Bug#94839: ITP: ptex-base -- basic ASCII pTeX library files
Package: wnpp
Version: N/A; reported 2001-04-22
Severity: wishlist
o What's this?
ASCII p(La)TeX is a Japanese-localized TeX. It can handle 2-byte Japanese
Kanji characters(supported encoding is EUC-JP) properly and also supports
traditional Tate-gaki(vertical writing) style.
The first ASCII pTeX(then called ASCII jTeX) was developed in ca. 1984. It
means, it was much before the appearance of Babel or Omega. ASCII Corp., the
developer of pTeX, has been improving pTeX with zeal and pTeX still has
considerable share in Japanese academic society. For example, over 30% of
scientific papers at my university are written with pTeX. A bunch of books
about usage of pTeX are published every year.
pTeX has nothing to do with Polish TeX. People at ASCII said "p" means
"publishing"...oh well, you can say Japanese are insular. I tried pretty
hard not to bother Polish TeX in teTeX.deb packages, anyway.
o License
LEGAL NOTICE
Note: the official copyright notice is written in Japanese and can be
found in the file called "copyright.ja".
The governing language of this notice shall be Japanese, and
any translation into any other language shall be solely for
the convenience.
0. In this notice, the "Software" represents a part of the pTeX
distribution that is concerned with Japanese support developed
by ASCII Co.
1. ASCII Co. retains copyright of the Japanese translation of the Software.
2. Use of the Software in any form is permitted provided that it is not
for profit-making (e.g. collecting tolls for using the Software).
ASCII Co. shall not be liable for any damages caused by using the
Software, whether direct or indirect, incidental or consequential,
under any circumstances whatsoever.
3. Copy and redistribution of the Japanese translation of the Software
is permitted provided that it is not for commercial purpose.
4. Modification of a part of the Japanese translation of the Software
is permitted provided that you notify ASCII Co. of your modification.
You shall not release your modification to public without prior
approval of ASCII Co.
Redistribution of the modified version of the Software is permitted
provided that the receiver can easily restore it to the original.
5. In no event shall ASCII Co. be liable for any direct or indirect
damage. Any express or implied warranties, including,
but not limited to, the implied warranties of fitness for a
particular purpose are disclaimed.
Non-commercial use only, so it should go into non-free.
But I hope they might change their license in the near future. Recently I
succeeded to convince them to change the license of Japanese patch for
dvipsk(that's why dvipsk-ja is in main now), so maybe I could do that again
for pTeX itself.
o NTT jTeX(jtex packages in Debian)
NTT jTeX is another Japanized TeX and its syntax is not compatible with pTeX.
It has no support for Tete-gaki. For some reason, it's not as much popular as
ASCII pTeX. But the good thing is, jTeX is released under a license compliant
with DFSG.
o ptex-buildsupport
Since ASCII pTeX is provided as a set of additional source files to teTeX
source tree, you need teTeX source tarball when you build ptex packages.
teTeX is damn big one, so I decided to strip it down to the bare minimum for
building pTeX and provide as a separate package. In this way, I don't have to
increase the version number of the source packages of ptex-* when new teTeX
beta is available.
These package have been maintained by a member of Debian JP Project, and
recently I took over the maintainership.
-- System Information
Debian Release: testing/unstable
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux paraiso 2.4.3 #1 2001ǯ 4·î 18Æü ¿åÍËÆü 00:05:07 JST i586
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