] page-breaking and page
make-up for complex pages -- the best yet achieved with TeX!
More recently we have added material to handle the complex front
matter requirements of journal articles; this was presented at
Gutenberg 2001 in Metz.
A paper describing the new output routine is at
http://www.latex-project.org/papers/xo-pfloat.pdf
All code examples and documentation are available at
http://www.latex-project.org/code/experimental
This directory has been extended to contain the
following.
galley Prototype implementation of the interface for manipulating
vertical material in galleys.
xinitials Prototype implementation of the interface for paragraph
initials (needs the galley package).
xtheorem Contributed example using the template
package to provide a designer interface for theorem
environments.
xor A prototype implementation of the new output routine as
described in the xo-pfloat.pdf paper.
xfrontm A prototype version of the new font matter interface.
1. The stress here is on automated!
LaTeX News, and the LaTeX software, are brought to you by the LaTeX3
Project Team; Copyright 2001, all rights reserved.
Reply to: