4-Aug-1998 19:24:22-GMT,3765;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id NAA15140 for ; Tue, 4 Aug 1998 13:24:16 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id UAA00509; Tue, 4 Aug 1998 20:28:01 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 393648 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 4 Aug 1998 20:27:58 +0200 Received: from math.ams.org (math.ams.org [130.44.210.14]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id UAA00491 for ; Tue, 4 Aug 1998 20:27:56 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from axp14.ams.org by math.ams.org via smtpd (for relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) with SMTP; 4 Aug 1998 18:27:55 UT Received: from sun06.pvd (SUN06.AMS.ORG) by AXP14.AMS.ORG (PMDF V5.1-8 #30286) with SMTP id <01J07J48DBK0000N70@AXP14.AMS.ORG> for latex-l@urz.uni-heidelberg.de; Tue, 4 Aug 1998 14:27:54 EDT Received: by sun06.pvd (SMI-8.6/SMI-SVR4) id OAA22268; Tue, 04 Aug 1998 14:27:49 -0400 X-Mailer: Gnus v5.5/Emacs 20.2 Lines: 45 Message-ID: Date: Tue, 4 Aug 1998 14:27:49 -0400 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Michael John Downes Subject: Converting a LaTeX2e package to LaTeX3 naming conventions To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L I began putting together a script to facilitate the process of converting an LaTeX2e package to LaTeX3. (Since, in fact, there is a largish package that I want to try converting.) Then it occurred to me I ought to check with the readers of this list to guard against reinventing a wheel that someone else has done already. Consider this (slightly simplified) fragment from ltdefns.dtx: % \begin{macro}{\CheckCommand} % |\CheckCommand| takes the same arguments as |\newcommand|. If % the command already exists, with the same definition, then % nothing happens, otherwise a warning is issued. Useful for % checking the current state befor a macro package starts % redefining things. Currently two macros are considered to have % the same definition if they are the same except for different % default arguments. That is, if the old definition was: % |\newcommand\xxx[2][a]{(#1)(#2)}| then % |\CheckCommand\xxx[2][b]{(#1)(#2)}| would \emph{not} generate a % warning, but, for instance |\CheckCommand\xxx[2]{(#1)(#2)}| % would. % \begin{macrocode} \def\CheckCommand{\@star@or@long\check@command} % \end{macrocode} % \end{macro} Naturally we want to convert control sequences in the macrocode blocks to LaTeX3 equivalents. We also want to convert the argument of \begin{macro}, as well as references in the commentary to LaTeX2e internal control sequences. But the mention of \newcommand should probably be left alone, not to mention the \xxx, and the \emph also should not be converted. Macro name references usually take one of the following forms: |\foo| \verb|\foo| \verb'\foo' \cs{foo} I will probably write the script in Emacs Lisp with the idea of reusing some fragments later in setting up a LaTeX3 programmer's mode for Emacs. The largest part of the work would seem to be setting up a table of name pairs. Michael Downes 6-Aug-1998 17:17:11-GMT,4036;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA09400 for ; Thu, 6 Aug 1998 11:17:09 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA04568; Thu, 6 Aug 1998 18:43:11 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 394263 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 6 Aug 1998 18:43:08 +0200 Received: from math.ams.org (math.ams.org [130.44.210.14]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA04550 for ; Thu, 6 Aug 1998 18:43:01 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from axp14.ams.org by math.ams.org via smtpd (for relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) with SMTP; 6 Aug 1998 16:42:42 UT Received: from sun06.pvd (SUN06.AMS.ORG) by AXP14.AMS.ORG (PMDF V5.1-8 #30286) with SMTP id <01J0A8173QKW0003GU@AXP14.AMS.ORG> for latex-l@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de; Thu, 6 Aug 1998 12:42:28 EDT Received: by sun06.pvd (SMI-8.6/SMI-SVR4) id MAA16965; Thu, 06 Aug 1998 12:42:19 -0400 X-Mailer: Gnus v5.5/Emacs 20.2 Lines: 44 Message-ID: Date: Thu, 6 Aug 1998 12:42:18 -0400 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Michael John Downes Subject: expl3: parameter access letters To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L The set of parameter access letters (c l g C L G R) may need amending. I was putting together a one-page "quick reference" for LaTeX3 conventions, and I wanted to put in some examples of variables that have the different kinds of access. I could not think of any example for C "constant and TeX will not allow you to change it", and further investigation still did not turn up anything, unless C was intended for things like \badness; but I think \badness and similar are the intended recipients of the R designation, since they are not constant throughout a TeX run, although they are truly read-only. So I think the "C" should be discarded, leaving c l g R L G. Furthermore, the following question should probably be addressed in the documentation of the access types. It came up during my current attempts to convert an existing package to LaTeX3 form. I have a variable, let us pretend that it is called \g_parindent, that is supposed to have a "global" value that prevails throughout an entire document. But it is not "constant" because it is OK for the documentclass to change this variable, or it might be changed "globally" for some subdocument context such as a footnote, a float, or an appendix. And there is a companion variable \l_parindent that is the current value of this parameter for the current local context. However---and here is the problem---because of the way that this variable is used, \l_parindent must sometimes be assigned globally. So the "l" access specifier appears to be wrong. I guess the best approach would be to use "g" for both forms of the variable and use the description part of the name to indicate their relative meaning: \g_master_parindent \g_cur_parindent or something along those lines. So then the list of access letters does not need to be extended. But this issue seems important enough that it would be helpful to have it mentioned in the documentation about the access letters. And finally, the documentation should probably point out that some of the TeX primitive parameters are only pseudo-global: The current value extends beyond the end of the current group but not beyond the end of the current box. Examples are \prevgraf, \prevdepth, \spacefactor. 6-Aug-1998 17:21:43-GMT,1580;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA09504 for ; Thu, 6 Aug 1998 11:21:42 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA05467; Thu, 6 Aug 1998 19:02:14 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 394281 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 6 Aug 1998 19:02:12 +0200 Received: from vms.rhbnc.ac.uk (alpha1.rhbnc.ac.uk [134.219.201.113]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA05455 for ; Thu, 6 Aug 1998 19:02:10 +0200 (MET DST) Message-ID: <980806180211.14b4@vms.rhbnc.ac.uk> Date: Thu, 6 Aug 1998 18:02:11 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "Philip Taylor (RHBNC)" Subject: Re: expl3: parameter access letters To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Mjd> [...] I could not think of any Mjd> example for C "constant and TeX will not allow you to change it", and Mjd> further investigation still did not turn up anything... It may be a placeholder for e-TeX constants such as \eTeXversion ** Phil. 7-Aug-1998 18:08:46-GMT,3762;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA14111 for ; Fri, 7 Aug 1998 12:08:45 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA14378; Fri, 7 Aug 1998 19:41:44 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 394220 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 7 Aug 1998 19:41:40 +0200 Received: from tinet0.redestb.es (tinet0.redestb.es [194.179.106.117]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA14358 for ; Fri, 7 Aug 1998 19:41:39 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from fclients0.redestb.es ([194.179.106.116]) by tinet0.redestb.es (Post.Office MTA v3.1 release PO203a ID# 0-0U10L2S100) with ESMTP id AAA148 for ; Fri, 7 Aug 1998 19:41:45 +0200 Received: from [62.81.65.120] by fclients0.redestb.es (Post.Office MTA v3.1.2 release (PO205-101c) ID# 0-0U10L2S100) with SMTP id AAA244 for ; Fri, 7 Aug 1998 19:45:46 +0200 x-mailer: Claris Emailer 1.1 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Message-ID: <199808071741.TAA14358@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de> Date: Fri, 7 Aug 1998 19:38:31 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Javier Bezos Subject: Re: expl3: parameter access letters To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Michael John Downes wrote >[...] I have a >variable, let us pretend that it is called \g_parindent, that is >supposed to have a "global" value that prevails throughout an entire >document. But it is not "constant" because it is OK for the >documentclass to change this variable, or it might be changed >"globally" for some subdocument context such as a footnote, a float, >or an appendix. > >And there is a companion variable \l_parindent that is the >current value of this parameter for the current local context. >However---and here is the problem---because of the way that this >variable is used, \l_parindent must sometimes be assigned globally. >So the "l" access specifier appears to be wrong. In fact, both g and l specifiers are wrong, because TeX lacks the concept of variable scope. Only *assignments* are local or global and a certain macro is assigned globally or locally depending on the context. (That makes \global different to \outer and \long, as you can see in the p 210 of the TeXbook.) >I guess the best approach would be to use "g" for both forms of the >variable and use the description part of the name to indicate their >relative meaning: The best approach is not to believe that TeX is ModulaX or Java -- just let's TeX be TeX. \parindent is always the current \parindent, except you may reassign its value locally. Simple and efficient, isn't it? (Interestingly l3 "functions", regardless that could mean, have no scope specifiers. Perhaps because functions are not nested in C or Java?) > > \g_master_parindent > \g_cur_parindent > >or something along those lines. And don't forget the intermediate levels when you write a footnote in a minipage in a float in an appendix in a document! ;-) >So I think the "C" should be discarded, leaving c l g R L G. I think all of them should be discarded. Javier 7-Aug-1998 21:54:10-GMT,4216;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id PAA19327 for ; Fri, 7 Aug 1998 15:54:04 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id XAA20531; Fri, 7 Aug 1998 23:33:02 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 394286 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 7 Aug 1998 23:32:59 +0200 Received: from kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE (Ufrank@kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE [134.93.8.158]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id XAA20519 for ; Fri, 7 Aug 1998 23:32:57 +0200 (MET DST) Received: (from Ufrank@localhost) by kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE (8.8.8/8.8.8) id XAA15724 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 7 Aug 1998 23:32:54 +0200 (MET DST) X-Authentication-Warning: kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE: Ufrank set sender to latex3 using -f Received: (from latex3@localhost) by frank.zdv.uni-mainz.de (8.6.9/8.6.9) id WAA13710; Fri, 7 Aug 1998 22:11:45 +0200 References: <199808071741.TAA14358@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de> Message-ID: <199808072011.WAA13710@frank.zdv.uni-mainz.de> Date: Fri, 7 Aug 1998 22:11:45 +0200 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Frank Mittelbach Subject: Re: expl3: parameter access letters To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199808071741.TAA14358@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de> Javier > In fact, both g and l specifiers are wrong, because TeX lacks > the concept of variable scope. Only *assignments* are local > or global and a certain macro is assigned globally or locally > depending on the context. (That makes \global different to \outer > and \long, as you can see in the p 210 of the TeXbook.) i think wrong here is the wrong word. The fact that the underlying language does in principle allow you to mix local and global assignments does not mean that on a higher level of abstraction you want to distinguish variables for global or local use (and discurrage or even prevent mixing those assignments). > The best approach is not to believe that TeX is ModulaX or Java -- just nobody believes that TeX is that or at least I don't but that doesn't mean that i want to structure my variables. the fact that, for example, half of the \newif commands in current latex are meant to be used always globally but have no indication of needing this access method has resulted in quite a number of bugs over the years. or to give a different example, this is like claiming that LaTeX or plain TeX has no concept of internal commands (ie those with @ in them since it is not part of the language and everybody can make @ a letter at any time. or course everybody can but then he/she is conceptually starting to work with internal commands. > > \g_master_parindent > > \g_cur_parindent > > > >or something along those lines. > > And don't forget the intermediate levels when you write a footnote in > a minipage in a float in an appendix in a document! ;-) > > >So I think the "C" should be discarded, leaving c l g R L G. > > I think all of them should be discarded. i disagree with both of you: discard RLG but keep the (in my opinion) helpful distinction between constants and variable intended for local or for global use. this covers 99.9% of any code you need to write and helps structuring it a lot for easier understanding and less errors. if you look at the article produced for TUB you will notice that there only c l g are described (plus a vague sentence that "these codes include the following" which indicates that there might be more). this was because working with this i found that more would not be helpful but rather over the top. frank 12-Aug-1998 20:25:48-GMT,3262;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id OAA29832 for ; Wed, 12 Aug 1998 14:25:43 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id WAA21220; Wed, 12 Aug 1998 22:04:06 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 395497 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 12 Aug 1998 22:04:03 +0200 Received: from deceased.kn-bremen.de (root@deceased.hb.north.de [194.94.232.249]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id WAA21205 for ; Wed, 12 Aug 1998 22:04:02 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from dream.kn-bremen.de by deceased.kn-bremen.de with uucp (Smail3.2.0.100) id m0z6h5M-002g9xC; Wed, 12 Aug 1998 22:01:28 +0200 (MET DST) Received: by dream.kn-bremen.de (1.65/waf) via UUCP; Wed, 12 Aug 98 21:49:00 -2 for latex-l@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de References: <199806180546.PAA08908@ricetub.anu.edu.au> X-Mailer: Helldiver 1.08 (Waffle 1.65) Lines: 37 Message-ID: Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 21:48:59 +0200 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Martin Schroeder Organization: The Dreaming Subject: Space and Time (was: Modules) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In <199806180546.PAA08908@ricetub.anu.edu.au> Richard Walker writes: >Now bear with me for a few moments of madness. Come to think of it, >what follows isn't much weirder^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmore unusual than some of >the details of L3PL. Even if you don't like the particulars, maybe >they might trigger a better idea or a totally different application? >OK, so now the base's internal macros look like this: >\base/ltbibl/@citex >and if I write a package called `splat' my internal macros will >look like this: >\contrib/supported/splat/somethinguseful >The result: massive fmt file and control sequence bloat. We need some >shortcuts. Here are some possibilities. So what? :-) Even today the _cheapest_ available PC has a P5/200 with 32MB RAM and 2GB HD. When L3 will be available(2y+?), this will certainly be the standard PC in use; the cheapest to buy will run at 500MHz++. And we'll all be able to use BIGGGTeX. :-) I don't think we should be concerned much about TeXs main memory or processing speed -- there will be plenty. Best regards Martin -- Martin Schr"oder, MS@Dream.KN-Bremen.DE It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people. (Giordano Bruno) 12-Aug-1998 20:25:52-GMT,3077;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id OAA29834 for ; Wed, 12 Aug 1998 14:25:45 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id WAA21282; Wed, 12 Aug 1998 22:06:05 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 395501 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 12 Aug 1998 22:06:03 +0200 Received: from deceased.kn-bremen.de (root@deceased.hb.north.de [194.94.232.249]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id WAA21211 for ; Wed, 12 Aug 1998 22:04:04 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from dream.kn-bremen.de by deceased.kn-bremen.de with uucp (Smail3.2.0.100) id m0z6h5O-002g9yC; Wed, 12 Aug 1998 22:01:30 +0200 (MET DST) Received: by dream.kn-bremen.de (1.65/waf) via UUCP; Wed, 12 Aug 98 21:49:41 -2 for latex-l@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de References: <199806271853.UAA29351@frank.zdv.uni-mainz.de> X-Mailer: Helldiver 1.08 (Waffle 1.65) Lines: 25 Message-ID: Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 21:49:41 +0200 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Martin Schroeder Organization: The Dreaming Subject: Re: Modules To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In <199806271853.UAA29351@frank.zdv.uni-mainz.de> Frank Mittelbach writes: >b) will be drastic: a current LaTeX format (without any packages >loaded) uses about 51088 words of memory before begin document; if the >average word length in commands is 10 (which is far too low with a >consequent implemented module concept) then this gets basically blown >to 500000 which is twice the amount of main mem that i have available >on this machine for everything. i just looked: when we compiled the >Companion the log file showed 208957 words of memory out of 262141 >try to imagine to what size this would grow. I just looked: emTeX has an hTeX version where main memory can be configured to be between 2097152 (2^21) and 4194304 (2^22). And I don't think there's a limit in TeX to make it even bigger if needed. :-) But I agree that this should be avoided -- but not a taboo. Best regards Martin -- Martin Schr"oder, MS@Dream.KN-Bremen.DE It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people. (Giordano Bruno) 12-Aug-1998 22:49:49-GMT,2657;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id QAA03112 for ; Wed, 12 Aug 1998 16:49:47 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id AAA26060; Thu, 13 Aug 1998 00:32:49 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 394769 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 13 Aug 1998 00:32:47 +0200 Received: from math.uci.edu (moliver@math.uci.edu [128.200.174.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id AAA26041 for ; Thu, 13 Aug 1998 00:32:43 +0200 (MET DST) Received: (from moliver@localhost) by math.uci.edu (8.8.8/) id PAA05747; Wed, 12 Aug 1998 15:32:32 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <199808122232.PAA05747@math.uci.edu> Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 15:32:32 -0700 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Marcel Oliver Subject: Re: Space and Time (was: Modules) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Martin Schroeder wrote: > Even today the _cheapest_ available PC has a P5/200 with 32MB RAM and 2GB HD. > When L3 will be available(2y+?), this will certainly be the standard PC in > use; the cheapest to buy will run at 500MHz++. And we'll all be able to use > BIGGGTeX. :-) > > I don't think we should be concerned much about TeXs main memory or > processing speed -- there will be plenty. I disagree. I believe somewhere in the long-term development of TeX and/or LaTeX one has to come to a point were visual markup decisions (page breaks, float placement, maybe even parshapes) can be done within some GUI and are clearly separated from the logical markup which is best done in a traditional text editor (thus, getting rid of ugly things like float placement parameters, \addtopage, \clearpage etc.) in the .tex file. This requires a sufficiently fast TeX engine to be useful---the avarage PC is now coming into this range. So I don't think it would be a good idea to throw away performance unless it is compensated by a clear and major gain in non-performance issues. This performance may be desperately needed in future development of LaTeX which is not yet forseen. Just my thoughts on this... Marcel 13-Aug-1998 0:46:21-GMT,3155;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id SAA05389 for ; Wed, 12 Aug 1998 18:46:18 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id CAA28081; Thu, 13 Aug 1998 02:31:51 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 394784 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 13 Aug 1998 02:31:48 +0200 Received: from mail-out-0.tiac.net (mail-out-0.tiac.net [199.0.65.247]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id CAA28071 for ; Thu, 13 Aug 1998 02:31:46 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from mail-out-3.tiac.net (mail-out-3.tiac.net [199.0.65.15]) by mail-out-0.tiac.net (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id UAA09485 for ; Wed, 12 Aug 1998 20:31:45 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from support@YandY.com) Received: from denali (p18.tc2.metro.MA.tiac.com [209.61.75.147]) by mail-out-3.tiac.net (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id UAA09112; Wed, 12 Aug 1998 20:31:43 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from support@YandY.com) X-Sender: yandy@pop.tiac.net X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.0.1 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: <199808130031.UAA09112@mail-out-3.tiac.net> Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 20:32:10 -0400 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "Y&Y, Inc." Subject: Re: Space and Time (was: Modules) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199808122232.PAA05747@math.uci.edu> At 03:32 PM 98/08/12 -0700, Marcel Oliver wrote: >I disagree. I believe somewhere in the long-term development of TeX >and/or LaTeX one has to come to a point were visual markup decisions >(page breaks, float placement, maybe even parshapes) can be done >within some GUI and are clearly separated from the logical markup >which is best done in a traditional text editor (thus, getting rid of >ugly things like float placement parameters, \addtopage, \clearpage >etc.) in the .tex file. >This requires a sufficiently fast TeX engine to be useful---the >avarage PC is now coming into this range. So I don't think it would >be a good idea to throw away performance unless it is compensated by a >clear and major gain in non-performance issues. This performance may >be desperately needed in future development of LaTeX which is not yet >forseen. I agree. Working on the new Technical Addendum (about 100 pages, 300kb TeX source file) for our TeX System, I can reTeX and redisplay in 2-3 seconds whenever I want to check on how changes affected the layout. Great when fine-tuning bad line- and bad page-breaks. I'd hate to give this up... 13-Aug-1998 8:14:47-GMT,4327;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id CAA01089 for ; Thu, 13 Aug 1998 02:14:41 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id JAA07972; Thu, 13 Aug 1998 09:57:03 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 395001 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 13 Aug 1998 09:57:01 +0200 Received: from ifi.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de (ifi.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de [129.69.211.1]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id JAA07954 for ; Thu, 13 Aug 1998 09:56:59 +0200 (MET DST) Received: by isidor.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de; Thu, 13 Aug 1998 09:56:55 +0200 (MET DST) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199806271853.UAA29351@frank.zdv.uni-mainz.de> X-Mailer: VM 6.51 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13778.40005.889304.525595@isidor> Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1998 09:56:53 +0200 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Bernd Raichle Subject: Re: Modules To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: On Wed, 12 August 1998 21:49:41 +0200, Martin Schroeder writes: > In <199806271853.UAA29351@frank.zdv.uni-mainz.de> Frank Mittelbach writes: > >b) will be drastic: a current LaTeX format (without any packages > >loaded) uses about 51088 words of memory before begin document; if the > >average word length in commands is 10 (which is far too low with a > >consequent implemented module concept) then this gets basically blown > >to 500000 which is twice the amount of main mem [...] Frank, either I misunderstand your ``word'' or you are wrong with this analysis. A control sequence is one token and will use exactly the same amount of TeX's ``main memory'' independent on the length of its name. The names of control sequences are put in TeX's ``string pool'', thus the string pool will grow if the lengths of control sequence's name will be enlarged in a module concept. > > that i have available > >on this machine for everything. i just looked: when we compiled the > >Companion the log file showed 208957 words of memory out of 262141 > >try to imagine to what size this would grow. ... which had other reasons (a bunch of macro definitions/packages, many and complex box constructions, large and detailed (PicTeX?) figures etc.), hadn't it? > I just looked: emTeX has an hTeX version where main memory can be configured > to be between 2097152 (2^21) and 4194304 (2^22). And I don't think there's a > limit in TeX to make it even bigger if needed. :-) There are limits for TeX's main memory size, for a ``bigTeX'' version with double-sized mem words it's upto 2^32, which should be fairly enough for the next years. ;-) > But I agree that this should be avoided -- but not a taboo. IMHO a module concept will be a good idea, but the extended use of the string pool because of a long common csname prefix (e.g. \contributed/supported/...) should be avoided. String pool space is cheap (one byte for each character) in comparison to a main memory word (4 resp. 8 bytes for each word = token in a token list, hlist character node etc.), nonetheless it should be used reasonable. Just my $0.02. Best wishes, -bernd member of the e-TeX team _____________________________________________________________________ Bernd Raichle "Le langage est source Autor des `german.sty' (aktuell: v2.5e) de malentendus" (A. de Saint-Exupery) 13-Aug-1998 13:01:52-GMT,3965;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA07383 for ; Thu, 13 Aug 1998 07:01:50 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA23590; Thu, 13 Aug 1998 14:29:44 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 395388 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 13 Aug 1998 14:29:42 +0200 Received: from dcdrjh.fnal.gov (dcdrjh.fnal.gov [131.225.103.66]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA23576 for ; Thu, 13 Aug 1998 14:29:40 +0200 (MET DST) Received: (from herber@localhost) by dcdrjh.fnal.gov (8.9.0/8.9.0) id HAA17125; Thu, 13 Aug 1998 07:29:34 -0500 (CDT) Message-ID: <199808131229.HAA17125@dcdrjh.fnal.gov> Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1998 07:29:34 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "Randolph J. Herber" Subject: Re: Space and Time (was: Modules) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L The following header lines retained to affect attribution: |Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 15:32:32 -0700 |Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project |From: Marcel Oliver |Subject: Re: Space and Time (was: Modules) |To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L |Martin Schroeder wrote: |> Even today the _cheapest_ available PC has a P5/200 with 32MB RAM and 2GB HD. |> When L3 will be available(2y+?), this will certainly be the standard PC in |> use; the cheapest to buy will run at 500MHz++. And we'll all be able to use |> BIGGGTeX. :-) |> I don't think we should be concerned much about TeXs main memory or |> processing speed -- there will be plenty. |I disagree. I believe somewhere in the long-term development of TeX |and/or LaTeX one has to come to a point were visual markup decisions |(page breaks, float placement, maybe even parshapes) can be done |within some GUI and are clearly separated from the logical markup |which is best done in a traditional text editor (thus, getting rid of |ugly things like float placement parameters, \addtopage, \clearpage |etc.) in the .tex file. In as much as I dispise GUIs, I agree that using a GUI for this purpose is reasonable---the function is graphical in nature. This does not require and ought not cause the markup for these functions to be removed from the .tex file or for such markup to be made in such a manner that it can not be changed with ordinary text editors easily. The markup for these functions could be stylized so that the GUI could recognize the markup when reading a .tex file and generate such stylized markup when rewritting the .tex file. |This requires a sufficiently fast TeX engine to be useful---the |avarage PC is now coming into this range. So I don't think it would |be a good idea to throw away performance unless it is compensated by a |clear and major gain in non-performance issues. This performance may |be desperately needed in future development of LaTeX which is not yet |forseen. |Just my thoughts on this... |Marcel Randolph J. Herber, herber@dcdrjh.fnal.gov, +1 630 840 2966, CD/OSS/CDF CDF-PK-149F Mail Stop 318 Fermilab, Kirk & Pine Rds., P.O. Box 500, Batavia, IL 60510-0500, USA. (Speaking for myself and not for US, US DOE, FNAL nor URA.) (Product, trade, or service marks herein belong to their respective owners.) N 41 50 26.3 W 88 14 54.4 and altitude 700' approximately, WGS84 datum. ``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.''-Chaucer-Parliament of Fowls 13-Aug-1998 14:03:22-GMT,3058;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA09107 for ; Thu, 13 Aug 1998 08:03:15 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA29798; Thu, 13 Aug 1998 15:22:16 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 395507 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 13 Aug 1998 15:22:12 +0200 Received: from mail.nada.kth.se (root@mail.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.92]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA29737 for ; Thu, 13 Aug 1998 15:22:09 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from [130.237.37.42] (sl22.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.42]) by mail.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id PAA28677 for ; Thu, 13 Aug 1998 15:22:08 +0200 (MET DST) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se (Unverified) References: <199808122232.PAA05747@math.uci.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1998 15:20:22 +0200 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: Space and Time To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199808130031.UAA09112@mail-out-3.tiac.net> I have spent some time thinking about optimizations in a C++ program I write, like when implementing conservative GC (garbage collectors) and the like: On this very low level, one must think very hard on whether can allow an increment like "count++", and the like, because it happens every time an object is called. So, I think optimizations will never be out of the question: When computers become more powerful, the first optimization is for time. In addition, the places that need the most optimizations are often only a few places with code that is called often. With TeX, if long names decrease speed, the should only be used at places that are not called to often. Similarly all macro expansions that can be avoided should be avoided in code that is called often. However, with code that is more high level, and is not called so often, the opposite often happens: One should indeed put in extra macro expansions and the like, if that can help describing the programming structures: This will help making the code safer and also cutting developing time. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 17-Aug-1998 20:02:29-GMT,3207;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id OAA14141 for ; Mon, 17 Aug 1998 14:02:23 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id VAA01927; Mon, 17 Aug 1998 21:32:54 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 396263 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 17 Aug 1998 21:32:51 +0200 Received: from kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE (Ufrank@kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE [134.93.8.158]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id VAA01914 for ; Mon, 17 Aug 1998 21:32:49 +0200 (MET DST) Received: (from Ufrank@localhost) by kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE (8.8.8/8.8.8) id VAA02902 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 17 Aug 1998 21:32:49 +0200 (MET DST) X-Authentication-Warning: kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE: Ufrank set sender to latex3 using -f Received: (from latex3@localhost) by frank.zdv.uni-mainz.de (8.6.9/8.6.9) id VAA00236; Mon, 17 Aug 1998 21:27:01 +0200 References: <199806271853.UAA29351@frank.zdv.uni-mainz.de> <13778.40005.889304.525595@isidor> Message-ID: <199808171927.VAA00236@frank.zdv.uni-mainz.de> Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1998 21:27:01 +0200 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Frank Mittelbach Subject: Re: Modules To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13778.40005.889304.525595@isidor> Bernd > On Wed, 12 August 1998 21:49:41 +0200, > Martin Schroeder writes: > > In <199806271853.UAA29351@frank.zdv.uni-mainz.de> Frank Mittelbach writes: > > >b) will be drastic: a current LaTeX format (without any packages > > >loaded) uses about 51088 words of memory before begin document; if the > > >average word length in commands is 10 (which is far too low with a > > >consequent implemented module concept) then this gets basically blown > > >to 500000 which is twice the amount of main mem > [...] > > Frank, either I misunderstand your ``word'' or you are wrong with this > analysis. i guess neither. :-) the problem is that Martin cited me out of context. I was replying to a suggestion to replace TeX's token based mechanism, ie \foobar being internally one token in main mem and a few bits of char mem, with a mechanism in which \foobar is 7 tokens --- only that we were discussing \foo/bar_bas_... eg even longer streams of tokens stored and processed each time. my claim back then is that TeX is tailored to be a token based program and that giving this up is undesirable for several reasons. frank 7-Sep-1998 22:16:04-GMT,3598;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id QAA29719 for ; Mon, 7 Sep 1998 16:15:58 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id XAA25621; Mon, 7 Sep 1998 23:40:44 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 398528 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 7 Sep 1998 23:40:42 +0200 Received: from blaubaer.kn-bremen.de (root@blaubaer.kn-bremen.de [194.94.232.249]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id XAA25610 for ; Mon, 7 Sep 1998 23:40:39 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from dream.kn-bremen.de (uucp@localhost) by blaubaer.kn-bremen.de (8.9.1/8.9.1) with UUCP id XAA24301 for latex-l@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de; Mon, 7 Sep 1998 23:19:30 +0200 Received: by dream.kn-bremen.de (1.65/waf) via UUCP; Mon, 07 Sep 98 23:07:12 -2 for latex-l@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Mailer: Helldiver 1.08 (Waffle 1.65) Lines: 48 Message-ID: Date: Mon, 7 Sep 1998 23:07:12 +0200 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Martin Schroeder Organization: The Dreaming Subject: [comp.text.sgml,comp.text.tex] Ann: ISO character entities and their LaTeX equivalents To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L >From: Rune Mathisen >Newsgroups: comp.text.sgml,comp.text.tex >Subject: Ann: ISO character entities and their LaTeX equivalents >Message-ID: <3114164011659133@online.no> >Date: 07 Sep 1998 15:33:31 +0200 We have been making documentation on the entity character sets given in the ISO 8879 (SGML) standard. The aim is twofold: (1) Provide the mappings necessary to translate SGML documents to TeX/LaTeX. (2) Provide documentation on how the characters look by producing glyphs (using LaTeX of course). This will also work the other way around: it is actually a neat reference for LaTeX users needing some special symbol. Status: -- Almost all ISO 8879 mappings to LaTeX have been found. ISObox is missing. Further work: -- We are including mappings to Unicode. -- We will add other character entity sets: ISO TR 9573-13, HTML-4, MathML -- We want someone to help us write a database application (SQL) to sort and present the symbols for different purposes ...and replace SDATA fields in entity files. -- We need help finding more documentation on -- font packages for TeX/LaTeX. -- other (public) character entity sets. See: http://home.sol.no/~mathrune/isoent/ Any comments or suggestions are welcome! Please respond to . -- Rune Mathisen Vidar Gundersen End of forwarded message. -- Martin Schr"oder, MS@Dream.KN-Bremen.DE Internet: Thousands of people mostly unaware of the sight and sound of each other, linked together by the bits of our souls that can fit through computer keyboards. (James Fortune) 10-Oct-1998 17:31:49-GMT,2743;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA23480 for ; Sat, 10 Oct 1998 11:31:46 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA13154; Sat, 10 Oct 1998 19:16:41 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 400734 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 10 Oct 1998 19:16:39 +0200 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA13144 for ; Sat, 10 Oct 1998 19:16:37 +0200 (MET DST) X-VMS-To: LATEX X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98101018164904@man.ac.uk> Date: Sat, 10 Oct 1998 18:16:49 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: use PS fonts in LaTeX for the journal A&A To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L I would like to use the PostScript fonts, specifically the psnfss times package, so that manuscripts for the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics will be typeset as they later will appear in the journal. This is, at the moment, ALL I want to do as far as PostScript fonts are concerned. I've read descriptions in the obvious places, but it seems a bit too complicated; I suspect that it's actually quite easy if all one wants to do is what I described above. Can someone point me to a) the times package (if it's REALLY just three lines I can type it in by hand) and b) the fonts. The main thing is that I would like to get ONLY what I need, and that without much sifting and sorting. Where should I put the various font files? What I have done is got the contents of tex-archive/fonts/psfonts/{times|courier|helvetic}/ What else do I need and where should I put the stuff (I have a rather standard VMS TeX-tree). -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ My opinions are not necessarily those of NRAL or the University of Manchester. 10-Oct-1998 18:19:57-GMT,2170;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA24341 for ; Sat, 10 Oct 1998 12:19:55 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id UAA14101; Sat, 10 Oct 1998 20:08:23 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 400759 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 10 Oct 1998 20:08:21 +0200 Received: from salmon.maths.tcd.ie (mmdf@salmon.maths.tcd.ie [134.226.81.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id UAA14082 for ; Sat, 10 Oct 1998 20:08:08 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from boole.maths.tcd.ie by salmon.maths.tcd.ie with SMTP id ; 10 Oct 98 19:07:55 +0100 (BST) References: <98101018164904@man.ac.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.93.2i Message-ID: <19981010190754.A13834@maths.tcd.ie> Date: Sat, 10 Oct 1998 19:07:54 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Timothy Murphy Subject: Re: use PS fonts in LaTeX for the journal A&A To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <98101018164904@man.ac.uk>; from Phillip Helbig on Sat, Oct 10, 1998 at 06:16:49PM +0000 On Sat, Oct 10, 1998 at 06:16:49PM +0000, Phillip Helbig wrote: > I would like to use the PostScript fonts, specifically the psnfss times > package, so that manuscripts for the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics > will be typeset as they later will appear in the journal. Normally all you have to do, if you have a reasonably recent LaTeX, is to say \usepackage{times}. This uses times.sty in the psnfss package (which usually comes with LaTeX). 10-Oct-1998 18:43:25-GMT,4346;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA24780 for ; Sat, 10 Oct 1998 12:43:24 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id UAA14470; Sat, 10 Oct 1998 20:32:22 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 400773 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 10 Oct 1998 20:32:20 +0200 Received: from mail-out-0.tiac.net (mail-out-0.tiac.net [199.0.65.247]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id UAA14460 for ; Sat, 10 Oct 1998 20:32:18 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from mail-out-1.tiac.net (mail-out-1.tiac.net [199.0.65.12]) by mail-out-0.tiac.net (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA13581; Sat, 10 Oct 1998 14:32:09 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from support@YandY.com) Received: from yandy (p22.tc5.metro.MA.tiac.com [209.61.76.23]) by mail-out-1.tiac.net (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id OAA15005; Sat, 10 Oct 1998 14:31:58 -0400 (EDT) X-Sender: yandy@pop.tiac.net X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.0.1 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: <199810101831.OAA15005@mail-out-1.tiac.net> Date: Sat, 10 Oct 1998 14:26:18 -0400 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "Y&Y Inc." Subject: Re: use PS fonts in LaTeX for the journal A&A To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <98101018164904@man.ac.uk> At 06:16 PM 10/10/98 +0000, Phillip Helbig wrote: >I would like to use the PostScript fonts, specifically the psnfss times >package, so that manuscripts for the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics >will be typeset as they later will appear in the journal. Do you know what fonts they use? `PostScript fonts' is a bit too generic, given that there are supposedly 90,000 fonts in that form :-) >Can someone point me to a) the times package (if it's REALLY just three >lines I can type it in by hand) in LaTeX 2e, \usepackage{times} times.sty should be in the PSNFSS package. You may need to say something about font encoding (\usepackage[...]{fontenc}) and you may need to setup psfonts.map for DVIPS so it knows what to do. >and b) the fonts. The times.sty file uses Times-Roman, Helvetica and Courier fonts that are printer resident in most PS printers. So unless you want to preview the DVI file you don't acutally need those fonts. The fonts are available from Adobe (http://www.adobe.com). The cheapest way is probably to get the Type Basics package from them. If you need just individual fonts you are better off going to MonoType (http://www.monotype.com) who sell licenses for individual fonts in this family. The above will only change the text fonts. Math will still use Computer Modern fonts. CM is lighter and wider than Times, so the mixture is not too appealing. One solution is to use the MathTime fonts from Y&Y :-) Other solutions are free - like mathptm - but limited because they can only rely on having the Symbol font, which is also printer resident, hence have to mix to gether Times, Symbol and some CM math fonts. Regards, Louis. ***************************************************************************** Y&Y, Inc. `Acrobat-ready PS from TeX' (see http://www.YandY.com/pdf_from.pdf) 45 Walden Street, Concord, MA 01742 USA Phone: (508) 371-3286 Fax: (508) 371-2004 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------- Sales: mailto:sales@YandY.com Support: mailto:support@YandY.com Site License: mailto:main-office@YandY.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------- World Wide Web: http://www.YandY.com ***************************************************************************** 12-Oct-1998 11:27:43-GMT,3880;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA07745 for ; Mon, 12 Oct 1998 05:27:12 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id MAA25591; Mon, 12 Oct 1998 12:59:09 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 400860 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 12 Oct 1998 12:59:06 +0200 Received: from coreserver.core.ucl.ac.be (coreserver.core.ucl.ac.be [130.104.4.39]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA25577 for ; Mon, 12 Oct 1998 12:59:04 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from core.ucl.ac.be ([130.104.121.63]) by coreserver.core.ucl.ac.be (Netscape Mail Server v2.0) with ESMTP id AAA275 for ; Mon, 12 Oct 1998 13:03:59 +0200 X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5b2 (Macintosh; I; PPC) X-Accept-Language: en-GB, en, en-US, fr-FR, fr, fr-BE, fr-CH, fr-CA, es, es-ES, es-AR, es-CO, es-MX, nl, nl-BE MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de id MAA25578 Message-ID: <3621EFE9.1CF6DD06@core.ucl.ac.be> Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1998 13:02:51 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: MERTENS Jean-Francois Organization: CORE, =?iso-8859-1?Q?Universit=E9?= Catholique de Louvain Subject: [Fwd: Renewal of your subscription to the LATEX-L list] To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L -------- Original Message -------- Return-Path: Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de ([129.206.119.201])by coreserver.core.ucl.ac.be (Netscape Mail Server v2.0)with ESMTP id AAA299 for ;Sun, 11 Oct 1998 06:05:07 +0200 Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201])by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id GAA22446for ; Sun, 11 Oct 1998 06:00:06 +0200 (MET DST) Message-Id: <199810110400.GAA22446@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de> Date: Sun, 11 Oct 1998 06:00:06 +0200 From: "L-Soft list server at University of Heidelberg (1.8b)" Subject: Renewal of your subscription to the LATEX-L list To: " " X-LSV-ListID: LATEX-L X-Mozilla-Status: 8001 X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000 X-UIDL: 19981011040507031.AAA299@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de Sun, 11 Oct 1998 06:00:06 Your subscription to the LATEX-L list is due for renewal. If you wish to remain subscribed to LATEX-L, please issue the following command to LISTSERV@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE at your earliest convenience: CONFIRM LATEX-L You will be automatically removed from the list if you do not send a CONFIRM command within the next 21 days. PS: In order to facilitate the task, this message has been specially formatted so that you only need to forward it back to LISTSERV@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE to have the command executed. Note that while the formats produced by the forwarding function of most mail packages are supported, replying will seldom work, so make sure to forward and not reply. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- // JOB CONFIRM LATEX-L // EOJ 12-Oct-1998 13:48:41-GMT,976;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA10416 for ; Mon, 12 Oct 1998 07:48:38 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA19476 for ; Mon, 12 Oct 1998 15:48:33 +0200 (MET DST) Message-Id: <199810121348.PAA19476@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de> Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1998 15:48:33 +0200 From: "L-Soft list server at University of Heidelberg (1.8b)" Subject: Output of your job "beebe" To: "Nelson H. F. Beebe" > CONFIRM LATEX-L Your subscription to the LATEX-L list has been confirmed. Summary of resource utilization ------------------------------- CPU time: 0.030 sec Overhead CPU: 0.010 sec CPU model: SPARCstation-20 (128M) 13-Oct-1998 12:30:20-GMT,2030;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA12510 for ; Tue, 13 Oct 1998 06:30:18 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA14121; Tue, 13 Oct 1998 13:46:04 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 401104 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 13 Oct 1998 13:46:02 +0200 Received: from heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk (exim@heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk [128.232.32.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA14105 for ; Tue, 13 Oct 1998 13:46:00 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from dorceus.cl.cam.ac.uk (cl.cam.ac.uk) [128.232.1.34] (rf) by heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 1.82 #1) id 0zT2tq-0005cO-00; Tue, 13 Oct 1998 12:45:58 +0100 Message-ID: Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1998 12:45:56 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Robin Fairbairns Subject: Re: [Fwd: Renewal of your subscription to the LATEX-L list] To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 13 Oct 1998 12:36:56 BST." <3.0.1.32.19981013123656.0075b828@mailhost.fis.unico.it> please, people, read what the message says: the mail should be forwarded back to listserv: > >PS: In order to facilitate the task, this message has been specially > >formatted so that you only need to forward it back to > >LISTSERV@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE to have the command executed. [...] robin 13-Oct-1998 12:36:18-GMT,3853;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA12566 for ; Tue, 13 Oct 1998 06:32:30 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA13657; Tue, 13 Oct 1998 13:40:35 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 401092 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 13 Oct 1998 13:40:28 +0200 Received: from fermi.fis.unico.it (root@fermi.fis.unico.it [131.175.56.2]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA13636 for ; Tue, 13 Oct 1998 13:40:22 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from mirko (pc-casini [131.175.56.33]) by fermi.fis.unico.it (8.9.1/8.9.1) with SMTP id NAA29910 for ; Tue, 13 Oct 1998 13:40:20 +0200 (MET DST) X-Sender: casini@mailhost.fis.unico.it X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Light Version 3.0.1 (32) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de id NAA13641 Message-ID: <3.0.1.32.19981013123656.0075b828@mailhost.fis.unico.it> Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1998 12:36:56 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Emanuele Casini Subject: Re: [Fwd: Renewal of your subscription to the LATEX-L list] To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <3621EFE9.1CF6DD06@core.ucl.ac.be> At 13.02 12/10/98 +0100, you wrote: >-------- Original Message -------- >Return-Path: >Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de ([129.206.119.201])by >coreserver.core.ucl.ac.be (Netscape Mail Server v2.0)with ESMTP id >AAA299 for ;Sun, 11 Oct 1998 06:05:07 +0200 >Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201])by >relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id GAA22446for >; Sun, 11 Oct 1998 06:00:06 +0200 (MET DST) >Message-Id: <199810110400.GAA22446@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de> >Date: Sun, 11 Oct 1998 06:00:06 +0200 >From: "L-Soft list server at University of Heidelberg (1.8b)" >Subject: Renewal of your subscription to the LATEX-L list >To: " " >X-LSV-ListID: LATEX-L >X-Mozilla-Status: 8001 >X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000 >X-UIDL: 19981011040507031.AAA299@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de > >Sun, 11 Oct 1998 06:00:06 > >Your subscription to the LATEX-L list is due for renewal. If you wish to >remain subscribed to LATEX-L, please issue the following command to >LISTSERV@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE at your earliest convenience: > > CONFIRM LATEX-L > > >You will be automatically removed from the list if you do not send a >CONFIRM command within the next 21 days. > >PS: In order to facilitate the task, this message has been specially >formatted so that you only need to forward it back to >LISTSERV@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE to have the command executed. Note >that while the formats produced by the forwarding function of most mail >packages are supported, replying will seldom work, so make sure to >forward and not reply. >------------------------------------------------------------------------- >// JOB >CONFIRM LATEX-L >// EOJ > > 13-Oct-1998 17:29:12-GMT,1544;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA19875 for ; Tue, 13 Oct 1998 11:28:59 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA13600; Tue, 13 Oct 1998 18:44:33 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 401403 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 13 Oct 1998 18:44:29 +0200 Received: from olumiere.idris.fr (gaulle@olumiere.idris.fr [130.84.8.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id SAA13576 for ; Tue, 13 Oct 1998 18:44:27 +0200 (MET DST) Received: (from gaulle@localhost) by olumiere.idris.fr (8.9.1a/8.9.1) id SAA29706 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 13 Oct 1998 18:44:20 +0200 Message-ID: <199810131644.SAA29706@olumiere.idris.fr> Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1998 18:44:20 +0200 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Bernard GAULLE Subject: Re: [Fwd: Renewal of your subscription to the LATEX-L list] To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L CONFIRL [DM LATEX-L 15-Oct-1998 21:15:52-GMT,2195;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id PAA02900 for ; Thu, 15 Oct 1998 15:15:37 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id UAA19332; Thu, 15 Oct 1998 20:00:10 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 401229 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 15 Oct 1998 20:00:07 +0200 Received: from sarah.albany.edu (sarah.albany.edu [169.226.1.103]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA14671 for ; Thu, 15 Oct 1998 19:22:10 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from hilbert.math.albany.edu (hilbert.math.albany.edu [169.226.23.52]) by sarah.albany.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA08858 for ; Thu, 15 Oct 1998 13:21:51 -0400 (EDT) Received: (from hammond@localhost) by hilbert.math.albany.edu (8.8.4/8.8.3) id NAA05475 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 15 Oct 1998 13:21:48 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <199810151721.NAA05475@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1998 13:21:48 -0400 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "William F. Hammond" Subject: Users dropping into TeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Greetings -- I believe that it is generally considered "bad form", eventually perhaps unacceptable with LaTeX 3, for a user to use raw TeX commands in a LaTeX file. Are there circumstances where it will be acceptable to use raw TeX in the definition argument of "\newcommand", "\renewcommand", or "\providecommand", or in one of the definition arguments of "\newenvironment"? Thanks. -- Bill Hammond 16-Oct-1998 13:37:28-GMT,2730;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA22523 for ; Fri, 16 Oct 1998 07:37:24 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA21316; Fri, 16 Oct 1998 15:00:11 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 401713 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 16 Oct 1998 15:00:08 +0200 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA21272 for ; Fri, 16 Oct 1998 15:00:03 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from [130.237.37.138] (sl112.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.138]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id OAA07582 for ; Fri, 16 Oct 1998 14:59:58 +0200 (MET DST) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1998 14:57:45 +0200 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: Users dropping into TeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199810151721.NAA05475@hilbert.math.albany.edu> At 13:21 -0400 98/10/15, William F. Hammond wrote: >I believe that it is generally considered "bad form", eventually >perhaps unacceptable with LaTeX 3, for a user to use raw TeX >commands in a LaTeX file. > >Are there circumstances where it will be acceptable to use raw TeX >in the definition argument of "\newcommand", "\renewcommand", or >"\providecommand", or in one of the definition arguments of >"\newenvironment"? LaTeX evidently has a syntax based on Pascal, but this syntax is not explicitly part of LaTeX, only something that the developers of LaTeX use internally and present to the LaTeX users as set of heuristical rules. I think it would be good if this syntax would be officially and explicitly stated (using EBNF rules), which would help developers of other tools. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 16-Oct-1998 14:04:57-GMT,2222;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA23124 for ; Fri, 16 Oct 1998 08:04:50 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA22515; Fri, 16 Oct 1998 15:14:50 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 401720 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 16 Oct 1998 15:14:46 +0200 Received: from nag.co.uk (openmath.nag.co.uk [192.156.217.16]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA22481 for ; Fri, 16 Oct 1998 15:14:24 +0200 (MET DST) Received: (from davidc@localhost) by nag.co.uk (AIX4.2/UCB 8.7/8.7) id OAA30490; Fri, 16 Oct 1998 14:13:45 +0100 (BST) References: Message-ID: <199810161313.OAA30490@nag.co.uk> Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1998 14:13:45 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: David Carlisle Subject: Re: Users dropping into TeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: (message from Hans Aberg on Fri, 16 Oct 1998 14:57:45 +0200) LaTeX evidently has a syntax based on Pascal, but this syntax is not explicitly part of LaTeX, only something that the developers of LaTeX use internally I think you are probably referring to the pascal-ish comments that were in the sorces for latex209 and some remain in the `oldcomments' sections in the current sources. Leslie Lamport used those while designing the original latex algorithms but they are not really used now. Most of them have been removed as they had (even in the days of 2.09) got out of sync with the actual code implementation and so were more confusing than helpful. David 16-Oct-1998 21:20:34-GMT,2698;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id PAA08632 for ; Fri, 16 Oct 1998 15:20:27 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id WAA20873; Fri, 16 Oct 1998 22:52:22 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 402210 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 16 Oct 1998 22:52:18 +0200 Received: from blaubaer.kn-bremen.de (root@blaubaer.kn-bremen.de [194.94.232.249]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id WAA20855 for ; Fri, 16 Oct 1998 22:52:15 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from dream.kn-bremen.de (uucp@localhost) by blaubaer.kn-bremen.de (8.9.1/8.9.1) with UUCP id WAA11002 for latex-l@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de; Fri, 16 Oct 1998 22:31:45 +0200 Received: by dream.kn-bremen.de (1.65/waf) via UUCP; Fri, 16 Oct 98 22:21:42 -2 for latex-l@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de References: <199810161313.OAA30490@nag.co.uk> X-Mailer: Helldiver 1.08 (Waffle 1.65) Lines: 21 Message-ID: <28-J2A2JBh108h@dream.kn-bremen.de> Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1998 22:21:42 +0200 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Martin Schroeder Organization: The Dreaming Subject: Re: Users dropping into TeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In <199810161313.OAA30490@nag.co.uk> David Carlisle writes: > LaTeX evidently has a syntax based on Pascal, but this syntax is not > explicitly part of LaTeX, only something that the developers of LaTeX use > internally >I think you are probably referring to the pascal-ish comments that were >in the sorces for latex209 and some remain in the `oldcomments' sections >in the current sources. Leslie Lamport used those while designing the AFAIK it is not pascal-ish, but classic algol68-like pseudocode. :-) Best regards Martin -- Martin Schr"oder, MS@Dream.KN-Bremen.DE - If I start up a C shell and put it up to my ear, what will I hear? - You'd hear the sound of the C, of course, as it repeatedly crashes on the silicon beach. (The Usenet Oracle, Jan 1993) 17-Oct-1998 11:09:22-GMT,2764;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA25951 for ; Sat, 17 Oct 1998 05:09:16 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id MAB07015; Sat, 17 Oct 1998 12:49:20 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 401476 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 17 Oct 1998 12:49:17 +0200 Received: from heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk (exim@heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk [128.232.32.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id MAA07005 for ; Sat, 17 Oct 1998 12:49:14 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from dorceus.cl.cam.ac.uk (cl.cam.ac.uk) [128.232.1.34] (rf) by heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 1.82 #1) id 0zUTv6-0000em-00; Sat, 17 Oct 1998 11:49:12 +0100 Message-ID: Date: Sat, 17 Oct 1998 11:49:11 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Robin Fairbairns Subject: Re: Users dropping into TeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 16 Oct 1998 22:21:42 +0200." <28-J2A2JBh108h@dream.kn-bremen.de> > In <199810161313.OAA30490@nag.co.uk> David Carlisle writes: > > LaTeX evidently has a syntax based on Pascal, but this syntax is not > > explicitly part of LaTeX, only something that the developers of LaTeX use > > internally > > >I think you are probably referring to the pascal-ish comments that were > >in the sorces for latex209 and some remain in the `oldcomments' sections > >in the current sources. Leslie Lamport used those while designing the > > > AFAIK it is not pascal-ish, but classic algol68-like pseudocode. :-) > frankly, whatever the pseudocode looks like (and wirth would once have been apoplectic to have pascal-like and algol68-like confused ;-), i think hans aberg's original suggestion is just plain wrong. latex's syntax has a little bit of regularity, a little bit of block structure, ..., but all told it's so uneven that it's silly to imagine `formally' specifying it. added to which, the extreme difficult of faulting tex primitives, etc., that fall outside the scope of the syntax makes the utility of such a specification doubtful. robin 17-Oct-1998 11:19:03-GMT,2310;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA26128 for ; Sat, 17 Oct 1998 05:19:01 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA07355; Sat, 17 Oct 1998 13:00:22 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 401486 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 17 Oct 1998 13:00:20 +0200 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA07345 for ; Sat, 17 Oct 1998 13:00:18 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from [130.237.37.99] (sl73.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.99]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id NAA20438 for ; Sat, 17 Oct 1998 13:00:08 +0200 (MET DST) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <199810161313.OAA30490@nag.co.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Sat, 17 Oct 1998 12:59:10 +0200 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: Users dropping into TeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <28-J2A2JBh108h@dream.kn-bremen.de> At 22:21 +0200 98/10/16, Martin Schroeder wrote: > >AFAIK it is not pascal-ish, but classic algol68-like pseudocode. :-) > SSMA, I recall that Wirth who made Pascal stole the syntax largely from Algol: So what's Pascalish is likely to be Algolish, and vice versa. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 17-Oct-1998 11:22:40-GMT,2456;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA26160 for ; Sat, 17 Oct 1998 05:22:39 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA07481; Sat, 17 Oct 1998 13:04:39 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 401494 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 17 Oct 1998 13:04:36 +0200 Received: from heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk (exim@heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk [128.232.32.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA07471 for ; Sat, 17 Oct 1998 13:04:33 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from dorceus.cl.cam.ac.uk (cl.cam.ac.uk) [128.232.1.34] (rf) by heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 1.82 #1) id 0zUU9x-0000nE-00; Sat, 17 Oct 1998 12:04:33 +0100 Message-ID: Date: Sat, 17 Oct 1998 12:04:31 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Robin Fairbairns Subject: Re: Users dropping into TeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 17 Oct 1998 12:59:10 +0200." > At 22:21 +0200 98/10/16, Martin Schroeder wrote: > > > >AFAIK it is not pascal-ish, but classic algol68-like pseudocode. :-) > > > > SSMA, I recall that Wirth who made Pascal stole the syntax largely from > Algol: So what's Pascalish is likely to be Algolish, and vice versa. algol-68 (what martin was talking about) and algol-60 have very different specification styles. wirth stormed out of the group that was specifying algol-68 because he thought it was becoming too complicated (or something). algol-68 never really took off (though i and many other people here programmed in it a lot in the late 60s and early 70s); pascal's never exactly taken the world by storm, either. but i think the whole issue is irrelevant to discussion of latex. so i'll shut up now... robin 17-Oct-1998 11:23:25-GMT,2645;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA26188 for ; Sat, 17 Oct 1998 05:23:23 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA07529; Sat, 17 Oct 1998 13:06:36 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 401498 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 17 Oct 1998 13:06:33 +0200 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA07519 for ; Sat, 17 Oct 1998 13:06:30 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from [130.237.37.99] (sl109.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.135]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id NAA20580 for ; Sat, 17 Oct 1998 13:06:25 +0200 (MET DST) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: Your message of "Fri, 16 Oct 1998 22:21:42 +0200." <28-J2A2JBh108h@dream.kn-bremen.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Sat, 17 Oct 1998 13:05:58 +0200 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: Users dropping into TeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: At 11:49 +0100 98/10/17, Robin Fairbairns wrote: >latex's syntax has a little bit of regularity, a little bit of block >structure, ..., but all told it's so uneven that it's silly to imagine >`formally' specifying it. Whatever, it is important one makes up one's mind and make that explicit. >added to which, the extreme difficult of faulting tex primitives, >etc., that fall outside the scope of the syntax makes the utility of >such a specification doubtful. I have noted that some tools, such as spell-checkers, are dependant on a LaTeX syntax (not working properly if using merely PlainTeX). Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 21-Oct-1998 16:52:10-GMT,3360;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA01482 for ; Wed, 21 Oct 1998 10:51:42 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA09181; Wed, 21 Oct 1998 15:02:18 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 402691 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 21 Oct 1998 15:02:14 +0200 Received: from sarah.albany.edu (sarah.albany.edu [169.226.1.103]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA09147 for ; Wed, 21 Oct 1998 15:02:09 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from hilbert.math.albany.edu (hilbert.math.albany.edu [169.226.23.52]) by sarah.albany.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id JAA00310 for ; Wed, 21 Oct 1998 09:01:51 -0400 (EDT) Received: (from hammond@localhost) by hilbert.math.albany.edu (8.8.4/8.8.3) id JAA11121 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 21 Oct 1998 09:01:47 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <199810211301.JAA11121@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Date: Wed, 21 Oct 1998 09:01:47 -0400 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "William F. Hammond" Subject: Re: Users dropping into TeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Robin Fairbairns on Sat, 17 Oct 1998 at 11:49:11 +0100 wrote (responding primarily to Carlisle (and Aberg)): > latex's syntax has a little bit of regularity, a little bit of block > structure, ..., but all told it's so uneven that it's silly to imagine > `formally' specifying it. > added to which, the extreme difficult of faulting tex primitives, > etc., that fall outside the scope of the syntax makes the utility of > such a specification doubtful. Comment: I do imagine that LaTeX can be modeled as something like a "categorical limit" of SGML DTD's. If I want to be able to have robust translations of the documents that I author to other formats, then I would choose one of those DTD's. (Well, I might add a few other goodies to it that flow to LaTeX.) But my original question was motivated by several lines from "ltx3info.tex" and my wondering whether these lines were durable for the LaTeX-3 future. Here are clips of a "newenvironment" and a "newcommand": %%%%% clip \newenvironment{citations}{% \list{}{% \renewcommand{\makelabel}[1]{\normalfont\itshape ##1}% }% }{% \endlist } %%%%% clip \newcommand{\AmSLaTeX}{$\mathcal A$\lower.4ex\hbox{$\!\mathcal M\!$}$\mathcal S$-\LaTeX} %%%%% endclips (I do not see why "citations" could not have been done entirely in Lamport LaTeX. (I am unclear what "list" and "endlist" are.)) In the "AmSLaTeX" macro I believe that "lower" and "hbox" are ordinary TeX. Will this usage survive? Thanks. -- Bill Hammond 21-Oct-1998 22:20:35-GMT,4171;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id QAA10782 for ; Wed, 21 Oct 1998 16:20:33 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id AAA15895; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 00:00:35 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 402396 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 00:00:33 +0200 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id XAA15663 for ; Wed, 21 Oct 1998 23:58:52 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from [130.237.37.63] (sl43.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.63]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id XAA16510 for ; Wed, 21 Oct 1998 23:58:46 +0200 (MET DST) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <199810211301.JAA11121@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Wed, 21 Oct 1998 23:58:24 +0200 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: Users dropping into TeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <3WoL2AgGBh108h@dream.kn-bremen.de> In <199810211301.JAA11121@hilbert.math.albany.edu> "William F. Hammond" writes: >%%%%% clip >\newenvironment{citations}{% > \list{}{% > \renewcommand{\makelabel}[1]{\normalfont\itshape ##1}% > }% >}{% > \endlist >} >%%%%% clip >\newcommand{\AmSLaTeX}{$\mathcal A$\lower.4ex\hbox{$\!\mathcal > M\!$}$\mathcal S$-\LaTeX} >%%%%% endclips > >(I do not see why "citations" could not have been done entirely in >Lamport LaTeX. (I am unclear what "list" and "endlist" are.)) At 21:09 +0200 98/10/21, Martin Schroeder wrote: > >\newenvironment{foo}{start}{end} defines \foo{start} and \endfoo{end}. > >But this is an undocumented feature -- which you can use at your own >risk. So citations really should be > >\newenvironment{citations}{% > \begin{list}{}{% > \renewcommand{\makelabel}[1]{\normalfont\itshape ##1}% > }% > }{% > \end{list}% > } > >I think the official policy on compatibilty is something like: if it's >mentionend in the manual or in /doc, it will be provided. Otherwise it >might be unavailable or hidden somewhere. This is in fact related to the idea of "modules": In computer lingo, the implementer of a library (or something) to be used by others defines an "interface", with specifications of its usage, called a contract. The user of that feature can only use it according to the contract, but that is expected to be unchanged between versions. So LaTeX defines \begin{list} and \end{list} as a part of the list-environment interface, but \list and \endlist are part of the implementation of the list environment. Some languages have special features in order to prevent users to use the things merely part of the implementation and not the interface, but TeX does not have any such features; so LaTeX instead uses "@" defined as a letter in some contexts and a non-letter to the user. So, in order to emphasize that \list and \endlist do not belong to the interface, these should really have been named \@list or \@endlist: Then people will know this. If developing the concept of "modules", it would be prudent to formalize the use of such features. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 21-Oct-1998 22:21:06-GMT,3351;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id QAA10786 for ; Wed, 21 Oct 1998 16:20:51 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id VAA29986; Wed, 21 Oct 1998 21:23:16 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 402960 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 21 Oct 1998 21:23:13 +0200 Received: from blaubaer.kn-bremen.de (root@blaubaer.kn-bremen.de [194.94.232.249]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id VAA29955 for ; Wed, 21 Oct 1998 21:23:10 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from dream.kn-bremen.de (uucp@localhost) by blaubaer.kn-bremen.de (8.9.1/8.9.1) with UUCP id VAA25097 for latex-l@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de; Wed, 21 Oct 1998 21:15:16 +0200 Received: by dream.kn-bremen.de (1.65/waf) via UUCP; Wed, 21 Oct 98 21:09:11 -2 for latex-l@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de References: <199810211301.JAA11121@hilbert.math.albany.edu> X-Mailer: Helldiver 1.08 (Waffle 1.65) Lines: 48 Message-ID: <3WoL2AgGBh108h@dream.kn-bremen.de> Date: Wed, 21 Oct 1998 21:09:11 +0200 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Martin Schroeder Organization: The Dreaming Subject: Re: Users dropping into TeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In <199810211301.JAA11121@hilbert.math.albany.edu> "William F. Hammond" writes: >But my original question was motivated by several lines from >"ltx3info.tex" and my wondering whether these lines were durable >for the LaTeX-3 future. >Here are clips of a "newenvironment" and a "newcommand": >%%%%% clip >\newenvironment{citations}{% > \list{}{% > \renewcommand{\makelabel}[1]{\normalfont\itshape ##1}% > }% >}{% > \endlist >} >%%%%% clip >\newcommand{\AmSLaTeX}{$\mathcal A$\lower.4ex\hbox{$\!\mathcal > M\!$}$\mathcal S$-\LaTeX} >%%%%% endclips >(I do not see why "citations" could not have been done entirely in >Lamport LaTeX. (I am unclear what "list" and "endlist" are.)) \newenvironment{foo}{start}{end} defines \foo{start} and \endfoo{end}. But this is an undocumented feature -- which you can use at your own risk. So citations really should be \newenvironment{citations}{% \begin{list}{}{% \renewcommand{\makelabel}[1]{\normalfont\itshape ##1}% }% }{% \end{list}% } I think the official policy on compatibilty is something like: if it's mentionend in the manual or in /doc, it will be provided. Otherwise it might be unavailable or hidden somewhere. Best regards Martin -- Martin Schr"oder, MS@Dream.KN-Bremen.DE \line{Final exhortation: G{\sc O} {\sc FORTH} now and create {\sl masterpieces of the publishing art!\/}} Donald E. Knuth, TeXbook.TeX line 18801f 21-Oct-1998 23:26:35-GMT,3850;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id RAA12487 for ; Wed, 21 Oct 1998 17:26:34 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id XAA10836; Wed, 21 Oct 1998 23:08:37 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 402999 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 21 Oct 1998 23:08:34 +0200 Received: from bnedgate.vossnet.de (root@bnedgate.vossnet.de [212.53.203.130]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id XAA10819 for ; Wed, 21 Oct 1998 23:08:31 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from BNeD.com (hubertjg@bned-s1.intra.bned.com [192.168.2.2]) by bnedgate.vossnet.de (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id XAA03071 for ; Wed, 21 Oct 1998 23:08:37 +0200 X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.04 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.0.32 i686) MIME-Version: 1.0 References: <199810211301.JAA11121@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <362E4D4C.A089A8B2@BNeD.com> Date: Wed, 21 Oct 1998 21:08:28 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hubert Gaesslein Organization: Broadband Network Design Subject: Re: Users dropping into TeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L William F. Hammond on Wed, 21 Oct 1998 09:01:47 -0400 wrote: > But my original question was motivated by several lines from > "ltx3info.tex" and my wondering whether these lines were durable > for the LaTeX-3 future. > > Here are clips of a "newenvironment" and a "newcommand": > > %%%%% clip > \newenvironment{citations}{% > \list{}{% > \renewcommand{\makelabel}[1]{\normalfont\itshape ##1}% > }% > }{% > \endlist > } > %%%%% clip > \newcommand{\AmSLaTeX}{$\mathcal A$\lower.4ex\hbox{$\!\mathcal > M\!$}$\mathcal S$-\LaTeX} > %%%%% endclips > > (I do not see why "citations" could not have been done entirely in > Lamport LaTeX. (I am unclear what "list" and "endlist" are.)) A LaTeX environment "foo" is basically implemented as a pair of commands "\foo" and "\endfoo". The construct \begin{foo} ... \end{foo} will be translated to something like \begingroup \foo ... \endfoo \endgroup plus some extra code to check whether such an environment is defined at all and whether the names given as arguments to \begin and \end match each other. Many of LaTeX's environments (e.g., enumerate, quotation, description, verse) are based on the "list" environment (or its cousin "trivlist"); i.e., in the above definition \begin{list} ... \end{list} could've been used as well---the only differences would have been an extra (redundant) level of grouping and some performance overhead. > In the "AmSLaTeX" macro I believe that "lower" and "hbox" are > ordinary TeX. Yupp. These are TeX primitives (built-in, not macros) --- unless somebody comes along and redefines them, of course. > Will this usage survive? Probably not. According to the demos/preview of LaTeX3 published last spring (1), *lots* of things are going to change. (The TeXbook may well become useless for us humble package writers ...) (1) CTAN:macros/latex/packages/expl3/ Hubert Gaesslein 22-Oct-1998 3:45:44-GMT,2756;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id VAA17954 for ; Wed, 21 Oct 1998 21:45:43 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id FAA14292; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 05:28:16 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 402526 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 05:28:15 +0200 Received: from REG.TRIUMF.CA (reg.Triumf.CA [142.90.100.2]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id FAA14278 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 05:28:12 +0200 (MET DST) Received: by triumf.ca (MX V4.0-1 VAX) id 13; Wed, 21 Oct 1998 20:17:09 PST Message-ID: <009CE0B8.3AA44DD4.13@triumf.ca> Date: Wed, 21 Oct 1998 20:17:02 PST Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Donald Arseneau Subject: Re: Users dropping into TeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L At 21:09 +0200 98/10/21, Martin Schroeder wrote: > >\newenvironment{foo}{start}{end} defines \foo{start} and \endfoo{end}. > >But this is an undocumented feature -- which you can use at your own >risk. Hans Aberg > So LaTeX defines \begin{list} and \end{list} as a part of the >list-environment interface, but \list and \endlist are part of the >implementation of the list environment. ... > ... \list and \endlist do not belong to the interface, All untrue! The command equivalent of an environment is "documented" on pages 25 and 34 of Lamport's Manual (1st ed; check the index for Environment > made from declaration). It's not *well* documented, (omitting mention of the \end form) but it is clearly intended to be part of the user interface. For the package or class writer, it is *preferred* to use the commands rather than the environments for two reasons: - less overhead and stack use (minor) - better syntax checking (important!) Let's say you use \begin{list} when defining a new environment {citation}, and a document has omitted \end{citation}. The error message you get is ! LaTeX Error: \begin{list} on input line xx ended by \end{document}. but if you use \list and \endlist you get the proper ! LaTeX Error: \begin{citation} on input line xx ended by \end{document}. Donald Arseneau asnd@triumf.ca 22-Oct-1998 16:16:30-GMT,2310;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA03490 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 10:16:28 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA23847; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:17:00 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 403583 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:16:57 +0200 Received: from hal9000.dvg-hannover.de (hal9000.dvg-hannover.de [195.21.144.236]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA23821 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:16:52 +0200 (MET DST) Received: by hal9000.dvg-hannover.de; id OAA00614; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:17:12 +0200 Received: from viri.internet.nbg.net(172.17.1.2) by hal9000.dvg-hannover.de via smap (4.1) id xma000369; Thu, 22 Oct 98 14:16:54 +0200 Received: from 172.17.1.5 by viri.internet.nbg.net (InterScan E-Mail VirusWall NT); Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:13:23 +0100 Received: from viri.internet.nbg.net (viri.internet.nbg.net [172.17.1.2]) by mailhub.internet.nbg.net (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id OAA26229 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:22:14 +0200 Received: from 6.201.33.24 by viri.internet.nbg.net (InterScan E-Mail VirusWall NT); Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:13:22 +0100 Received: by s101ln07.dvg.de(Lotus SMTP MTA v1.2 (600.1 3-26-1998)) id C12566A5.00489E7B ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:13:11 +0100 X-Lotus-FromDomain: DVGHANNOVER Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Message-ID: <412566A5.00438DBE.00@s101ln07.dvg.de> Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 13:18:10 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Axel Stanke To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Axel Stanke@DVGHANNOVER 22.10.98 13.18 unsubsribe 22-Oct-1998 16:16:46-GMT,2142;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA03502 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 10:16:40 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA22866; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:11:58 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 403571 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:11:55 +0200 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA22820 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:11:51 +0200 (MET DST) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98102213123551@man.ac.uk> Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 13:12:35 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L > He said \quote{foo}, she replied \quote{bar}, and so on. > Then LaTeX uses a lookup in the current typesetting style (logical, > illogical, UK English, US English, etc) to determine if the quotes should > be single or double and the preferred style of nesting and so on. I think this is a great idea. -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ My opinions are not necessarily those of NRAL or the University of Manchester. 22-Oct-1998 17:25:21-GMT,2324;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA05378 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 11:25:05 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA24054; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:18:35 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 403587 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:18:33 +0200 Received: from hal9000.dvg-hannover.de (hal9000.dvg-hannover.de [195.21.144.236]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA24028 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:18:29 +0200 (MET DST) Received: by hal9000.dvg-hannover.de; id OAA00636; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:17:14 +0200 Received: from viri.internet.nbg.net(172.17.1.2) by hal9000.dvg-hannover.de via smap (4.1) id xma000514; Thu, 22 Oct 98 14:17:04 +0200 Received: from 172.17.1.5 by viri.internet.nbg.net (InterScan E-Mail VirusWall NT); Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:13:33 +0100 Received: from viri.internet.nbg.net (viri.internet.nbg.net [172.17.1.2]) by mailhub.internet.nbg.net (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id OAA26232 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:22:25 +0200 Received: from 6.201.33.24 by viri.internet.nbg.net (InterScan E-Mail VirusWall NT); Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:13:32 +0100 Received: by s101ln07.dvg.de(Lotus SMTP MTA v1.2 (600.1 3-26-1998)) id C12566A5.0048A4D3 ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:13:27 +0100 X-Lotus-FromDomain: DVGHANNOVER Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Message-ID: <412566A5.0043967B.00@s101ln07.dvg.de> Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 13:18:28 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Axel Stanke Subject: unsubscribe To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Axel Stanke@DVGHANNOVER 22.10.98 13.18 22-Oct-1998 17:26:17-GMT,2381;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA05421 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 11:26:12 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA14780; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 13:55:11 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 403554 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 13:55:07 +0200 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA14725 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 13:55:03 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from [130.237.37.28] (sl08.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.28]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id NAA10704 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 13:13:21 +0200 (MET DST) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 13:02:50 +0200 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Math environments and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In traditional math typesetting also displayed formulas should have punctuation (like a comma or a period). I do not use that as it is hard to position, and could be confused to belong to the formula. But some typesetters still want to put that in. So it seems me that the math environments should be able to detect if followed by a punctuation and the be able to choose from a style if that punctuation mark should be displayed or not in the formula. Is this a question that LaTeX3 addresses? Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 22-Oct-1998 18:05:33-GMT,2427;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA06477 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 12:05:25 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA12711; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:22:03 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 403689 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:22:01 +0200 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA12697 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:21:59 +0200 (MET DST) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98102215224582@man.ac.uk> Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 15:22:45 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: Re: Math environments and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L What I had my mind is that the author just concentrates on writing out the text logically (just as in the case of the quotes); this then provides the context which a style can process. Thus, one would simply write \begin{equation} 2+2=4 \end{equation}. % Note period here ^ The \end{equation} makes an one character lookahead, and processes it according to the style definition. (I think this would be possible with the "environments with hooks" I wrote some code for a long time ago.) Right, but period, comma, semicolon---where does that info come from? -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ My opinions are not necessarily those of NRAL or the University of Manchester. 22-Oct-1998 18:17:20-GMT,2808;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA06743 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 12:17:18 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA23504; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:14:21 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 403579 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:14:18 +0200 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA23474 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:14:15 +0200 (MET DST) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98102213130376@man.ac.uk> Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 13:13:03 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: Re: Math environments and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L > In traditional math typesetting also displayed formulas should have > punctuation (like a comma or a period). I do not use that as it is hard to > position, and could be confused to belong to the formula. > > But some typesetters still want to put that in. So it seems me that the > math environments should be able to detect if followed by a punctuation and > the be able to choose from a style if that punctuation mark should be > displayed or not in the formula. I've run in to this as well. However, depending on the context, the punctuation might be . , ; ! : or whatever. I don't see how LaTeX could guess this from the context. Easier would be to define yourself (or in the appropriate journal class; perhaps that discussion will rear its ugly head again soon) things like \period, \comma and so on which you could stick in before the \end{equation}. You could define them to correspond to their names or just to do nothing as the style required. -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ My opinions are not necessarily those of NRAL or the University of Manchester. 22-Oct-1998 18:29:28-GMT,2973;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA07072 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 12:29:23 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA15442; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 13:56:41 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 403558 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 13:56:36 +0200 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA14776 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 13:55:11 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from [130.237.37.28] (sl08.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.28]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id NAA10700 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 13:13:19 +0200 (MET DST) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <199810211301.JAA11121@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 12:55:49 +0200 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <3WoL2AgGBh108h@dream.kn-bremen.de> There a two ways to combine quotes and punctuation: He said ``foo'', she replied ``bar,'' and so on. The foo version has the comma logically positioned, but the bar version is in fact the more common in typesetting (at least in the US): It seems that this later illogical version is dictated by kerning problems with the logical variation when typesetting using led (even though I do not know this for sure). But TeX should be able to handle such problems (correct?): Looking up the character pairs '' and , and then finding the correct kerning, regardless of their order. But does LaTeX have any opinions on this? It seems me that the correct way to type a manuscript would be (from the logical point of view) He said \quote{foo}, she replied \quote{bar}, and so on. Then LaTeX uses a lookup in the current typesetting style (logical, illogical, UK English, US English, etc) to determine if the quotes should be single or double and the preferred style of nesting and so on. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 22-Oct-1998 18:55:51-GMT,2868;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA07640 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 12:54:01 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA14272; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:32:57 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 403699 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:32:55 +0200 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA14254 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:32:53 +0200 (MET DST) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98102215301122@man.ac.uk> Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 15:30:11 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: Re: Change needed? To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L > Judging by Hans Aberg's reply, there is perhaps a misunderstanding of > the purpose of this list. > > It is for discussion of principles and requirements of LaTeX3, a major > new system, not that of refinements or bug-fixes to LaTeX2e. > > So maybe, since the LaTeX3 Project Team does both of these, perhaps we > should change its description from: A rose, by any other name.... I think most people on the list know what it's for and aren't confused by the name of the list. As the two are related, I think the discussion of both is appropriate here. I hear lots of rumours about TeX's successors. How much longer will something like the current TeX/LaTeX continue to be developed? Will there be a branching of different lineages, with all continuing, at least for a while, or will all but one die out/be killed? Where is a good description of the goals of LaTeX3 and differences to LaTeXe? How long will the TeX/LaTeX/BibTeX/DVIPS/PostScript/CUSTOM-BIB/ NATBIB combination continue to exist in something like its present form? Of course, no one can predict the future; I'm thinking about plans and intentions. -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ 22-Oct-1998 19:01:36-GMT,2906;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id NAA07869 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 13:01:34 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA11227; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:10:35 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 403683 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:10:31 +0200 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA11001 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:09:27 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from [130.237.37.111] (sl85.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.111]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id QAA02210 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:09:02 +0200 (MET DST) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 15:36:10 +0200 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: Math environments and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <98102213130376@man.ac.uk> >... depending on the context, the >punctuation might be . , ; ! : or whatever. I don't see how LaTeX could >guess this from the context. > >Easier would be to define yourself (or in the appropriate journal class; >perhaps that discussion will rear its ugly head again soon) things like >\period, \comma and so on which you could stick in before the >\end{equation}. You could define them to correspond to their names or >just to do nothing as the style required. What I had my mind is that the author just concentrates on writing out the text logically (just as in the case of the quotes); this then provides the context which a style can process. Thus, one would simply write \begin{equation} 2+2=4 \end{equation}. % Note period here ^ The \end{equation} makes an one character lookahead, and processes it according to the style definition. (I think this would be possible with the "environments with hooks" I wrote some code for a long time ago.) Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 22-Oct-1998 19:09:38-GMT,3459;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id NAA08148 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 13:09:13 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA29057; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:52:31 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 403617 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:52:28 +0200 Received: from ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.2]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA29030 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:52:22 +0200 (MET DST) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:52:01 +0200 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:51:43 +0200 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:51:33 +0200 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:51:50 +0200 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13871.9933.597248.116184@fell.o] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: Users dro... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <009CE0B8.3AA44DD4.13@triumf.ca> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13871.9933.597248.116184@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:51:50 +0200 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: Users dropping into TeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Hans Aberg wrote -- > The apparent reason this gives "improved syntax checking" is due to a bug > in LaTeX!: > > When nesting environments, there are more than environment to keep track > of for the error checking, which LaTeX does not do. This is an area where we have some ideas but it is necessary to think clearly about what is needed. Here are some desirable features of such a specification: -- provide a straightforward means of extending the available document-level environments (and commands), with clearly defined rules for what is allowed; -- distinguish (to both humans and software) clearly between such extensions (where the detailed syntax is very flexible) and an inner-level which has a rigorously defined syntax that is extensible only in more complex ways within (something like) package files; -- hence fix such "bugs". If anyone is intersted in putting substantial work into implementing such ideas, please contact Them. This would involve some major programming using the LaTeX3 PL (and of course developing it) and implementing in it any low-level structures needed. chris 22-Oct-1998 19:41:46-GMT,3045;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id NAA08988 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 13:39:55 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA13539; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:27:39 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 403695 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:27:36 +0200 Received: from ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.1]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA13509 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:27:33 +0200 (MET DST) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:27:09 +0200 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:26:47 +0200 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:26:38 +0200 X400-Received: by mta open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:26:37 +0200 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:26:57 +0200 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13871.16136.904846.285771@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Change needed? Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: , <13871.9933.597248.116184@fell.open.ac.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13871.16136.904846.285771@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:26:57 +0200 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Change needed? To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Judging by Hans Aberg's reply, there is perhaps a misunderstanding of the purpose of this list. It is for discussion of principles and requirements of LaTeX3, a major new system, not that of refinements or bug-fixes to LaTeX2e. So maybe, since the LaTeX3 Project Team does both of these, perhaps we should change its description from: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project to Mailing list for the discussion of LaTeX3 Or is that getting too long? chris 22-Oct-1998 19:55:15-GMT,3084;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id NAA09417 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 13:55:09 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA16992; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:46:02 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 403703 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:45:59 +0200 Received: from sarah.albany.edu (sarah.albany.edu [169.226.1.103]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA16950 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:45:52 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from hilbert.math.albany.edu (hilbert.math.albany.edu [169.226.23.52]) by sarah.albany.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA13277 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 10:45:13 -0400 (EDT) Received: (from hammond@localhost) by hilbert.math.albany.edu (8.8.4/8.8.3) id KAA26098 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 10:45:11 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <199810221445.KAA26098@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 10:45:11 -0400 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "William F. Hammond" Subject: Various quotes: Was: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Hans Aberg wrote about quotes and punctuation. In my personal pre-processor for LaTeX (which involves an intermediate SGML stage under my personal DTD so that, e.g., I can get to HTML without going through LaTeX), I have provided for myself the following names: (Note: "quote" and "quotation" are names of existing LaTeX environments.) quophrase: to set the content, possibly only a letter, in standard typeset quotation marks; Personal: \quophrase{foo text} LaTeX: ``foo text'' quochar: to provide a *character* (could be a phrase) in "string" representation as for documenting C code; Personal: \quochar{x} LaTeX: \texttt{`x'} quostr: to provide a *string* (could be only a character) in "string" representation; Personal: \quostr{foo string} LaTeX: \texttt{foo string} qquostr: same as "quostr" except that the string is delimited with ascii quotation marks, i.e., hex 22, as for documenting C code I do not perceive these as mere macro substitutions when I think about automatic processing to many possible output formats. They are about *content*. -- Bill Hammond 22-Oct-1998 19:55:42-GMT,3665;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id NAA09434 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 13:55:34 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA26784; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:37:09 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 403601 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:37:07 +0200 Received: from ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.2]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA26760 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:37:04 +0200 (MET DST) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:36:47 +0200 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:36:32 +0200 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:36:22 +0200 X400-Received: by mta open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:36:21 +0200 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN2 in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:36:39 +0200 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13871.8534.296663.860180@fell.o] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: Math envi... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13871.8534.296663.860180@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:36:39 +0200 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: Math environments and Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Hans Aberg wrote on these subjects and asks, for example: > Is this a question that LaTeX3 addresses? > But does LaTeX have any opinions on this? Since LaTeX and LaTeX3 have as yet no recognisable `thinking module' I shall personalise the answers. The LaTeX3 Team (aka They) are very much aware of this type of problem. These have been categorised as falling into (at least) two types: `local logical processing' and `input character stream processing' (some can perhaps be put into either category). We have spent a lot of time on investigating these areas. Becoming now even more personalised, my opinion is that some of the requirements of such processes are best built into `New Standard TeX': ie NST, an acronym I just invented; NST should not to be confused with NTS but should, at present, be confused with e-TeX and/or Omega and/or pdfTeX and/or any other exciting project of which I have not yet heard. Other(s?) (not connected with the LaTeX3 team or any of the above-named projects) are of the opinion that Active TeX can solve all such problems: it would be nice to see a well-documented, freely- available prototype demonstrating this. chris 22-Oct-1998 20:13:17-GMT,4526;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id OAA09992 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:13:15 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA15556; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 13:56:54 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 403562 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 13:56:50 +0200 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA14789 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 13:55:12 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from [130.237.37.28] (sl08.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.28]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id NAA10692 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 13:13:14 +0200 (MET DST) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 12:41:01 +0200 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: Users dropping into TeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <009CE0B8.3AA44DD4.13@triumf.ca> At 20:17 -0800 98/10/21, Donald Arseneau wrote: ... >Hans Aberg >> So LaTeX defines \begin{list} and \end{list} as a part of the >>list-environment interface, but \list and \endlist are part of the >>implementation of the list environment. ... >> ... \list and \endlist do not belong to the interface, > >All untrue! The command equivalent of an environment is "documented" >on pages 25 and 34 of Lamport's Manual (1st ed; check the index for >Environment > made from declaration). It's not *well* documented, >(omitting mention of the \end form) but it is clearly intended to >be part of the user interface. I think the story is that LaTeX does not make that distinction clear, which it ought to do. >For the package or class writer, it is *preferred* to use the commands >rather than the environments for two reasons: > > - less overhead and stack use (minor) When building a high level user interface, overhead is not an important factor. One should stick to the interface in order to avoid hard-to-catch errors (like in your example; see below). > - better syntax checking (important!) > >Let's say you use \begin{list} when defining a new environment {citation}, >and a document has omitted \end{citation}. The error message you get is >! LaTeX Error: \begin{list} on input line xx ended by \end{document}. >but if you use \list and \endlist you get the proper >! LaTeX Error: \begin{citation} on input line xx ended by \end{document}. The apparent reason this gives "improved syntax checking" is due to a bug in LaTeX!: When nesting environments, there are more than environment to keep track of for the error checking, which LaTeX does not do. So when you write \newenvironment{citations}{% \list{}{% \renewcommand{\makelabel}[1]{\normalfont\itshape ##1}% }% }{% \endlist } you avoid the \begingroup ... \endgroup clause for the inner environment that any environment. Therefore the variable is set correctly for the error checking you mentioned, but it may be set incorrectly for other tasks. Therefore, it is safer to rely that the general programming tasks work correctly, use \newenvironment{citations}{% \begin{list}{}{% \renewcommand{\makelabel}[1]{\normalfont\itshape ##1}% }% }{% \end{list}% } and not worry about that the error message comes out wrong. I made some code "environments with hooks" which keeps track of both these environments in the case these area nested, so it should be possible to make both the error messages and other environment tasks compute correctly. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 22-Oct-1998 20:20:34-GMT,4649;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id OAA10198 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 14:20:32 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA11016; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:09:29 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 403679 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:09:26 +0200 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA10985 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:09:19 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from [130.237.37.111] (sl85.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.111]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id QAA02234 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:09:11 +0200 (MET DST) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <009CE0B8.3AA44DD4.13@triumf.ca> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 16:04:26 +0200 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: Users dropping into TeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13871.9933.597248.116184@fell.open.ac.uk> At 14:51 +0200 98/10/22, Chris Rowley wrote: >Here are some desirable features of such a specification: > >-- provide a straightforward means of extending the available >document-level environments (and commands), with clearly >defined rules for what is allowed; > >-- distinguish (to both humans and software) clearly between such >extensions (where the detailed syntax is very flexible) and an >inner-level which has a rigorously defined syntax that is extensible >only in more complex ways within (something like) package files; The second rule translates into saying "provide an interface for the implementation" (unless I have misunderstood what you are trying to say), which should be avoided. Instead the desirable cause of action would be to keep track of the information needed for defining environments: The interface must be sufficiently general. (People trying to beat this interface is to ask for trouble.) With respect to nesting environment definitions, one needs some extra variables keeping track of both the name of the defining environment and the environment currently at the top of the stack. I think LaTeX3 should define an entirely environment definition structure, and try to make old environments works reasonably well in a compatibility mode. This may not be as difficult as it sounds, because new and old environments would doffer mainly in the number of variables they use and where the commands are executed: For example, in LaTeX, I recall the \begingroup & \endgroup commands are executed by the \begin{foo} and \end{foo} commands; for environments with hooks, it should be executed by what corresponds to \foo and \endfoo, according to my analysis. I recall that I tried a version where old style environments could be used to define new style environments (even though there were some problems). In addition, one should cut out the illogical stuff: For example, the \begin{document} is not a start of an environment: It instead cancels a \begingroup, I recall. This is used to force a Pascal-like top level structure, but will cause problems if one will want to group documents together in larger structures (say a journal). I think that the things I did will not require a major effort to implement. It is however imperative that it is implemented as a part of the LaTeX macro package itself: I recall that when LaTeX2e changed, some of the quick-and-dirty stuff stopped working. When defining new style environments one needs to have special knowledge about the special typesetting variables some environments need to have: So perhaps only some of Them have it. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 23-Oct-1998 4:25:19-GMT,3160;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id WAA21294 for ; Thu, 22 Oct 1998 22:25:17 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id GAA23481; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 06:14:07 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 403986 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 06:14:04 +0200 Received: from abacus.maths.uq.edu.au (abacus.maths.uq.edu.au [130.102.160.6]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id GAA23366 for ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 06:13:57 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from humpty.maths.uq.edu.au (humpty.maths.uq.edu.au [130.102.160.19]) by abacus.maths.uq.edu.au (8.9.0/8.9.0) with ESMTP id OAA03641 for ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 14:13:52 +1000 (EST) Received: (from kgs@localhost) by humpty.maths.uq.edu.au (8.8.6/0.0.0) id OAA20202 for LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 14:13:51 +1000 (EST) Message-ID: <199810230413.OAA20202@humpty.maths.uq.edu.au> Date: Fri, 23 Oct 1998 14:13:51 +1000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Ken Smith Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L On Thu, 22 Oct 1998 13:12:35 GMT Phillip Helbig wrote: > > He said \quote{foo}, she replied \quote{bar}, and so on. > > Then LaTeX uses a lookup in the current typesetting style (logical, > > illogical, UK English, US English, etc) to determine if the quotes should > > be single or double and the preferred style of nesting and so on. > > I think this is a great idea. The major problem would be the nesting. There are some parts of the Bible, for instance, where the outer quote is thousands of characters long. If an (or several) inner quotes were near the end of this there could be trouble with missing closing braces. I am sure we have all spent a lot of time looking for the source of "end occurred inside a group" errors. But for short quotes, which don't extend over a single paragraph, it would be ideal, and should be a lot easier to implement than things like \textbf{bold type}. -- > Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk > Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) > Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 > Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G > UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ > My opinions are not necessarily those of NRAL or the University of Manchester. Ken Smith 23-Oct-1998 9:09:36-GMT,2337;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id DAA27458 for ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 03:09:30 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA29719; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 10:40:58 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 404152 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 10:40:53 +0200 Received: from alpha.ntp.springer.de (alpha.ntp.springer.de [192.129.24.9]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA29594 for ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 10:40:46 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from ALPHA.NTP.SPRINGER.DE by ALPHA.NTP.SPRINGER.DE (PMDF V5.1-10 #19300) id <01J3B26EMMMO00049X@ALPHA.NTP.SPRINGER.DE> for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 10:41:21 CE X-VMS-To: IN%"LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE" MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Message-ID: <01J3B26EN3KY00049X@ALPHA.NTP.SPRINGER.DE> Date: Fri, 23 Oct 1998 10:41:21 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Joerg Knappen Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L It is almost trivial to implement \quote{this}, but do you really expect that it will be used by the authors, typing a LaTeX script? Compare: "this" ``this'' \quote{this} in length, sophistication, and error checking. IMO, the Knuthian commands are just right -- not too long and not shortened into cryptical acronyms. LaTeX2e is already on the way to go overboard on command length, I am not very fond of all the commands prefixed by \text... Too long commands encourage the authors to come up with their own, incompatible abbreviations. It makes processing LaTeX documents on a large scale more difficult. --J"org Knappen 23-Oct-1998 9:28:04-GMT,2297;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id DAA27789 for ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 03:28:02 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id LAA21019; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:11:02 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 404192 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:10:57 +0200 Received: from hal9000.dvg-hannover.de (hal9000.dvg-hannover.de [195.21.144.236]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id LAA20729 for ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:10:37 +0200 (MET DST) Received: by hal9000.dvg-hannover.de; id LAA11392; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:11:00 +0200 Received: from viri.internet.nbg.net(172.17.1.2) by hal9000.dvg-hannover.de via smap (4.1) id xma010855; Fri, 23 Oct 98 11:10:06 +0200 Received: from 172.17.1.5 by viri.internet.nbg.net (InterScan E-Mail VirusWall NT); Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:06:34 +0100 Received: from viri.internet.nbg.net (viri.internet.nbg.net [172.17.1.2]) by mailhub.internet.nbg.net (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id LAA05763 for ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:15:25 +0200 Received: from 6.201.33.24 by viri.internet.nbg.net (InterScan E-Mail VirusWall NT); Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:06:33 +0100 Received: by s101ln07.dvg.de(Lotus SMTP MTA v1.2 (600.1 3-26-1998)) id C12566A6.00378597 ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:06:26 +0100 X-Lotus-FromDomain: DVGHANNOVER Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Message-ID: <412566A6.00327B4E.00@s101ln07.dvg.de> Date: Fri, 23 Oct 1998 10:11:34 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Axel.Stanke@DVG.DE To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Axel Stanke@DVGHANNOVER 23.10.98 10.11 unsubscribe 23-Oct-1998 9:28:47-GMT,2317;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id DAA27801 for ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 03:28:15 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id LAA19424; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:08:39 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 404177 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:08:35 +0200 Received: from hal9000.dvg-hannover.de (hal9000.dvg-hannover.de [195.21.144.236]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id LAA19327 for ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:08:31 +0200 (MET DST) Received: by hal9000.dvg-hannover.de; id LAA10128; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:08:54 +0200 Received: from viri.internet.nbg.net(172.17.1.2) by hal9000.dvg-hannover.de via smap (4.1) id xma010067; Fri, 23 Oct 98 11:08:43 +0200 Received: from 172.17.1.5 by viri.internet.nbg.net (InterScan E-Mail VirusWall NT); Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:05:12 +0100 Received: from viri.internet.nbg.net (viri.internet.nbg.net [172.17.1.2]) by mailhub.internet.nbg.net (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id LAA05713 for ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:14:02 +0200 Received: from 6.201.33.24 by viri.internet.nbg.net (InterScan E-Mail VirusWall NT); Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:05:10 +0100 Received: by s101ln07.dvg.de(Lotus SMTP MTA v1.2 (600.1 3-26-1998)) id C12566A6.00376591 ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:05:04 +0100 X-Lotus-FromDomain: DVGHANNOVER Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Message-ID: <412566A6.00325A18.00@s101ln07.dvg.de> Date: Fri, 23 Oct 1998 10:10:13 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Axel.Stanke@DVG.DE Subject: unsubscribe LATEX3 To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Axel Stanke@DVGHANNOVER 23.10.98 10.10 23-Oct-1998 9:30:45-GMT,2305;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id DAA27837 for ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 03:30:44 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id LAA20859; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:10:47 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 404188 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:10:43 +0200 Received: from hal9000.dvg-hannover.de (hal9000.dvg-hannover.de [195.21.144.236]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id LAA20738 for ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:10:37 +0200 (MET DST) Received: by hal9000.dvg-hannover.de; id LAA11387; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:11:01 +0200 Received: from viri.internet.nbg.net(172.17.1.2) by hal9000.dvg-hannover.de via smap (4.1) id xma010713; Fri, 23 Oct 98 11:09:56 +0200 Received: from 172.17.1.5 by viri.internet.nbg.net (InterScan E-Mail VirusWall NT); Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:06:24 +0100 Received: from viri.internet.nbg.net (viri.internet.nbg.net [172.17.1.2]) by mailhub.internet.nbg.net (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id LAA05743 for ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:15:14 +0200 Received: from 6.201.33.24 by viri.internet.nbg.net (InterScan E-Mail VirusWall NT); Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:06:23 +0100 Received: by s101ln07.dvg.de(Lotus SMTP MTA v1.2 (600.1 3-26-1998)) id C12566A6.00378140 ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:06:15 +0100 X-Lotus-FromDomain: DVGHANNOVER Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Message-ID: <412566A6.0032752B.00@s101ln07.dvg.de> Date: Fri, 23 Oct 1998 10:11:21 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Axel.Stanke@DVG.DE To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Axel Stanke@DVGHANNOVER 23.10.98 10.11 unsubscribe LATEX-L 23-Oct-1998 9:53:00-GMT,2773;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id DAA28269 for ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 03:52:52 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id LAA06290; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:32:41 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 404217 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:32:38 +0200 Received: from na.uni-tuebingen.de (root@na.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de [134.2.161.64]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA06195 for ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:32:33 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de (na6 [134.2.161.170]) by na.uni-tuebingen.de (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA16870 for ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:32:28 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from na.uni-tuebingen.de (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA07532 for ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:32:27 +0200 (MET DST) X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.06 [en] (X11; I; SunOS 5.6 sun4m) MIME-Version: 1.0 References: <412566A6.0032752B.00@s101ln07.dvg.de> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <36304D2B.88610A27@na.uni-tuebingen.de> Date: Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:32:27 +0200 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Marcel Oliver To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Axel.Stanke@DVG.DE wrote: > > Axel Stanke@DVGHANNOVER > 23.10.98 10.11 > > unsubscribe LATEX-L Wenn Du von der Liste runter willst, musst Du das an den Listserver schicken, dort wo Du dich auch angemeldet hast. So bekommt jeder auf der Liste Dein unsubscribe und nichts passiert!!! --------------------------------------------------------------------- Marcel Oliver http://www.math.uci.edu/~moliver Mathematisches Institut oliver@na.uni-tuebingen.de Universitaet Tuebingen oliver@member.ams.org Auf der Morgenstelle 10 Fax: +49-7071-294322 72076 Tuebingen, Germany Phone: +49-7071-2972932 --------------------------------------------------------------------- 23-Oct-1998 10:18:29-GMT,2305;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id EAA28725 for ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 04:18:23 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id LAA19139; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:50:53 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 404230 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:50:47 +0200 Received: from hal9000.dvg-hannover.de (hal9000.dvg-hannover.de [195.21.144.236]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id LAA19002 for ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:50:41 +0200 (MET DST) Received: by hal9000.dvg-hannover.de; id LAA03653; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:50:03 +0200 Received: from viri.internet.nbg.net(172.17.1.2) by hal9000.dvg-hannover.de via smap (4.1) id xma003559; Fri, 23 Oct 98 11:49:47 +0200 Received: from 172.17.1.5 by viri.internet.nbg.net (InterScan E-Mail VirusWall NT); Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:46:15 +0100 Received: from viri.internet.nbg.net (viri.internet.nbg.net [172.17.1.2]) by mailhub.internet.nbg.net (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id LAA06534 for ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:55:06 +0200 Received: from 6.201.33.24 by viri.internet.nbg.net (InterScan E-Mail VirusWall NT); Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:46:14 +0100 Received: by s101ln07.dvg.de(Lotus SMTP MTA v1.2 (600.1 3-26-1998)) id C12566A6.003B25ED ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 11:46:03 +0100 X-Lotus-FromDomain: DVGHANNOVER Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Message-ID: <412566A6.00361A73.00@s101ln07.dvg.de> Date: Fri, 23 Oct 1998 10:51:09 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Axel.Stanke@DVG.DE To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Axel Stanke@DVGHANNOVER 23.10.98 10.51 unsubscribe LATEX-L 23-Oct-1998 11:11:07-GMT,3707;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA29778 for ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 05:10:53 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id MAA25663; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 12:42:12 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 404315 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 12:42:07 +0200 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA25527 for ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 12:42:02 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from [130.237.37.36] (sl87.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.113]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id MAA09894 for ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 12:41:55 +0200 (MET DST) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Fri, 23 Oct 1998 12:41:06 +0200 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <01J3B26EN3KY00049X@ALPHA.NTP.SPRINGER.DE> There are inm reality two separate problems, what the logical input by the author should be and how that should be practically imnput by the author using TeX. In TeX these two apsects become dependant of each other because of TeX's limited capacity of parsing different syntaxes, but I had really only in my mind the first question. At 10:41 +0000 98/10/23, Joerg Knappen wrote: >It is almost trivial to implement \quote{this}, but do you really expect >that it >will be used by the authors, typing a LaTeX script? > >Compare: "this" > ``this'' > \quote{this} > >in length, sophistication, and error checking. > >IMO, the Knuthian commands are just right -- not too long and not shortened >into cryptical acronyms. LaTeX2e is already on the way to go overboard on >command length, I am not very fond of all the commands prefixed by \text... At 14:13 +1000 98/10/23, Ken Smith wrote: ... >The major problem would be the nesting. >There are some parts of the Bible, for instance, where the outer quote >is thousands of characters long. >If an (or several) inner quotes were near the end of this there could >be trouble with missing closing braces. >I am sure we have all spent a lot of time looking for the source of >"end occurred inside a group" errors. So, once one has made up ones mind of which logical structure the author ought to input, one can attepmt to make it feasible in TeX: Perhaps it is not possible, in which case the idea must be scrapped. For example, let "<" and ">" denote the left and right chevrons. Then one might attempt to use these as active characters, so that the author writes He said , she replied , and so on. This would solve the objections above, but I would not surprised if it creates other problems. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 23-Oct-1998 18:33:21-GMT,4700;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA10802 for ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 12:33:15 -0600 (MDT) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id UAA18846; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 20:10:11 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 404507 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 20:10:08 +0200 Received: from ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.1]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id UAA18818 for ; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 20:10:05 +0200 (MET DST) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 20:09:59 +0200 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 20:09:51 +0200 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 20:09:41 +0200 X400-Received: by mta open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 20:09:40 +0200 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN2 in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Fri, 23 Oct 1998 20:09:53 +0200 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13872.49503.776519.437795@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: Change ne... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <98102215301122@man.ac.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13872.49503.776519.437795@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Fri, 23 Oct 1998 20:09:53 +0200 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: Change needed? To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <98102215301122@man.ac.uk> Phillip Helbig wrote -- > As the two are > related, I think the discussion of both is appropriate here. > But are the members of the list aware of the only method by which LaTeX2e will get chnaged from now on? This will only happen if people such as the memebrs of this list producing packages that implement such enhancements. > I hear lots of rumours about TeX's successors. Yes: exciting, are they not? > How much longer will > something like the current TeX/LaTeX continue to be developed? How long is rose stem? Much of the current work on TeX's sucessors is, in fact, development of the current TeX (but what they have produced cannot be called TeX). It is all (we hope) known to the LaTeX3 team and much of it pays attention to what we think and to what goes onto lists like this one. > Will there be a branching of different lineages, with all continuing, at > least for a while, or will all but one die out/be killed? There has been branching, which has its pluses and minuses, but it will be a Bad Thing if these canot be brought together again soon (to some extent this convergence is beginning). If LaTeX3 is based on something other than standard TeX, we shall need to be certain that this will be a system that is widely available, easy to install and well-maintained. Of couse there is a something of a egg-and-croccdile situation here. > > Where is a good description of the goals of LaTeX3 and differences to > LaTeXe? This is the latest published source. I have no idea if it is good as all I did was write it: \item Frank Mittelbach, Chris Rowley. The \LaTeX3 Project, Communications of the \TeX{} Users Group, 18, (1997), pp 195--198 No doubt there is proper BIBTEX version of this somewhere. > How long will the TeX/LaTeX/BibTeX/DVIPS/PostScript/CUSTOM-BIB/ > NATBIB combination continue to exist in something like its present form? As a supported system, that depends largely on when we can get significant person-power devoted to building up and using the LaTeX3 Programming Language (hence my earlier message). > > Of course, no one can predict the future; I'm thinking about plans and > intentions. You could try SOOTHSAYERS-L or ORACLE-L (oops, maybe not:-). Thanks for your comments and suggestions. chris 3-Nov-1998 6:42:46-GMT,3455;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id XAA20781 for ; Mon, 2 Nov 1998 23:42:39 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id HAA01339; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 07:23:02 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 406891 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 07:22:59 +0100 Received: from kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE (Ufrank@kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE [134.93.8.158]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id HAA01310 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 07:22:54 +0100 (MET) Received: (from Ufrank@localhost) by kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE (8.8.8/8.8.8) id HAA27817 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 07:22:48 +0100 (MET) X-Authentication-Warning: kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE: Ufrank set sender to latex3 using -f Received: (from latex3@localhost) by frank.zdv.uni-mainz.de (8.6.9/8.6.9) id WAA08590; Mon, 2 Nov 1998 22:06:41 +0100 References: <01J3B26EN3KY00049X@ALPHA.NTP.SPRINGER.DE> Message-ID: <199811022106.WAA08590@frank.zdv.uni-mainz.de> Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 22:06:41 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Frank Mittelbach Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <01J3B26EN3KY00049X@ALPHA.NTP.SPRINGER.DE> Joerg Knappen writes: > It is almost trivial to implement \quote{this}, but do you really expect that it > will be used by the authors, typing a LaTeX script? > > Compare: "this" > ``this'' > \quote{this} > > in length, sophistication, and error checking. > > IMO, the Knuthian commands are just right -- not too long and not shortened > into cryptical acronyms. except that he misuses the ligature mechanism to implement his "commands" (or was it ``commands'' :-) with all the pitfalls we know > LaTeX2e is already on the way to go overboard on > command length, I am not very fond of all the commands prefixed by \text... that is a problem which i also see, but it originates in the usage of TeX for things it was not meant for (ie typesetting anything other than English) and not having appropriate interfaces for it. so the \text... is a logical step to avoid absolute chaos while still being able to extend the capabilities (within the framework forced on you) > Too long commands encourage the authors to come up with their own, incompatible and too short commands result in users documents suddenly no longer working as they have already been defined by the user. the \text... commands have been introduced mainly as internal commands not primarily to be used by the end user but to provide a unique representation if going from an input representation (inputenc) via internal commands (\text...) to some output representation (fontenc) on the whole i think this is something which does work fairly well in the current LaTeX. frank 3-Nov-1998 6:42:49-GMT,2762;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id XAA20790 for ; Mon, 2 Nov 1998 23:42:47 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id HAA01357; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 07:24:07 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 406895 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 07:24:03 +0100 Received: from kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE (Ufrank@kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE [134.93.8.158]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id HAA01309 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 07:22:54 +0100 (MET) Received: (from Ufrank@localhost) by kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE (8.8.8/8.8.8) id HAA27517 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 07:22:47 +0100 (MET) X-Authentication-Warning: kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE: Ufrank set sender to latex3 using -f Received: (from latex3@localhost) by frank.zdv.uni-mainz.de (8.6.9/8.6.9) id VAA08581; Mon, 2 Nov 1998 21:57:36 +0100 References: <98102213123551@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: <199811022057.VAA08581@frank.zdv.uni-mainz.de> Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 21:57:36 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Frank Mittelbach Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <98102213123551@man.ac.uk> Phillip Helbig writes: > > He said \quote{foo}, she replied \quote{bar}, and so on. > > Then LaTeX uses a lookup in the current typesetting style (logical, > > illogical, UK English, US English, etc) to determine if the quotes should > > be single or double and the preferred style of nesting and so on. > > I think this is a great idea. but only for the simple cases and even there TeX's limitation in parsing will easily screw you up. Change the above to: He said \quote{She said to me \quote{bar}}, and so on what is going to happen? parsing a character and syntax stream of that type using \futurelet is just not good enough. as Chris said, this is really an area where some successor of TeX providing additional functionality could help but within the current TeX is is at best possible to provide hacks that work half of the time if you try to get generically down to this level of detail. frank 3-Nov-1998 10:10:33-GMT,2419;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id DAA24994 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 03:10:01 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA11505; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 10:36:46 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407065 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 10:36:44 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA11494 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 10:36:42 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.128] (sl102.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.128]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id KAA26712 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 10:36:33 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <98102213123551@man.ac.uk> <98102213123551@man.ac.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 10:36:19 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811022057.VAA08581@frank.zdv.uni-mainz.de> At 21:57 +0100 1998/11/02, Frank Mittelbach wrote: >.. Change the above to: > > He said \quote{She said to me \quote{bar}}, and so on > >what is going to happen? parsing a character and syntax stream of that >type using \futurelet is just not good enough. One can get around this by using a pair of active characters. Denote these by "<" and ">"; then the above would read He said >, and so on and \futurelet could be used. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 3-Nov-1998 10:24:59-GMT,2886;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id DAA25225 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 03:24:52 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA12820; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 10:53:45 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407087 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 10:53:42 +0100 Received: from nag.co.uk (openmath.nag.co.uk [192.156.217.16]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA12804 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 10:53:40 +0100 (MET) Received: (from davidc@localhost) by nag.co.uk (AIX4.2/UCB 8.7/8.7) id JAA04308; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 09:53:18 GMT References: <98102213123551@man.ac.uk> <98102213123551@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: <199811030953.JAA04308@nag.co.uk> Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 09:53:18 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: David Carlisle Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: (message from Hans Aberg on Tue, 3 Nov 1998 10:36:19 +0100) > One can get around this by using a pair of active characters. Denote > these by "<" and ">"; then the above would read > He said >, and so on > and \futurelet could be used. This works for a few more cases, but only a few. What if the quote is inside a font change, or a section head, or any other command, you still have the potential problem of the lookahead coping with {}. Of course you can follow the above to its logical conclusion of implementing _everything_ via active characters and implementing your own parsing routines _in_ TeX rather than using the parser built into tex-the-program. This is certainly possible (some people have done exactly that) but TeX isn't really the best language for implementing a parser, and certainly isn't the fastest. If more involved contextual analysis is required in the input stream then it probably makes more sense to look to an extended system that can provide such extended functionality. (Something like omega's OTP processes.) They may not be quite what you want here, but the principle is the same, to make a controlled extension of the underlying system rather than try to build a tower of macros on the rather fragile sand that is tex-the-program. David 3-Nov-1998 11:47:41-GMT,4121;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id EAA26594 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 04:47:35 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id MAA22187; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 12:12:22 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407236 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 12:12:20 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA22145 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 12:12:03 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.128] (sl104.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.130]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id MAA05006 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 12:11:54 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: (message from Hans Aberg on Tue, 3 Nov 1998 10:36:19 +0100) <98102213123551@man.ac.uk> <98102213123551@man.ac.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 12:11:48 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811030953.JAA04308@nag.co.uk> At 09:53 +0000 1998/11/03, David Carlisle wrote: >This works for a few more cases, but only a few. What if the quote is >inside a font change, or a section head, or any other command, you still >have the potential problem of the lookahead coping with {}. I was able to make a \leturelet to detect {}: % Make a definition that uses \futurelet to check the next token, % and then pick up all arguments until the next token is a } or a \par. \newtoks\@tget \def\get{\@tget={}\@get} \def\@get{\futurelet\@next\@getA} \def\@getA{% \ifx\@next\@sptoken% \let\@@next\@getspace% \else\ifcat\noexpand\@next{% \let\@@next\@getarg% \else\ifcat\noexpand\@next}% \let\@@next\@getend% \@tget=\expandafter{\the\@tget\@get@end}% \else% \let\@@next\@gettoken% \fi\fi\fi% \@@next% } It is the funny section \else\ifcat\noexpand\@next{% \let\@@next\@getarg% \else\ifcat\noexpand\@next}% that makes it possible. I have no idea why it works; TeX seemed to accept it. >Of course you can follow the above to its logical conclusion of >implementing _everything_ via active characters and implementing your >own parsing routines _in_ TeX rather than using the parser built into >tex-the-program. This is certainly possible (some people have done >exactly that) but TeX isn't really the best language for implementing a >parser, and certainly isn't the fastest. It is extremely difficult to implement any general type of parser; TeX is not suitable for that. >If more involved contextual >analysis is required in the input stream then it probably makes more >sense to look to an extended system that can provide such extended >functionality. (Something like omega's OTP processes.) They may not be >quite what you want here, but the principle is the same, to make a >controlled extension of the underlying system rather than try to build a >tower of macros on the rather fragile sand that is tex-the-program. One needs a successor to TeX, or perhaps a TeX preprocessor. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 3-Nov-1998 12:20:37-GMT,4316;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA27162 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 05:20:21 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id MAA26244; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 12:53:54 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407322 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 12:53:52 +0100 Received: from ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.1]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA26230 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 12:53:50 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 12:53:42 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 12:53:17 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 12:52:59 +0100 X400-Received: by mta open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 12:52:58 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 12:53:32 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13886.60082.618695.290249@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: Quotes an... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <98102213123551@man.ac.uk>, <199811030953.JAA04308@nag.co.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13886.60082.618695.290249@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 12:53:32 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811030953.JAA04308@nag.co.uk> David Carlisle wrote -- > > Of course you can follow the above to its logical conclusion of > implementing _everything_ via active characters and implementing your > own parsing routines _in_ TeX rather than using the parser built into > tex-the-program. Take care or the project will have to pay royalties to a certain fellow-country person of ours for even mentioning the possibility:-). > This is certainly possible (some people have done > exactly that) but TeX isn't really the best language for implementing a > parser, and certainly isn't the fastest. If more involved contextual > analysis is required in the input stream then it probably makes more > sense to look to an extended system that can provide such extended > functionality. (Something like omega's OTP processes.) They may not be > quite what you want here, but the principle is the same, to make a > controlled extension of the underlying system rather than try to build a > tower of macros on the rather fragile sand that is tex-the-program. This suggests two very useful exercises for our readers: 1. Implement "smart quotes" using OTPs (or show why this is not possible or is a good way to do it). 2. Give a reasonably full spec for an extension to TeX's input character processing that would support clean and elegant implementation of this and similar functionality. NOTE: these exercises are not a joke. As Frank, David and I have been trying to state, perhaps too subtly, this kind of exercise is one important part (there are many others) of what is needed to make LaTeX3 happen in the current TeX world. By contrast, clever TeX code showing that "TeX can do it" is not so useful, right now, for this type of parsing problem: since TeX (and even its expansion mechanism alone) is Turing complete "TeX can do all parsing and string manipulation". chris 3-Nov-1998 12:55:29-GMT,2577;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA27801 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 05:55:23 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA29631; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 13:29:11 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407338 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 13:29:08 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA29529 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 13:28:36 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.116] (sl90.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.116]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id NAA12091 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 13:28:30 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <199811030953.JAA04308@nag.co.uk> <98102213123551@man.ac.uk>, <199811030953.JAA04308@nag.co.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 13:28:07 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13886.60082.618695.290249@fell.open.ac.uk> At 12:53 +0100 1998/11/03, Chris Rowley wrote: >By contrast, clever TeX code showing that "TeX can do it" is not so >useful, right now, for this type of parsing problem: since TeX (and >even its expansion mechanism alone) is Turing complete "TeX can do all >parsing and string manipulation". The Turing argument is not so interesting in the context of computer languages, because firstly computers are not Turing machines, and second the equivalence between Turing machines normally do not preserve the other semantic structures that one wants to describe. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 3-Nov-1998 13:52:30-GMT,3052;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA28840 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 06:52:28 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA04160; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 14:14:07 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407389 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 14:14:04 +0100 Received: from nag.co.uk (openmath.nag.co.uk [192.156.217.16]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA04140 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 14:14:01 +0100 (MET) Received: (from davidc@localhost) by nag.co.uk (AIX4.2/UCB 8.7/8.7) id NAA12382; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 13:13:44 GMT References: (message from Hans Aberg on Tue, 3 Nov 1998 10:36:19 +0100) <98102213123551@man.ac.uk> <98102213123551@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: <199811031313.NAA12382@nag.co.uk> Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 13:13:44 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: David Carlisle Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: (message from Hans Aberg on Tue, 3 Nov 1998 12:11:48 +0100) > that makes it possible. I have no idea why it works; TeX seemed to accept it. yes of course you can detect {} with \futurelet (you'll see similar code in xspace.sty) the point is that you can't reliably do anything with the information once you have it. For your quote lookahead you need to see past the } but the role of } is rather different in \mbox{..} or \section{...} or \sbox{...} and you don't know what sort of thing you have, and the group may not end with } it may be & or ..... and then the question is do you expand before or after testing. in \quote{this}\foo do you expand \foo first in case it is defined to start with a , ? If you decide no then sometimes your quote command will sometimes make the wrong decision (this is what xspace does) If you expand once (by inserting some \expandafter s at suitable places then your quote command will make the wrong decision at slightly different set of times. If you try to fully expand the token to see if it ultimately produces a , then effectively you make your entire document a `moving argument' so all sorts of fragile commands will blow up, and commands made robust using \protect still won't expand and so quote will still sometimes make the wrong decision. David 3-Nov-1998 14:38:56-GMT,3748;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA29815 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 07:38:40 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA08977; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 14:56:53 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407476 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 14:56:51 +0100 Received: from dcdrjh.fnal.gov (dcdrjh.fnal.gov [131.225.103.66]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA08964 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 14:56:48 +0100 (MET) Received: (from herber@localhost) by dcdrjh.fnal.gov (8.9.0/8.9.0) id HAA11625; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 07:56:47 -0600 (CST) References: <199811030953.JAA04308@nag.co.uk> <98102213123551@man.ac.uk>, <199811030953.JAA04308@nag.co.uk> Message-ID: <199811031356.HAA11625@dcdrjh.fnal.gov> Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 07:56:47 -0600 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "Randolph J. Herber" Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L The following header lines retained to affect attribution: |Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 13:28:07 +0100 |Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project |From: Hans Aberg |Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation |To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L |At 12:53 +0100 1998/11/03, Chris Rowley wrote: |>By contrast, clever TeX code showing that "TeX can do it" is not so |>useful, right now, for this type of parsing problem: since TeX (and |>even its expansion mechanism alone) is Turing complete "TeX can do all |>parsing and string manipulation". | The Turing argument is not so interesting in the context of computer |languages, because firstly computers are not Turing machines, and second |the equivalence between Turing machines normally do not preserve the other |semantic structures that one wants to describe. | Hans Aberg | * Email: Hans Aberg | * Home Page: | * AMS member listing: I grant your first point that computers are not Turing machines. That is because no computer has infinite memory (8^} not even big TeX). I disagree with your second point---with sufficient encoding, any semantic can be preserved, possibly with a time penalty (which are ignored when discussing such equivalences). That is one of the points of Goedel's Incompleteness (Undecidability) Theorem. Without regard to available memory, TeX is ``Turing complete''. I suggest that you check the coursework of a Theory of Automata course. The proper argument is whether the encoding is practical in some sense: ease of coding, complexity, running time, maintainability, etc. I offer that the Chris Rowley is correct in that it _could_ be done and that you (Hans Aberg) are correct in that it is not practical to do. Randolph J. Herber, herber@dcdrjh.fnal.gov, +1 630 840 2966, CD/CDFTF PK-149F, Mail Stop 318, Fermilab, Kirk & Pine Rds., PO Box 500, Batavia, IL 60510-0500, USA. (Speaking for myself and not for US, US DOE, FNAL nor URA.) (Product, trade, or service marks herein belong to their respective owners.) BA Math '72. 3-Nov-1998 14:44:15-GMT,3074;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA29946 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 07:44:14 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA09885; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 15:06:07 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407492 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 15:06:05 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA09763 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 15:04:56 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.116] (sl21.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.41]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id PAA20706 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 15:04:46 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: (message from Hans Aberg on Tue, 3 Nov 1998 12:11:48 +0100) (message from Hans Aberg on Tue, 3 Nov 1998 10:36:19 +0100) <98102213123551@man.ac.uk> <98102213123551@man.ac.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 15:05:13 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811031313.NAA12382@nag.co.uk> At 13:13 +0000 1998/11/03, David Carlisle wrote: >and then the question is do you expand before or after testing. > >in \quote{this}\foo > >do you expand \foo first in case it is defined to start with a , ? > >If you decide no then sometimes your quote command will sometimes make >the wrong decision (this is what xspace does) > >If you expand once (by inserting some \expandafter s at suitable places >then your quote command will make the wrong decision at slightly >different set of times. This problem should be resolved (in principle) by clearly defining what input syntax LaTeX can accept. The problem is of course that TeX does not provide a mechanism checking that the input syuntax is correct. So it may prove difficult to do it in practise within the current TeX. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 3-Nov-1998 15:09:15-GMT,2831;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA00503 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 08:09:10 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA11821; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 15:26:30 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407527 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 15:26:28 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA11771 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 15:26:12 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.116] (sl106.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.132]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id PAA22661 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 15:25:40 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <199811030953.JAA04308@nag.co.uk> <98102213123551@man.ac.uk>, <199811030953.JAA04308@nag.co.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 15:26:07 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811031356.HAA11625@dcdrjh.fnal.gov> At 07:56 -0600 1998/11/03, Randolph J. Herber wrote: >I disagree with your second point---with sufficient encoding, any >semantic can be preserved, possibly with a time penalty (which are >ignored when discussing such equivalences). That is one of the >points of Goedel's Incompleteness (Undecidability) Theorem. Provided the semantics that one wants to describe can be expressed by binary numbers: For example, TeX proper cannot draw a non-straight spline curve no matter how you apply Turing theorems and Godel theorem, even though you can define structures simulating that TeX can handle that -- but that has no practical significance unless you figure out a way to extend TeX to print it. (In this example, even though the curve itself can be described by binary numbers, the capacity of printing it cannot.) Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 3-Nov-1998 17:29:30-GMT,4037;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA03974 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 10:29:23 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA27116; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 17:53:25 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407708 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 17:53:22 +0100 Received: from dcdrjh.fnal.gov (dcdrjh.fnal.gov [131.225.103.66]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA27094 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 17:53:20 +0100 (MET) Received: (from herber@localhost) by dcdrjh.fnal.gov (8.9.0/8.9.0) id KAA12001; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 10:53:19 -0600 (CST) References: <199811030953.JAA04308@nag.co.uk> <98102213123551@man.ac.uk>, <199811030953.JAA04308@nag.co.uk> Message-ID: <199811031653.KAA12001@dcdrjh.fnal.gov> Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 10:53:19 -0600 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "Randolph J. Herber" Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L The following header lines retained to affect attribution: |Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 15:26:07 +0100 |Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project |From: Hans Aberg |Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation |To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L |At 07:56 -0600 1998/11/03, Randolph J. Herber wrote: |>I disagree with your second point---with sufficient encoding, any |>semantic can be preserved, possibly with a time penalty (which are |>ignored when discussing such equivalences). That is one of the |>points of Goedel's Incompleteness (Undecidability) Theorem. | Provided the semantics that one wants to describe can be expressed by |binary numbers: For example, TeX proper cannot draw a non-straight spline |curve no matter how you apply Turing theorems and Godel theorem, even |though you can define structures simulating that TeX can handle that -- but |that has no practical significance unless you figure out a way to extend |TeX to print it. (In this example, even though the curve itself can be |described by binary numbers, the capacity of printing it cannot.) 1) TeX does not have to print it. TeX only has to generate dvi that describes it. Providing the necessry dvi semantics for necessary operations is a problem for the dvi language providers. 2) Irrational numbers are not representable by rational numbers. This is well known. But, irrational numbers can be approximated, to any desired accuracy, by rational numbers. TeX, disgarding memory issues, could generate rational numbers, for some dvi encoding, to any desired precision. Therefore, TeX could generate the output. 3) Goedel permits encoding with arbitary semantics. Therefore, an encoding for ``non-straight splines'' and for any specific irrational numbers could be established. | Hans Aberg | * Email: Hans Aberg | * Home Page: | * AMS member listing: Back to the circus at hand. Randolph J. Herber, herber@dcdrjh.fnal.gov, +1 630 840 2966, CD/CDFTF PK-149F, Mail Stop 318, Fermilab, Kirk & Pine Rds., PO Box 500, Batavia, IL 60510-0500, USA. (Speaking for myself and not for US, US DOE, FNAL nor URA.) (Product, trade, or service marks herein belong to their respective owners.) 3-Nov-1998 17:52:08-GMT,2812;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA04533 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 10:52:07 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA00352; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 18:20:42 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407737 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 18:20:40 +0100 Received: from ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.2]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id SAA00332 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 18:20:37 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 18:20:06 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 18:18:22 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 18:18:01 +0100 X400-Received: by mta open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 18:18:00 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 18:19:48 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13887.14837.318608.600502@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: Quotes an... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <199811030953.JAA04308@nag.co.uk>, <199811031653.KAA12001@dcdrjh.fnal.gov> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13887.14837.318608.600502@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 18:19:48 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811031653.KAA12001@dcdrjh.fnal.gov> Randolph J. Herber wrote -- > > Back to the circus at hand. > Yes, please! Otherwise I shall tempted to add my two-cents to the discussion of infinitessimal processes and Turing machines. May I take this opportunity therefore to remind readers of the homework assignmnts I set earlier today:-)? chris 3-Nov-1998 18:33:33-GMT,3639;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA05629 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 11:33:10 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA03358; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 19:02:42 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407775 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 19:02:40 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA03330 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 19:02:24 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.110] (sl84.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.110]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id TAA12913 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 19:02:19 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <199811030953.JAA04308@nag.co.uk> <98102213123551@man.ac.uk>, <199811030953.JAA04308@nag.co.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 19:02:01 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811031653.KAA12001@dcdrjh.fnal.gov> At 10:53 -0600 1998/11/03, Randolph J. Herber wrote: > 1) TeX does not have to print it. > TeX only has to generate dvi that describes it. > Providing the necessry dvi semantics for necessary operations > is a problem for the dvi language providers. The main point is that with the original setup whatsoever, it is not possible to print such a curve, no matter how you apply the Godel theorem. > 2) Irrational numbers are not representable by rational numbers. Anything that can be described in mathematics can of course be represented in the computer: Just put the math paper into the computer. This does not work with a physics paper because QM is not logical, so what it describes may have no logical representation, even though the description itself has a logical representation (the paper) of course. > 3) Goedel permits encoding with arbitary semantics. I think this line should read: Goedel permits encoding with arbitary logical semantics. > Therefore, > an encoding for ``non-straight splines'' and for any specific > irrational numbers could be established. Encoding for splines, or Bezier curves, are of course used by PS, PDF and such formats. So summing it up, even though reasoning with Turing machines and Godel theorems may be of theoretical interest, it has no practical value when dealing with a computer system that should perform a particular task. Returning to TeX and LaTeX, I think that we will have to wait for suitable extensions of TeX instead of hoping for an implementation via the Godel theorem. :-) Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 3-Nov-1998 19:24:24-GMT,4037;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA07028 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 12:24:17 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA27116; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 17:53:25 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407708 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 17:53:22 +0100 Received: from dcdrjh.fnal.gov (dcdrjh.fnal.gov [131.225.103.66]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA27094 for ; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 17:53:20 +0100 (MET) Received: (from herber@localhost) by dcdrjh.fnal.gov (8.9.0/8.9.0) id KAA12001; Tue, 3 Nov 1998 10:53:19 -0600 (CST) References: <199811030953.JAA04308@nag.co.uk> <98102213123551@man.ac.uk>, <199811030953.JAA04308@nag.co.uk> Message-ID: <199811031653.KAA12001@dcdrjh.fnal.gov> Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 10:53:19 -0600 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "Randolph J. Herber" Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L The following header lines retained to affect attribution: |Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 15:26:07 +0100 |Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project |From: Hans Aberg |Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation |To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L |At 07:56 -0600 1998/11/03, Randolph J. Herber wrote: |>I disagree with your second point---with sufficient encoding, any |>semantic can be preserved, possibly with a time penalty (which are |>ignored when discussing such equivalences). That is one of the |>points of Goedel's Incompleteness (Undecidability) Theorem. | Provided the semantics that one wants to describe can be expressed by |binary numbers: For example, TeX proper cannot draw a non-straight spline |curve no matter how you apply Turing theorems and Godel theorem, even |though you can define structures simulating that TeX can handle that -- but |that has no practical significance unless you figure out a way to extend |TeX to print it. (In this example, even though the curve itself can be |described by binary numbers, the capacity of printing it cannot.) 1) TeX does not have to print it. TeX only has to generate dvi that describes it. Providing the necessry dvi semantics for necessary operations is a problem for the dvi language providers. 2) Irrational numbers are not representable by rational numbers. This is well known. But, irrational numbers can be approximated, to any desired accuracy, by rational numbers. TeX, disgarding memory issues, could generate rational numbers, for some dvi encoding, to any desired precision. Therefore, TeX could generate the output. 3) Goedel permits encoding with arbitary semantics. Therefore, an encoding for ``non-straight splines'' and for any specific irrational numbers could be established. | Hans Aberg | * Email: Hans Aberg | * Home Page: | * AMS member listing: Back to the circus at hand. Randolph J. Herber, herber@dcdrjh.fnal.gov, +1 630 840 2966, CD/CDFTF PK-149F, Mail Stop 318, Fermilab, Kirk & Pine Rds., PO Box 500, Batavia, IL 60510-0500, USA. (Speaking for myself and not for US, US DOE, FNAL nor URA.) (Product, trade, or service marks herein belong to their respective owners.) 4-Nov-1998 15:51:38-GMT,2757;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA03160 for ; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 08:51:13 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA11903; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 16:17:17 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407194 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 16:17:15 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA11882 for ; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 16:17:11 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id PAA02282; hop 0; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 15:09:04 GMT Received: from screavie.elsevier.co.uk by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Wed, 4 Nov 1998 15:16:41 +0000 Received: from lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk (lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.7]) by screavie.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id PAA23403 for ; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 15:16:28 GMT Received: (from srahtz@localhost) by lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) id PAA02074; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 15:16:32 GMT References: <199811030953.JAA04308@nag.co.uk> <98102213123551@man.ac.uk> <199811031653.KAA12001@dcdrjh.fnal.gov> <19981104145716.B29267@maths.tcd.ie> Message-ID: <199811041516.PAA02074@lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk> Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 15:16:32 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <19981104145716.B29267@maths.tcd.ie> Timothy Murphy writes: > Would there still be difficulty if one said > \quote{...\inquote{...}...} ? > Ie is it the nesting of \quote that causes the problem ? > quiche eaters say ...... ... and translate the depth of the quote nesting into a color range when they display the text in their web brower how many angels *can* dance on the head of a pin? sebastian 4-Nov-1998 16:28:23-GMT,2645;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA04195 for ; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 09:28:21 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA08439; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 15:57:26 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407156 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 15:57:23 +0100 Received: from salmon.maths.tcd.ie (mmdf@salmon.maths.tcd.ie [134.226.81.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA08415 for ; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 15:57:21 +0100 (MET) Received: from boole.maths.tcd.ie by salmon.maths.tcd.ie with SMTP id ; 4 Nov 98 14:57:16 +0000 (GMT) References: <199811030953.JAA04308@nag.co.uk> <98102213123551@man.ac.uk>, <199811030953.JAA04308@nag.co.uk> <199811031653.KAA12001@dcdrjh.fnal.gov> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.93.2i Message-ID: <19981104145716.B29267@maths.tcd.ie> Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 14:57:16 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Timothy Murphy Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: ; from Hans Aberg on Tue, Nov 03, 1998 at 07:02:01PM +0100 On Tue, Nov 03, 1998 at 07:02:01PM +0100, Hans Aberg wrote: > > Returning to TeX and LaTeX, I think that we will have to wait for > suitable extensions of TeX instead of hoping for an implementation via the > Godel theorem. :-) Apologies for asking a very elementary question, but is the problem in this case that one gets into difficulty if one says \quote{...\quote{...}...} ? Would there still be difficulty if one said \quote{...\inquote{...}...} ? Ie is it the nesting of \quote that causes the problem ? If so, it would seem to me to be simpler to require use of \inquote or whatever rather than re-creating the universe. -- Timothy Murphy e-mail: tim@maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland 4-Nov-1998 17:16:09-GMT,2268;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA05349 for ; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 10:16:01 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA20479; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 17:48:17 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407306 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 17:48:14 +0100 Received: from sarah.albany.edu (sarah.albany.edu [169.226.1.103]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA20461 for ; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 17:48:12 +0100 (MET) Received: from hilbert.math.albany.edu (hilbert.math.albany.edu [169.226.23.52]) by sarah.albany.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA05730 for ; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 11:47:32 -0500 (EST) Received: (from hammond@localhost) by hilbert.math.albany.edu (8.8.4/8.8.3) id LAA07555 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 11:47:31 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <199811041647.LAA07555@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 11:47:31 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "William F. Hammond" Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Sebastian writes: > ...... ... I don't fully understand Chris's guidelines for what should be discussed here, and, therefore, I don't know whether the SGML plans for LaTeX3 are appropriate here. I don't understand exactly what Sebastian meant. Finally, I wonder if we have a clear statement of the homework problems that may be understood by all. And could we have a paragraph or two elaborating on why the homework assignment is important. Thanks. -- Bill Hammond 4-Nov-1998 17:47:05-GMT,2889;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA06103 for ; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 10:46:49 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA22568; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 18:10:05 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407346 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 18:10:03 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id SAA22548 for ; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 18:10:01 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id RAA07732; hop 0; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 17:01:54 GMT Received: from screavie.elsevier.co.uk by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Wed, 4 Nov 1998 17:09:48 +0000 Received: from lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk (lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.7]) by screavie.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id RAA25395 for ; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 17:09:40 GMT Received: (from srahtz@localhost) by lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) id RAA02563; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 17:09:45 GMT References: <199811041647.LAA07555@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Message-ID: <199811041709.RAA02563@lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk> Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 17:09:45 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811041647.LAA07555@hilbert.math.albany.edu> William F. Hammond writes: > I don't fully understand Chris's guidelines for what should be > discussed here, and, therefore, I don't know whether the SGML > plans for LaTeX3 are appropriate here. are there any SGML plans for L3? > I don't understand exactly what Sebastian meant. it was a joke. i was simplying that rendering of abstract things like `quoted text' need not involve quote marks; and that SGML/XML markup of abstract markup is much easier to parse than TeX.... > problems that may be understood by all. And could we have a > paragraph or two elaborating on why the homework assignment > is important. and what qualification we get if we pass the exam. sebastian 4-Nov-1998 18:19:38-GMT,4065;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA07062 for ; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 11:19:19 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA25943; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 18:55:05 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407383 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 18:55:03 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id SAA25906 for ; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 18:54:49 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.145] (sl119.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.145]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id SAA04275 for ; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 18:54:39 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: ; from Hans Aberg on Tue, Nov 03, 1998 at 07:02:01PM +0100 <199811030953.JAA04308@nag.co.uk> <98102213123551@man.ac.uk>, <199811030953.JAA04308@nag.co.uk> <199811031653.KAA12001@dcdrjh.fnal.gov> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 18:54:32 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <19981104145716.B29267@maths.tcd.ie> At 14:57 +0000 1998/11/04, Timothy Murphy wrote: >Apologies for asking a very elementary question, >but is the problem in this case that one gets into difficulty >if one says \quote{...\quote{...}...} ? >Would there still be difficulty if one said >\quote{...\inquote{...}...} ? >Ie is it the nesting of \quote that causes the problem ? One problem discussed was to handle the look-ahead beyond the quote: The ideal would be that the author just writes everything logically, independent of language and typesetting style. So reserve two character for quotes, say < and >. Then write a text He said , and so on. Here the comma may be typeset differently in different styles, for example He said ``She said \dots,'' and so on. as in a common US style. For this to work, the command corresponding to ">" in the author input must recognize that the character following it is a "," and making sure that the combination is typeset as ",''". The sorry thing is that TeX is not at all designed for doing such sophisticated work, even though one can achieve the effect by extraordinary manipulations. For example, suppose the input code looks like He said {}, and so on. How should this be handled? Now the command ">" must recognize a redundant "}", looking past it to see that it is followed by a ",". We could decide that it should be typeset as He said {``She said \dots''}, and so on. but we still must make a check for the "}" and treat it specially. The problem is that it can be difficult to foresee the uses of the quote commands ("<" and ">") so that code does not break. Otherwise, I do not think keeping track of the quote nesting level is so difficult: Quotes use a special variable keeping track of it. The quote style in use defines its behavior. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 4-Nov-1998 20:51:18-GMT,3664;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id NAA12010 for ; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 13:51:17 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id VAA05665; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 21:33:11 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407504 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 21:33:09 +0100 Received: from kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE (Ufrank@kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE [134.93.8.158]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id VAA05653 for ; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 21:33:08 +0100 (MET) Received: (from Ufrank@localhost) by kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE (8.8.8/8.8.8) id VAA16597 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 21:33:06 +0100 (MET) X-Authentication-Warning: kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE: Ufrank set sender to latex3 using -f Received: (from latex3@localhost) by frank.zdv.uni-mainz.de (8.6.9/8.6.9) id UAA29329; Wed, 4 Nov 1998 20:53:35 +0100 References: <199811030953.JAA04308@nag.co.uk> <98102213123551@man.ac.uk> <199811031653.KAA12001@dcdrjh.fnal.gov> <19981104145716.B29267@maths.tcd.ie> Message-ID: <199811041953.UAA29329@frank.zdv.uni-mainz.de> Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 20:53:35 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Frank Mittelbach Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <19981104145716.B29267@maths.tcd.ie> Timothy Murphy writes: > Apologies for asking a very elementary question, > but is the problem in this case that one gets into difficulty > if one says \quote{...\quote{...}...} ? > Would there still be difficulty if one said > \quote{...\inquote{...}...} ? > Ie is it the nesting of \quote that causes the problem ? essentially what we are trying to explain is that TeX's mechanism of \futurelet and its expansion mechanism are not adequate to model character stream parsing if those character streams might be hidden within commands (expansion) or arbitrary nesting of brace groups can intervene. in the later case expansion can also screw up simple \futurelet types of parsing, eg in \textbf{...\quote{...}}, by the time the end of the quote could look forward to see if a , follows it will encounter all kind of expanded internal code coming from the fact that \textbf has expanded and placed it there and it has no way of dealing with this. the two mechanisms just don't work together except in very tightly controlled cases of which general text is not really part of. so what is needed for typesetting support on such a level are more powerful concepts that better distangle character stream parsing and analysing and macro (or other) processing via expansion etc. Omega's OTPs might be a partial answer to this kind of question (though in my understanding they will not be the final answer at least not in their present form) for this reason Chris "homework" suggestion is meant really serious and would help a lot more than discussing Godel theorem or what can be represented in a computer. frank 5-Nov-1998 13:59:33-GMT,2631;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA02771 for ; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 06:57:20 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA24947; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 14:18:06 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407170 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 14:18:04 +0100 Received: from AWIUNI11.EDVZ.UniVie.AC.AT (helios.edvz.univie.ac.at [131.130.1.2]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA24936 for ; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 14:18:02 +0100 (MET) Received: from VM.UNIVIE.AC.AT by AWIUNI11.EDVZ.UniVie.AC.AT (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 3030; Thu, 05 Nov 98 14:18:02 MEZ Received: from VM.UNIVIE.AC.AT (NJE origin A8131DAL@AWIUNI11) by VM.UNIVIE.AC.AT (LMail V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 7773; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 14:18:02 +0100 Message-ID: <199811051318.OAA24936@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de> Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 14:03:13 MEZ Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Peter Schmitt Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Message of Wed, 4 Nov 1998 17:09:45 GMT from On Wed, 4 Nov 1998 17:09:45 GMT Sebastian Rahtz said: >it was a joke. i was simplying that rendering of abstract things like >`quoted text' need not involve quote marks; and that SGML/XML markup >of abstract markup is much easier to parse than TeX.... > The relevant comparison in this case is with _LaTeX markup_ ( TeX could parse SGML/XML as easily as any other program :-) But, of course, LaTeX is more friendly to the user than HTML -- that's the penalty one has to pay ... Peter Peter Schmitt a8131dal@awiuni11.edvz.univie.ac.at ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Institute of Mathematics Strudlhofgasse 4 University of Vienna A-1090 Wien Austria 5-Nov-1998 17:59:53-GMT,3031;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA08336 for ; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 10:59:51 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA04259; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 16:02:08 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407304 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 16:01:59 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA04230 for ; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 16:01:54 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id OAA07990; hop 0; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 14:53:50 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Thu, 5 Nov 1998 15:01:32 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199811051318.OAA24936@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de> Message-ID: <13889.44009.783830.780636@srahtz> Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 13:45:13 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811051318.OAA24936@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de> Peter Schmitt writes: > The relevant comparison in this case is with _LaTeX markup_ > ( TeX could parse SGML/XML as easily as any other program :-) people _say_ that, but one notes that it has never been done, to my knowledge (and I mean beyond the constrained environment of eg typehtml) > But, of course, LaTeX is more friendly to the user than HTML > -- that's the penalty one has to pay ... > what does HTML have to do with it? even wrt HTML, history is not on your side. millions and millions of people write HTML happily every day, a tiny proportion write LaTeX. what does that suggest? anyway, there *is* a point to my thread; which is that while (La)TeX can do the typesetting job, its a gross *input* language; if you only talk to the formatting engine ((La)TeX) through a constrained channel (XML as input, stylesheet for styling), you won't meet half so many problems possibly i digress. I feel the heavy breathing of Frank and Chris. Sebastian 5-Nov-1998 17:38:19-GMT,4051;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA07805 for ; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 10:38:12 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA13736; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 17:49:23 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407427 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 17:49:20 +0100 Received: from sarah.albany.edu (sarah.albany.edu [169.226.1.103]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA13720 for ; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 17:49:12 +0100 (MET) Received: from hilbert.math.albany.edu (hilbert.math.albany.edu [169.226.23.52]) by sarah.albany.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA12852 for ; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 11:49:10 -0500 (EST) Received: (from hammond@localhost) by hilbert.math.albany.edu (8.8.4/8.8.3) id LAA20522 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 11:49:09 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <199811051649.LAA20522@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 11:49:09 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "William F. Hammond" Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L On Thu, 5 Nov 1998 14:03:13 MEZ Peter Schmitt wrote: : On Wed, 4 Nov 1998 17:09:45 GMT Sebastian Rahtz said: : >it was a joke. i was simplying that rendering of abstract things like : >`quoted text' need not involve quote marks; and that SGML/XML markup : >of abstract markup is much easier to parse than TeX.... : > : The relevant comparison in this case is with _LaTeX markup_ : ( TeX could parse SGML/XML as easily as any other program :-) : But, of course, LaTeX is more friendly to the user than HTML : -- that's the penalty one has to pay ... Yes, indeed, LaTeX is indeed friendly. It is important, however, to understand that HTML is just NOT a good authoring language and was never intended to be an authoring language. It is browser fodder designed for easy and efficient browser handling. XML, eXtensible Markup Language, is an extension of HTML to allow anybody to create a tag set. But XML is also NOT an authoring language. It is more or less correct to view every XML language as also an SGML language. Therefore, many SGML languages are also not good for authors. However, some are not too bad. I have been trying to make an SGML language, still in infancy, that is much closer to LaTeX than is any other SGML that I have *seen*. (I am only interested in "seeing" non-proprietary things.) While it is an infant, it is working well enough for me for now. I have concluded that it cannot be extremely close to LaTeX, but I can then write its command as "\foo{content}" just as if I am authoring LaTeX even though I am really creating SGML that will eventually be processed to LaTeX. I think that my conclusion about "distance" is related to the difficulties in the discussion here concerning authoring that we have been seeing. SGML is all about fast staged processing. It is not very much about getting on to paper. There is a very lucrative and apparently profitable industry out there lurking behind closed doors. I suggest that individuals should think in terms of multiple SGML transformations as pre-processing for LaTeX. Some industrial strength publishers *may* want to think in terms of multiple SGML transformations as pre-processing to TeX directly. I am wary of messing with Knuth's TeX. -- Bill 5-Nov-1998 18:13:11-GMT,3007;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA08714 for ; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 11:12:24 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA17787; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 18:37:48 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407496 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 18:37:42 +0100 Received: from heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk (exim@heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk [128.232.32.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA17745 for ; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 18:37:36 +0100 (MET) Received: from dorceus.cl.cam.ac.uk (cl.cam.ac.uk) [128.232.1.34] (rf) by heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 1.82 #1) id 0zbTLi-0007L1-00; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 17:37:34 +0000 Message-ID: Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 17:37:31 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Robin Fairbairns Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 05 Nov 1998 14:03:13 EST." <199811051318.OAA24936@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de> Peter Schmitt wrote: > On Wed, 4 Nov 1998 17:09:45 GMT Sebastian Rahtz said: > >it was a joke. i was simplying that rendering of abstract things like > >`quoted text' need not involve quote marks; and that SGML/XML markup > >of abstract markup is much easier to parse than TeX.... > > The relevant comparison in this case is with _LaTeX markup_ > ( TeX could parse SGML/XML as easily as any other program :-) careful, now. sgml (with all bells and whistles) has been tried, and no product has ensued: while it's possible in principle (cf all those silly arguments about turing completeness and what it means) it seems rather difficult in practice. xml is, of course, a different matter, having been designed to address these parsing issues. > But, of course, LaTeX is more friendly to the user than HTML > -- that's the penalty one has to pay ... i boggle (is it _really_ peter saying this? ;-) i had an argument earlier today with a research student here, where i was suggesting that the perceived difficulty of html was due to his lack of familiarity with it. as sebastian said (while i was in my seminar), the proof of this pudding is the number of authors in the respective languages. i continue to believe that there remains a future for a latex-like language, but it's impossible to claim that it's going to be the majority's choice. robin 5-Nov-1998 23:08:06-GMT,2774;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id QAA16027 for ; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 16:08:04 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id XAA04126; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 23:46:16 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407689 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 23:46:13 +0100 Received: from abacus.maths.uq.edu.au (abacus.maths.uq.edu.au [130.102.160.6]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id XAA04107 for ; Thu, 5 Nov 1998 23:45:52 +0100 (MET) Received: from hamble.maths.uq.edu.au (hamble.maths.uq.edu.au [130.102.160.20]) by abacus.maths.uq.edu.au (8.9.0/8.9.0) with ESMTP id IAA26963 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 08:45:42 +1000 (EST) Received: (from kgs@localhost) by hamble.maths.uq.edu.au (8.8.6/0.0.0) id IAA22074 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 08:45:41 +1000 (EST) Message-ID: <199811052245.IAA22074@hamble.maths.uq.edu.au> Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 08:45:41 +1000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Ken Smith Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Timothy Murphy wrote: > On Tue, Nov 03, 1998 at 07:02:01PM +0100, Hans Aberg wrote: > > > > Returning to TeX and LaTeX, I think that we will have to wait for > > suitable extensions of TeX instead of hoping for an implementation via the > > Godel theorem. :-) > > Apologies for asking a very elementary question, > but is the problem in this case that one gets into difficulty > if one says \quote{...\quote{...}...} ? > Would there still be difficulty if one said > \quote{...\inquote{...}...} ? > Ie is it the nesting of \quote that causes the problem ? > > If so, it would seem to me to be simpler > to require use of \inquote or whatever > rather than re-creating the universe. But then you could need \quote{...\inquote{...\ininquote{...\inininquote{...}...}...}...} I have encountered quotations to this depth of nesting. Has anyone met greater depth of nesting? The real problem here would be remembering which level you were at, in case an additional level of quotation was needed. Ken Smith kgs@maths.uq.edu.au 6-Nov-1998 10:35:22-GMT,3094;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id DAA29292 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 03:35:20 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id LAA26509; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 11:09:17 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407201 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 11:09:14 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA26491 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 11:09:12 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id KAA28763; hop 0; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 10:01:13 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Fri, 6 Nov 1998 10:08:36 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199811051649.LAA20522@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Message-ID: <13890.49737.508588.828018@srahtz> Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 09:32:57 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811051649.LAA20522@hilbert.math.albany.edu> William F. Hammond writes: > to understand that HTML is just NOT a good authoring language and was > never intended to be an authoring language. It is browser fodder > designed for easy and efficient browser handling. XML, eXtensible oh come. of course it was intended as an authoring language! it is NOT good for efficient browser writing!! > Markup Language, is an extension of HTML to allow anybody to create > a tag set. But XML is also NOT an authoring language. XML is _not_ an extension of HTML!!! grr. and its a good authoring > It is more or less correct to view every XML language as also an > SGML language. Therefore, many SGML languages are also not good > for authors. However, some are not too bad. "more or less"? XML is a _strict_ subset of SGML! > transformations as pre-processing for LaTeX. Some industrial strength > publishers *may* want to think in terms of multiple SGML transformations > as pre-processing to TeX directly. thanks for the permission :-} > I am wary of messing with Knuth's TeX. i dont see the connection... sebastian 6-Nov-1998 13:33:50-GMT,2404;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA02112 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 06:33:42 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA13052; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 14:00:18 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407415 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 14:00:16 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA13030 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 14:00:09 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.102] (sl76.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.102]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id NAA23656 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 13:59:30 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se (Unverified) References: <199811051318.OAA24936@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de> <199811051318.OAA24936@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 14:00:00 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13889.44009.783830.780636@srahtz> At 13:45 +0000 1998/11/05, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: >even wrt HTML, history is not on your side. millions and millions of >people write HTML happily every day, a tiny proportion write >LaTeX. what does that suggest? Perhaps a LaTeX environment able to process HTML syntax. By the way, how do you know that they write HTML _happily_? :-) Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 6-Nov-1998 14:22:18-GMT,4798;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA03058 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 07:22:02 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA18034; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 14:52:31 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407490 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 14:52:28 +0100 Received: from sarah.albany.edu (sarah.albany.edu [169.226.1.103]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA17995 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 14:52:17 +0100 (MET) Received: from hilbert.math.albany.edu (hilbert.math.albany.edu [169.226.23.52]) by sarah.albany.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id IAA06439 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 08:51:59 -0500 (EST) Received: (from hammond@localhost) by hilbert.math.albany.edu (8.8.4/8.8.3) id IAA01838 for LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 08:51:57 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <199811061351.IAA01838@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 08:51:57 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "William F. Hammond" Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Sebastian Rahtz writes: : William F. Hammond writes: : > to understand that HTML is just NOT a good authoring language and was : > never intended to be an authoring language. It is browser fodder : > designed for easy and efficient browser handling. XML, eXtensible : oh come. of course it was intended as an authoring language! it is NOT : good for efficient browser writing!! : : > Markup Language, is an extension of HTML to allow anybody to create : > a tag set. But XML is also NOT an authoring language. : XML is _not_ an extension of HTML!!! grr. Well, that depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is. ;-) Of course, it also depends on the meaning of "extension". I perceive the name "eXtensible Markup Language" as an essentially political device designed to slip SGML past those with "SGML anxiety". Yes, HTML is not an XML. Moreover, the tag set of an XML need not intersect, much less contain, the HTML tags. : and its a good authoring A good XML could be a good authoring language if one doesn't mind being required always to use every element tag. For example, in X-HTML one would need to be meticulous about always closing every paragraph with "

" and always having the HTML preamble opened with "" and closed with "", not to mention wrapping the whole document in "" and "", all of which are optional in HTML as we know it. Now HTML is not a bad *web page authoring language* if one cares only about visible web pages. (I've never engaged in "browser writing".) But if one begins to care about web page appearance on paper and smart robots looking for information, editing HTML by hand becomes tedious. I know. I've been doing it since early 1994, and I've become very tired of the verbosity, much less the task of double authoring both HTML and LaTeX so that I can get printed versions that suit me. HTML is not a good single source authoring language for multiple targets. : > It is more or less correct to view every XML language as also an : > SGML language. Therefore, many SGML languages are also not good : > for authors. However, some are not too bad. : "more or less"? XML is a _strict_ subset of SGML! For one thing a document type definition is optional with XML but required with SGML (although it is not required to be a separate file -- the whole thing can be merged). The idea is (did they revise it?) that one can make up a tag set, write a style sheet for that tag set and ship it to the web. (Of course, if you don't have a hidden DTD, you may get into trouble.) Hmmm... Isn't "
" formally incorrect syntax under SGML? (My 1996 "nsgmls" won't accept it.) With SHORTTAG enabled "
Hello everyone./" is a complete paragraph since the '/' closes the innermost open element, so '/' must be treated, for safety, as special although not every instance is markup. Alas, we digress. Sorry to be so compulsive. -- Bill 6-Nov-1998 14:22:45-GMT,2555;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA03065 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 07:22:37 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA17983; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 14:52:02 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407484 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 14:51:49 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA17947 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 14:51:47 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id NAA08231; hop 0; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 13:43:28 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Fri, 6 Nov 1998 13:51:14 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199811051318.OAA24936@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de> Message-ID: <13890.63471.180486.718965@srahtz> Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 13:21:51 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Hans Aberg writes: > At 13:45 +0000 1998/11/05, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > >even wrt HTML, history is not on your side. millions and millions of > >people write HTML happily every day, a tiny proportion write > >LaTeX. what does that suggest? > > Perhaps a LaTeX environment able to process HTML syntax. now I *know* you need to see a Counsellor Troy :-} > By the way, how > do you know that they write HTML _happily_? :-) i've watched them do it sebastian 6-Nov-1998 14:29:42-GMT,2300;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA03173 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 07:29:40 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA18983; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 15:04:09 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407506 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 15:04:07 +0100 Received: from nag.co.uk (openmath.nag.co.uk [192.156.217.16]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA18963 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 15:04:05 +0100 (MET) Received: (from davidc@localhost) by nag.co.uk (AIX4.2/UCB 8.7/8.7) id OAA19608; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 14:03:33 GMT References: <199811061351.IAA01838@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Message-ID: <199811061403.OAA19608@nag.co.uk> Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 14:03:33 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: David Carlisle Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811061351.IAA01838@hilbert.math.albany.edu> (hammond@CSC.ALBANY.EDU) I'll get ticked off by Chris for being seriously off topic but... > Hmmm... Isn't "
" formally incorrect syntax under SGML? No. As long as you give your sgml parser an SGML declaration for XML then this is legal. You can either specify it via a trick (something with NET that I forget) or as done in current sp releases to assume the `WEB' TG proposed extensions to SGML which make a new syntactic construct to support this in a more natural way. relavent bit of the xml.dcl that I have (from jade this one, I think) DELIM GENERAL SGMLREF HCRO "&#x" -- 38 is the number for ampersand -- NESTC "/" NET ">" PIC "?>" SHORTREF NONE David 6-Nov-1998 15:20:42-GMT,2746;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA04068 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 08:20:40 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA23053; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 15:51:48 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407556 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 15:51:44 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA23024 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 15:51:42 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id OAA11377; hop 0; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 14:43:32 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Fri, 6 Nov 1998 14:51:15 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199811061351.IAA01838@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Message-ID: <13891.2538.874709.669285@srahtz> Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 14:38:34 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811061351.IAA01838@hilbert.math.albany.edu> William F. Hammond writes: > A good XML could be a good authoring language if one doesn't mind > being required always to use every element tag. For example, in good lord, do you type your XML _by hand_? thats what editors are for, to help you insert end tags > HTML is not a good single source authoring language for multiple > targets. strangely, this was not its desgn aim > For one thing a document type definition is optional with XML but > required with SGML (although it is not required to be a separate file XML is a subset of SGML, vis-a-vis the markup. the usage is not the same. > Hmmm... Isn't "
" formally incorrect syntax under SGML? (My 1996 you need the recent TC to SGML to be implemented Sebastian 6-Nov-1998 16:14:58-GMT,4495;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA05211 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 09:14:43 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA27285; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 16:39:29 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407584 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 16:39:27 +0100 Received: from ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.2]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA27267 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 16:39:16 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 16:38:03 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 16:37:37 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 16:37:15 +0100 X400-Received: by mta open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 16:37:14 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN2 in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 16:37:49 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13891.4807.589343.543730@fell.o] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: Quotes an... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <199811061351.IAA01838@hilbert.math.albany.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13891.4807.589343.543730@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 16:37:49 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811061403.OAA19608@nag.co.uk> David Carlisle wrote -- > I'll get ticked off by Chris for being seriously off topic but... Tick, tick!! My feeling is that yes, the details of *ML sybtax are not relevant, but the topic of "authoring structured documents" is pertinent. I think, judging by his later remarks, that perhaps Sebastian misled me when he wrote: > millions and millions of > people write HTML happily every day, I though he meant "by hand" but I susepct he means they use authoting tools that produce HTML. A very diferent meaning of "write" as well as of "is"?? > a tiny proportion write > LaTeX. what does that suggest? 1. That a lot more applications van be used as authoring tools for HTML. 2. That nearly all documents at present prepared for wweb publication can be adequately desribed in HTML. Of ocurse, there is a dinosaur-and-egg set-up here: people may really want to produce large quantities of easily browsable, well-designed, complex documents for we publishing but cannot do so whilst they are constarined by many factors to using HTML. This is pertinent since many of the detailed contributions seem to me to imply that people both do and will and should produce LaTeX by hand-coding. I do not think that they should; I am sure that they no longer need to do so. Thus I feel that whatever document-level syntaxes(sp??) a future version of LaTeX will read, they should be designed to clearly represent the full complexity of the documant and its structure, not to be easily hand-codable. Of course, backward-compatibility needs to be sensible dealt with but we do not need to be compatible at the authoring-tools level since we can assume that old authoring methods will never need to be used again. Maybe a controverial paragraph, but something that needs discussion and resolution. I hope that Frank made clear the imprtance of your "homework": (my trouble is that, as a teacher, the "importance of homewrok" has never been questionable:-) and that you can see that it is relevant, at least somewhat, to the above. chris 6-Nov-1998 16:36:16-GMT,3097;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA05742 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 09:35:39 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA29867; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 17:11:57 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407613 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 17:11:55 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA29857 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 17:11:53 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id QAA15812; hop 0; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 16:03:42 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Fri, 6 Nov 1998 16:11:03 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199811061351.IAA01838@hilbert.math.albany.edu> <13891.4807.589343.543730@fell.open.ac.uk> Message-ID: <13891.7984.348125.114160@srahtz> Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 16:09:20 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13891.4807.589343.543730@fell.open.ac.uk> Chris Rowley writes: > > millions and millions of > > people write HTML happily every day, > > I though he meant "by hand" but I susepct he means they use authoting > tools that produce HTML. A very diferent meaning of "write" as well as i think the evidence is that commonest ways to create HTML pages are people using "vi" and "notepad". but i cant quote any sources for that > 2. That nearly all documents at present prepared for wweb publication > can be adequately desribed in HTML. good point > to imply that people both do and will and should produce LaTeX by > hand-coding. I do not think that they should; I am sure that they no > longer need to do so. Chris, i had no idea you been to Damascus! > Thus I feel that whatever document-level syntaxes(sp??) a future > version of LaTeX will read, they should be designed to clearly > represent the full complexity of the documant and its structure, not > to be easily hand-codable. Of course, backward-compatibility needs to hurrah. i agree, 100% Sebastian 6-Nov-1998 16:48:36-GMT,3173;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA06030 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 09:48:30 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA00686; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 17:20:41 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407622 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 17:20:39 +0100 Received: from ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.2]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA00672 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 17:20:36 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 17:20:25 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 17:20:05 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 17:19:44 +0100 X400-Received: by mta open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 17:19:43 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN2 in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 17:20:17 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13891.8185.161829.829030@fell.o] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: Quotes an... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <199811061351.IAA01838@hilbert.math.albany.edu>, <13891.7984.348125.114160@srahtz> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13891.8185.161829.829030@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 17:20:17 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13891.7984.348125.114160@srahtz> Sebastian > i think the evidence is that commonest ways to create HTML pages are > people using "vi" and "notepad". but i cant quote any sources for that Aaagh!! You really did mean by hand: well more fools them is all I can say. The only people i have even heard of doing that also create LaTeX that way, something I have not done for many years, excpet out of necessity when in far-off parts of the world (like Mainz:-). Although even I have to admit to making the occasional tweek to some html in notepad (but only because I do not know how to configure IE to dump me into a proper editor). > hurrah. i agree, 100% shurely shomething wrong, ed??:-) chris 6-Nov-1998 17:15:56-GMT,6474;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA06607 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 10:15:55 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA02985; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 17:49:28 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407652 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 17:49:25 +0100 Received: from na.uni-tuebingen.de (root@na.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de [134.2.161.64]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA02958 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 17:49:22 +0100 (MET) Received: from na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de (na6 [134.2.161.170]) by na.uni-tuebingen.de (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA05244 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 17:49:18 +0100 (MET) Received: (from oliver@localhost) by na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) id RAA18880; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 17:49:17 +0100 (MET) X-Authentication-Warning: na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de: oliver set sender to oliver@na.uni-tuebingen.de using -f Message-ID: <199811061649.RAA18880@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 17:49:17 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Marcel Oliver Subject: pattern matching in LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Back to the "Quotes and punctuation" problem: So the main problem in TeX which makes pattern matching/lookahead/parsing very difficult in TeX is that the parsing routine cannot know into what kind of stuff future tokens expand without literally expanding the whole document. Would a two-tier expansion mechanism (to be implemented as an extension to TeX-the program) help? I am thinking along these lines: Both macro names and each of their arguments would get one of the attributes TRANSPARENT (T) or OBLIQUE (O). One could then have a first-tier expansion (T-expansion, say) in which only those macros and arguments which have the T feature are expanded. The result could then be processed with traditional methods (regular expression matching, tansformation patterns etc.) before final expansion of the O-macros takes place. Below I indicate the expansion categories for a few standard LaTeX macros in a sort of Pascal like fashion, i.e., the first category refers to the macro itself, the others to the arguments: TRANSPARENT \ref{TRANSPARENT} OBLIQUE \section[OBLIQUE]{TRANSPARENT} OBLIQUE \label{OBLIQUE} OBLIQUE \newcounter{OBLIQUE}[OBLIQUE] OBLIQUE \flushbottom OBLIQUE \begin{tabular}[OBLIQUE] TRANSPARENT \end{tabular} OBLIQUE \makebox(OBLIQUE,OBLIQUE)[OBLIQUE]{TRANSPARENT} TRANSPARENT \cite{TRANSPARENT} OBLIQUE \bibitem[OBLIQUE,OBLIQUE] OBLIQUE \emph{TRANSPARENT} OBLIQUE \itshape TRANSPARENT \newcommand{OBLIQUE}[OBLIQUE][OBLIQUE]{OBLIQUE} Assume, e.g., that the \ref command is defined to typset boldface, and a command \last has been defined which expands into "last". Let's T-expand the line Theorem \ref{fermat} was his \emph{\last}. Since \ref is TRANSPARENT, it expands, while \emph is OBLIQUE, but has a TRANSPARENT argument, which expands. So the result may look like Theorem \textbf{1.3} was his \emph{last}. A pattern matcher could now e.g. ignore all OBLIQUE tokens in this text, and thus match on "his last". How will this help with the quote problem? The text \newTcommand{\story}[T]{There was a man, who said, , and he began: <#1>} \story{\story{\story{\ldots}}}} will T-expand into There was a man, who said, , and he began: , and he began: , and he began: <\ldots>>> I assume that < and > are active characters of category OBLIQUE, so they do not expand at this stage. When full expansion takes place, the > can do a lookahead and, e.g., detect the following > from which it can determine optimal spacing (keeping track of the nesting level should be easy, I guess). The problem with braces (e.g. when a font change takes place) does seem linked to the particular way that \futurelet works, but I don't see how this poses a fundamental problem with a lookahead-type strategy. Two comments regarding other points that came up in the discussion: While I think that this quote problem might be useful to illustrate general parsing problems, I don't think it is reasonable to expect any author to write \quote{Quoted text}, or to make super smart decisions about the placement of punctuation. Any author who cares will do it right, and those who don't care won't want to write \quote, anyway. Related to this: Yes, I do believe that the primary goal of LaTeX should be to provide a human readable direct input typesetting language. If the abstract structure of the document can be completely specified, the better, but it seems that these two goals may be ultimately incompatible. I really know SGML/XML (Sebastian, what do you hope to get out of the LaTeX3 project that you think you cannot get out of SGML?), but I seem to understand that SGML is well suited to provide complete logical markup. So why re-do something that already exists and supposedly works well? Moreover, especially when typing Mathematics, complete logical mark-up is way beyond what most authors need in practice. If I need a tool which is optimized w.r.t. typsetting, I use LaTeX. I don't care whether the mark-up is sloppy in certain places---it is not important to me whether I can re-use the input in more structured applications. An example: for humans it makes perfect sense to use \ldots in a formula, but I could not even expect a symbolic system like Mathematica to understand what I mean. If my requirements go beyond publishing, my primary tools are different (although it would help if they could export to LaTeX when it comes to publishing), but then I don't mind the extra effort required. Marcel 6-Nov-1998 17:49:43-GMT,2643;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA07451 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 10:49:32 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA04714; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 18:13:11 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407710 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 18:13:09 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id SAA04700 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 18:13:03 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.120] (sl07.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.27]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id SAA16110 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 18:13:01 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <199811051318.OAA24936@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 18:09:26 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13890.63471.180486.718965@srahtz> At 13:21 +0000 1998/11/06, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > > Perhaps a LaTeX environment able to process HTML syntax. >now I *know* you need to see a Counsellor Troy :-} My guess is that you have consulted her too much already. Do you SGML fans think you are flying at warp five? :-) >millions and millions of >people write HTML happily every day, a tiny proportion write >LaTeX. ... > > By the way, how > > do you know that they write HTML _happily_? :-) >i've watched them do it Are we to believe that you watch "millions and millions of people every day"? Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 6-Nov-1998 18:24:05-GMT,2832;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA08526 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 11:23:50 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA07142; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 18:57:31 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407723 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 18:57:29 +0100 Received: from ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.2]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id SAA07127 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 18:57:26 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 18:57:22 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 18:56:33 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 18:56:12 +0100 X400-Received: by mta open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 18:56:11 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 18:57:15 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13891.14075.629675.797638@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: Mark-up l... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <199811051318.OAA24936@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13891.14075.629675.797638@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 18:57:15 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: Mark-up languages To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Robin > i continue to believe that there remains a future for a latex-like > language, It would be useful to know what uses you, and others, see for such a language in a world where XML fulfills what its proponents claim for it (and some things they maybe do not claim?). Note: I refer to the LaTeX langauge, not to its processing and typestting abilities. chris 6-Nov-1998 18:40:57-GMT,3563;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA08971 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 11:40:51 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA07913; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:10:07 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407742 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:10:05 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA07895 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:10:03 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.120] (sl88.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.114]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id TAA19696 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:09:45 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:09:05 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: pattern matching in LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811061649.RAA18880@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> At 17:49 +0100 1998/11/06, Marcel Oliver wrote: >Back to the "Quotes and punctuation" problem: So the main problem in >TeX which makes pattern matching/lookahead/parsing very difficult in >TeX is that the parsing routine cannot know into what kind of stuff >future tokens expand without literally expanding the whole document. The whole problem is more complicated, because it is not only a question of expansion, but also when things should be expanded: Sometimes immediately, sometimes later. The correct way around this would be to define a stricter input syntax which separates the elements authoring semantics, typesetting style elements and typesetting fine-tuning, but there is no way to enforce such a syntax in TeX. If one should avoid the long discussions in the thread "Quotes and punctuation" about language syntax, a way would be to define the semantic features one wants and then add a variations of programs like Lex and Yacc. -- One can then define syntactic modules for different authoring purposes. >..An example: for humans it makes >perfect sense to use \ldots in a formula, but I could not even expect >a symbolic system like Mathematica to understand what I mean. If my >requirements go beyond publishing, my primary tools are different >(although it would help if they could export to LaTeX when it comes to >publishing), but then I don't mind the extra effort required. A language like Haskell uses an ellipsis to indicate infinite lists. So one should expect every mathematical symbol used semantically way to eventually find its way into computers which knows how to manipulate it logically. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 6-Nov-1998 18:53:30-GMT,2554;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA09306 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 11:53:24 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA08597; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:23:41 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407755 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:23:39 +0100 Received: from sarah.albany.edu (sarah.albany.edu [169.226.1.103]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA08579 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:23:33 +0100 (MET) Received: from fenris.math.albany.edu (fenris.math.albany.edu [169.226.23.39]) by sarah.albany.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA26521 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 13:23:29 -0500 (EST) Received: (from mark@localhost) by fenris.math.albany.edu (8.8.4/8.8.3) id NAA14221 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 13:23:28 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] Content-Type: text Message-ID: <199811061823.NAA14221@fenris.math.albany.edu> Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 13:23:27 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Mark Steinberger Subject: Re: Mark-up languages To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13891.14075.629675.797638@fell.open.ac.uk> from "Chris Rowley" at Nov 6, 98 06:57:15 pm > > i continue to believe that there remains a future for a latex-like > > language, > > It would be useful to know what uses you, and others, see for such a > language in a world where XML fulfills what its proponents claim for > it (and some things they maybe do not claim?). But you can't write MathML, and XML in general has no macros, correct? It's horrible to contemplate writing in a language without macros. It's important to be able to write in a language that 1. has macros 2. conveys the semantic information needed for the target language. Latex itself falls short of 2, but comes closer than anything else I know. Do you know a better alternative? --Mark 6-Nov-1998 18:55:47-GMT,2906;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA09403 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 11:55:13 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA09037; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:32:15 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407773 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:32:13 +0100 Received: from na.uni-tuebingen.de (root@na.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de [134.2.161.64]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA09018 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:32:11 +0100 (MET) Received: from na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de (na6 [134.2.161.170]) by na.uni-tuebingen.de (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA05369 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:32:06 +0100 (MET) Received: from na.uni-tuebingen.de (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA18955 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:32:04 +0100 (MET) X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (X11; I; SunOS 5.6 sun4m) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <364340A4.3A5CE73C@na.uni-tuebingen.de> Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:32:04 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Marcel Oliver Subject: Re: pattern matching in LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Hans Aberg wrote: > The whole problem is more complicated, because it is not only a question > of expansion, but also when things should be expanded: Sometimes > immediately, sometimes later. The correct way around this would be to > define a stricter input syntax which separates the elements authoring > semantics, typesetting style elements and typesetting fine-tuning, but This is basically what I was thinking of. I couln't find an argument for needing more than 2 tiers in the expansion process, but what I was describing is certainly generalizable. So precisely why do you think one needs to distinguish "authoring semantics", "typesetting style" and "fine-tuning"? > there is no way to enforce such a syntax in TeX. This is clear. Question: how difficult would it be to extend TeX to allow for dual/multiple tier expansion? What are the draw-backs? Marcel 6-Nov-1998 18:58:04-GMT,3144;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA09457 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 11:57:58 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA09094; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:33:10 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407780 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:33:08 +0100 Received: from ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.2]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA09083 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:33:05 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:33:00 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:32:51 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:32:30 +0100 X400-Received: by mta open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:32:29 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:32:56 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13891.16156.398988.272335@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: Mark-up l... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <13891.14075.629675.797638@fell.open.ac.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13891.16156.398988.272335@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:32:56 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: Mark-up languages To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811061823.NAA14221@fenris.math.albany.edu> Mark Steinberger wrote -- > It's important to be able to write in a language that > > 1. has macros > I am probably misunderstanding horribly but it seems that this is the major thing you want. Standard TeX notation may or may not be an excellent language for this purpose but I am sure that using LaTeX simply to do the macro expansion is not a good idea. > 2. conveys the semantic information needed for the target language. After expansion of the macros, I assume? > > Latex itself falls short of 2, but comes closer than anything else I > know. Do you know a better alternative? What typically is the "target labgauge"; and what might it be in the future? chris 6-Nov-1998 19:05:01-GMT,1890;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA09606 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 12:04:47 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA08854; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:28:43 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407762 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:28:41 +0100 Received: from sarah.albany.edu (sarah.albany.edu [169.226.1.103]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA08837 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:28:37 +0100 (MET) Received: from hilbert.math.albany.edu (hilbert.math.albany.edu [169.226.23.52]) by sarah.albany.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA27022 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 13:28:34 -0500 (EST) Received: (from hammond@localhost) by hilbert.math.albany.edu (8.8.4/8.8.3) id NAA05446 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 13:28:33 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <199811061828.NAA05446@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 13:28:33 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "William F. Hammond" Subject: Re: Mark-up languages To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Mark -- Your macros are done either with something like M4 or with an early-on XML-to-XML. (I would say SGML-to-SGML.) -- Bill 6-Nov-1998 19:16:58-GMT,2752;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA09880 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 12:16:33 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA09978; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:51:12 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407809 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:51:10 +0100 Received: from ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.1]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA09966 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:51:08 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:51:03 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:50:54 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:50:33 +0100 X400-Received: by mta open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:50:32 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:50:57 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13891.17532.169854.302662@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: pattern m... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13891.17532.169854.302662@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:50:57 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: pattern matching in LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <364340A4.3A5CE73C@na.uni-tuebingen.de> Marcel Oliver wrote -- > Question: how difficult would it be to extend TeX to > allow for dual/multiple tier expansion? What are the draw-backs? This sounds like a useful question to me. But I would extend it to ask whether all these processes should be done by expansion tiers? chris 6-Nov-1998 19:18:24-GMT,2652;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA09912 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 12:18:22 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA10226; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:55:59 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407821 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:55:57 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA10207 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:55:54 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.120] (sl56.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.76]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id TAA22144 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:55:53 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <13891.14075.629675.797638@fell.open.ac.uk> from "Chris Rowley" at Nov 6, 98 06:57:15 pm Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:55:30 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: Mark-up languages To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811061823.NAA14221@fenris.math.albany.edu> At 13:23 -0500 1998/11/06, Mark Steinberger wrote: >It's important to be able to write in a language that > > 1. has macros > > 2. conveys the semantic information needed for the target language. If one should be able to use shorthand notation and abbreviations semantically correct, then one should not use macros at all: One should define a correct language parsing using LeX/Yacc style programs. TeX avoids all this stuff because at the time it probably seemed difficult to Knuth; using macros is the "quick and dirty" approach, the specialty of Knuth. But adding a more sophisticated understanding of syntaxes is what is needed. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 6-Nov-1998 19:21:00-GMT,2711;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA09976 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 12:20:58 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA10249; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:56:05 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407825 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:56:03 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA10212 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:55:56 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.120] (sl56.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.76]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id TAA22140 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:55:50 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 19:55:39 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: pattern matching in LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <364340A4.3A5CE73C@na.uni-tuebingen.de> At 19:32 +0100 1998/11/06, Marcel Oliver wrote: >Question: how difficult would it be to extend TeX to >allow for dual/multiple tier expansion? What are the draw-backs? (I leave to somebody else more qualified to respond to your particular idea.) For the general problems with TeX one must rely on more general mechanisms to solve them. >So precisely why do you think >one needs to distinguish "authoring semantics", "typesetting style" and >"fine-tuning"? It depends on how far one wants to go: On the more general side, one would work through the different movements with TeX/LaTeX, SGML, etc, isolate the semantic components, define runtime object which can be used by the Lex/Yacc parts to define a local syntactic module. A rather major undertaking. :-) Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 6-Nov-1998 19:30:11-GMT,2685;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA10169 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 12:30:04 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id UAA11789; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 20:05:00 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407842 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 20:04:58 +0100 Received: from ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.2]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id UAA11777 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 20:04:54 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 20:04:48 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 20:04:33 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 20:04:10 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 20:04:39 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13891.18187.811499.419988@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: pattern m... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: , MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13891.18187.811499.419988@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 20:04:39 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: pattern matching in LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Hans Aberg wrote -- > A rather major undertaking. :-) True, but I hope the :-) does not imply that it is laughable to attempt it, given suitable resources. It seems to me to be an important part of what needs to be done in order to produce a good document processing system. chris 6-Nov-1998 23:16:54-GMT,2880;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id QAA15534 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 16:16:53 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id XAA23162; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 23:53:27 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407909 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 23:53:24 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id XAA23152 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 23:53:22 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.71] (sl51.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.71]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id XAA02751 for ; Fri, 6 Nov 1998 23:52:57 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: , Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 23:52:04 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: pattern matching in LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13891.18187.811499.419988@fell.open.ac.uk> At 20:04 +0100 1998/11/06, Chris Rowley wrote: >...I hope the :-) does not imply that it is laughable... The symbol ":-)" means "please do not be offended by this; take this with a smile". :-) It was the only such smiley symbol once formally defined for Internet use, even a prgram I have provides the following 24 symbols: :-) smile :-} grin :-D laughing :-x kiss, kiss :-* Oops! :-o Oh, no! :-I puzzled :-, Hmmmmm :-C unbelievable :-( frown :-c unhappy :-V shout ;-) wink :-] smirk :-B drooling :-X wet kiss :^D Great! :-? licking lips :-\ undecided |-) asleep 8-) wide-eyed :-< mad :-[ pouting |-{ Good grief! Are these symbols part of some LaTeX package? (I must link this back to the discussions of this list. :-) ) Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 7-Nov-1998 15:03:33-GMT,3661;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA01395 for ; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 08:03:32 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA14059; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 15:42:18 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407105 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 15:42:16 +0100 Received: from ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.2]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA14047 for ; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 15:42:14 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 15:42:09 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 15:42:04 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 15:41:41 +0100 X400-Received: by mta open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 15:41:40 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN2 in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 15:42:05 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13892.23185.147997.613395@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: Quotes an... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <199811051649.LAA20522@hilbert.math.albany.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13892.23185.147997.613395@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Sat, 7 Nov 1998 15:42:05 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811051649.LAA20522@hilbert.math.albany.edu> William F. Hammond wrote -- > > SGML is all about fast staged processing. It is not very much about > getting on to paper. That sounds like a reasonable summary of reality, if not theoretically true. > > There is a very lucrative and apparently profitable industry out there > lurking behind closed doors. ????? Doing what exactly? Or are the doors too firmly closed to see? > > I suggest that individuals should think in terms of multiple SGML > transformations as pre-processing for LaTeX. Some industrial strength > publishers *may* want to think in terms of multiple SGML transformations > as pre-processing to TeX directly. That is certainly an interesting question in general: staright to TeX vs via LaTeX. Limited expereince suggests that some mixture may be needed; but a lot depends on how and where the formatting is specified. > > I am wary of messing with Knuth's TeX. Most everyone was until the last few years but some psychological barrier has since been broken and there are now several projects doing very good work in this area. Also, Knuth himself always wanted people to mess with it, as long as the result is clearly distinguished from his TeX. chris 7-Nov-1998 15:11:34-GMT,2889;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA01553 for ; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 08:11:33 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA14361; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 15:50:29 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407114 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 15:50:27 +0100 Received: from ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.1]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA14351 for ; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 15:50:26 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 15:50:19 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 15:50:12 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 15:49:50 +0100 X400-Received: by mta open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 15:49:49 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN2 in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 15:50:15 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13892.23868.527851.686871@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: Quotes an... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <01J3B26EN3KY00049X@ALPHA.NTP.SPRINGER.DE> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13892.23868.527851.686871@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Sat, 7 Nov 1998 15:50:15 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <01J3B26EN3KY00049X@ALPHA.NTP.SPRINGER.DE> Joerg Knappen wrote -- > > Too long commands encourage the authors to come up with their own, incompatible > abbreviations. It makes processing LaTeX documents on a large scale more > difficult. I sympathise with this problem but I do not think that it can or should be solved by allowing LaTeX syntax to be as quirky as Knuth's, thus compromising essential qualities of a sophisticated document formatting system. chris 7-Nov-1998 16:38:39-GMT,5857;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA02940 for ; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 09:38:38 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA17059; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 17:17:05 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407144 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 17:17:04 +0100 Received: from sarah.albany.edu (sarah.albany.edu [169.226.1.103]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA17048 for ; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 17:17:01 +0100 (MET) Received: from hilbert.math.albany.edu (hilbert.math.albany.edu [169.226.23.52]) by sarah.albany.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA12844; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 11:16:46 -0500 (EST) Received: (from hammond@localhost) by hilbert.math.albany.edu (8.8.4/8.8.3) id LAA15872; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 11:16:45 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <199811071616.LAA15872@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Date: Sat, 7 Nov 1998 11:16:45 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "William F. Hammond" Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L On Sat, 7 Nov 1998 15:42:05 +0100 Chris Rowley wrote to LATEX-L : William F. Hammond wrote -- : : > : > SGML is all about fast staged processing. It is not very much about : > getting on to paper. : : That sounds like a reasonable summary of reality, if not theoretically : true. Well, maybe. But consider the fussy stuff about "look-ahead" involved in DTD construction. (That slur aside, it's mainly a pain for DTD construction, not for the use of SGML languages.) Qualification: Each individual SGML-to-SGML should be fast. Of course, if you compose them, the times add (or worse, depending on swapping). Parser output is a nice linear stream. My impression is that processors are NOT expected to seek but just to make one pass through it. (Then I believe that some processors construct the whole thing in memory as a tree.) I've been using Megginson's sgmlspl/sgmlspm (stabilized Dec. '95), which is event driven and, moreover, linear except for things that I choose to remember along the way (global variables for subsequent branching) and pieces of document (whole SGML elements) that I may push into temporary abeyance while descending subtrees. The biggest thing that I think sensible to so push is a paragraph. Of course, SGMLSPM has a cross-reference facility just as LaTeX does and if that is exercised by a document, then a complete second pass using an auxiliary file, as with LaTeX, is required. All one needs to do is write little functions in Perl. You don't need to be lisp-enabled. And some of those functions are very easy. When I'm ready to write an XML DTD that is nearly isomorphic to my SGML DTD for "article", the SGML-to-XML transformation that I use to make the type of *archival* document that I think the LANL preprint site should use is going to be *very* linear. : > There is a very lucrative and apparently profitable industry out there : > lurking behind closed doors. : : ????? Doing what exactly? Or are the doors too firmly closed to see? If you listen to the UseNet newsgroup "comp.text.sgml" long enough, you will see it. Yes, the doors are locked. In fact, just to get a copy of the definition of SGML from the ISO costs a substantial sum. (Better to buy Charles Goldfarb's _SGML Handbook_.) (But I expect that some young Ph.D.'s in math, rather than in computer science, will turn out to be leaders in this growing industry, and I find that pleasing to contemplate.) : > I suggest that individuals should think in terms of multiple SGML : > transformations as pre-processing for LaTeX. Some industrial strength : > publishers *may* want to think in terms of multiple SGML transformations : > as pre-processing to TeX directly. : : That is certainly an interesting question in general: staright to TeX : vs via LaTeX. : : Limited expereince suggests that some mixture may be needed; but : a lot depends on how and where the formatting is specified. Comments: 1. Megginson's sgmlspl/sgmlspm comes with docs that may be used to test the package. The two enclosed demo processors are: (a) DocBook to LaTeX (b) DocBook to HTML 2. I think that for most individuals and most academic departments processing to LaTeX to get to paper is the most sensible choice. 3. I am preparing demo processors from my DTD to (a) LaTeX and (b) HTML and eventually maybe to other things but I am much too lazy to code for straight TeX myself. It might be pleasant for those who have been accustomed to writing papers in plain TeX. 4. I would like to see someone who is fluent in Texinfo volunteer to code from my "article" dtd -- or something close to it -- to Texinfo. Along the way it should then become obvious how to give math full implementation there. Note in this regard, that GNU-emacs window displays are becoming progressively more useful in this regard. And as most vt100's are not actual hardware, those windows, which are fixed font displays with algorithmic "styling", could begin to admit a public standard for change of cursor position and more inter-line space in order to accommodate superscripts and subscripts, maybe also reasonable but crude fractions in displays. -- Bill 7-Nov-1998 21:22:59-GMT,3099;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id OAA08037 for ; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 14:22:53 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id WAA25446; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 22:10:59 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407248 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 22:10:58 +0100 Received: from ROSE.IPM.AC.IR (vax.ipm.ac.ir [194.225.70.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id WAA25429 for ; Sat, 7 Nov 1998 22:10:31 +0100 (MET) Received: by ROSE.IPM.AC.IR (MX V4.1 VAX) id 20; Sun, 08 Nov 1998 00:39:12 +0330 Message-ID: <009CEE38.AA220D80.20@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1998 00:39:10 +0330 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Roozbeh Pournader Subject: Re: Quotes, HTML, and FrontPage To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Dear friends, Being an audience a big time, I have found that this is indeed a very funny mailing list (Seeing personal heros like frank, chris, sebastian, ... joking, blaming each other, etc. :^) But back to main problem, I can't think of what you are doing. I think this SGML guideline is a very bad fall. Is it that way there, or your people are really using emacs for HTML?! Here in our university, except TeXies, noone thinks of writing it by hand. They are using things like FrontPage, and at best chance Netscape Composer. I can't resist living in a world in which people use icrosoft Garbage 2000' for writing TeX documents. (Remember that journal's April joke, Knuth and Microsoft?) I am really thinking about forgetting all efforts I have had to widen the use of TeX and stuff in this part of the world, if LaTeX is going this way, to get converted to a typesetting engine used by some What You See Is All You've Got system. (What about Microsft Word using the LaTeX engine?) Sorry for being rude, but where are you going guys? Ok, Knuth liked the quick and dirty way, but I don't like saying

Client information: some stuff

(quoted from HTML4.0 description from W3C) which is more dirty. Do you? (and remained a TeXie?) Do you see it user friendly and readable? Like LaTeX code? Have you thought about mass users, about poor students preparing their thesis, poor professors trying to concentrate on DIV and SPAN? I love generic markup, but to what price? One's soul? ;) Sorry for duckspeak, perhaps a Knuth's fan is a stranger here in TeXsoc :) --Roozbeh Pournader, Sharif Univ. of Tech., Tehran, IRAN. 9-Nov-1998 10:42:15-GMT,2756;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id DAA16481 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 03:42:08 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id LAA28790; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 11:26:18 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407254 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 11:26:16 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA28507 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 11:24:04 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id KAA19322; hop 0; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 10:16:05 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Mon, 9 Nov 1998 10:23:55 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199811071616.LAA15872@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Message-ID: <13894.49030.975919.435948@srahtz> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 10:10:14 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811071616.LAA15872@hilbert.math.albany.edu> William F. Hammond writes: > Parser output is a nice linear stream. My impression is that > processors are NOT expected to seek but just to make one pass through it. > (Then I believe that some processors construct the whole thing in > memory as a tree.) its quite common to use a tree-based approach. DSSSL does this, highly recommended!!! > 1. Megginson's sgmlspl/sgmlspm comes with docs that may be used to > test the package. The two enclosed demo processors are: > > (a) DocBook to LaTeX > (b) DocBook to HTML > you probably want to look at Norm Walsh's DocBook DSSSL specifications, if this area interests you. they go way beyond what Megginson did. they cover Docbook -> HTML, and Docbook -> TeX/RTF/MIF. Sebastan 9-Nov-1998 10:42:30-GMT,2947;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id DAA16484 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 03:42:12 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id LAA28407; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 11:23:24 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407228 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 11:23:22 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA28377 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 11:23:15 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id KAA19258; hop 0; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 10:15:12 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Mon, 9 Nov 1998 10:22:58 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <13891.14075.629675.797638@fell.open.ac.uk> <199811061823.NAA14221@fenris.math.albany.edu> Message-ID: <13894.46970.367009.733502@srahtz> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 09:35:54 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: Mark-up languages To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811061823.NAA14221@fenris.math.albany.edu> Mark Steinberger writes: > > But you can't write MathML as i said before, thats what structured editors are for > and XML in general has no macros, correct? > > It's horrible to contemplate writing in a language without macros. > maybe you should expand on this. i find myself using macros *less* in documents these days, as i appreciate their disadvantages. of course i use short cuts (\def\X{this thing i am writing about}), but more complex stuff I delegate to the style file, and add another element to the DTD (as it were). as an example, I am in the middle of a book; we don't write \textsf(Perl)\index{Perl}, we write (of course) \PLanguage{Perl}. if that was in XML, I'd write Perl, and have it in a customization layer in the DTD [1]. Sebastian [1] your DTD has no customization possibility? then argue it with the designer, not the XML/SGML concept. 9-Nov-1998 10:44:42-GMT,3467;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id DAA16516 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 03:44:27 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id LAA28827; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 11:26:27 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407258 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 11:26:22 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA28525 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 11:24:12 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id KAA19328; hop 0; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 10:16:12 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Mon, 9 Nov 1998 10:23:59 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <009CEE38.AA220D80.20@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> Message-ID: <13894.49404.24471.552063@srahtz> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 10:16:28 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: Quotes, HTML, and FrontPage To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <009CEE38.AA220D80.20@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> Roozbeh Pournader writes: > thinking about forgetting all efforts I have had to widen the > use of TeX and stuff in this part of the world, if LaTeX > is going this way, to get converted to a typesetting engine > used by some What You See Is All You've Got system. contradictory, surely? TeX's power should replace the WYSIAYG stuff. >
>

Client information: > some stuff

> (quoted from HTML4.0 description from W3C) > > which is more dirty. Do you? (and remained a TeXie?) Do you see it > user friendly and readable? Like LaTeX code? > why dont you write some stuff and process it with a DSSSL or XSL style sheet, which could target the screen, paper (using TeX) or an audio renderer? > Sorry for duckspeak, perhaps a Knuth's fan is a stranger here in TeXsoc :) > TeX is a typesetting engine, pretty damn good it is too. i want to use it, does most of what i want. i don't care what its input is, because I dont want to write it, i want a computer to write it for me, based on my abstract text, and my stylesheet. Lamport LaTeX is a system that does that for me, and very well it has served me, but now i want better. so i turn to XML and its style sheets, to replace *Lamport LaTeX*. Knuth's TeX itself stays underneath, untouched as it always was. what *LaTeX 3* might do as an intermediate layer is less clear. Sebastian 9-Nov-1998 10:44:53-GMT,2388;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id DAA16522 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 03:44:52 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id LAA28700; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 11:25:54 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407232 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 11:25:52 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA28400 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 11:23:23 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id KAA19255; hop 0; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 10:15:11 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Mon, 9 Nov 1998 10:22:54 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199811051318.OAA24936@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de> Message-ID: <13894.46524.671044.810596@srahtz> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 09:28:28 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Hans Aberg writes: > Are we to believe that you watch "millions and >millions of people every day"? yes. some people get their kicks from oral sex with students, others of us stand behind people and watch them type angle brackets. Sebastian 9-Nov-1998 10:45:34-GMT,2974;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id DAA16526 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 03:45:28 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id LAA28731; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 11:26:04 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407241 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 11:26:01 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA28436 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 11:23:30 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id KAA19238; hop 0; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 10:14:54 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Mon, 9 Nov 1998 10:22:43 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199811061649.RAA18880@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> Message-ID: <13894.46384.268699.379786@srahtz> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 09:26:08 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: pattern matching in LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811061649.RAA18880@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> > ultimately incompatible. I really know SGML/XML (Sebastian, what do > you hope to get out of the LaTeX3 project that you think you cannot > get out of SGML?), I want a reliable batch-oriented page makeup system, no more, no less. I want to store my text in XML, and have LaTeX produce beautiful pages when I give it a style sheet > already exists and supposedly works well? Moreover, especially when > typing Mathematics, complete logical mark-up is way beyond what most > authors need in practice. today, yes. but they are crippling themselves by saving all their hard work in a presentation format, IMHO. > If my requirements go beyond publishing, my primary tools are > different (although it would help if they could export to LaTeX > when it comes to publishing), but then I don't mind the extra > effort required. with respect, is that not short-sighted? the "extra effort required" can scale up into man years sebastian 9-Nov-1998 11:26:29-GMT,4207;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id EAA17176 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 04:26:28 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id MAA02030; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:03:42 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407320 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:03:40 +0100 Received: from na.uni-tuebingen.de (root@na.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de [134.2.161.64]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA02018 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:03:38 +0100 (MET) Received: from na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de (na6 [134.2.161.170]) by na.uni-tuebingen.de (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA18725 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:03:35 +0100 (MET) Received: from na.uni-tuebingen.de (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA01990 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:03:33 +0100 (MET) X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (X11; I; SunOS 5.6 sun4m) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 References: <199811061649.RAA18880@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> <13894.46384.268699.379786@srahtz> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <3646CC04.6171ADF1@na.uni-tuebingen.de> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:03:32 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Marcel Oliver Subject: Re: pattern matching in LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > > > ultimately incompatible. I really know SGML/XML (Sebastian, what do > > you hope to get out of the LaTeX3 project that you think you cannot > > get out of SGML?), > I want a reliable batch-oriented page makeup system, no more, no > less. I want to store my text in XML, and have LaTeX produce beautiful > pages when I give it a style sheet Since you are working for Elsevier, what is your vision for authors' electronic submission of manuscripts? In your opinion, will LaTeX have a place, or would you like to use XML as the exclusive format for submission? What tools would authors use in that case? > > already exists and supposedly works well? Moreover, especially when > > typing Mathematics, complete logical mark-up is way beyond what most > > authors need in practice. > today, yes. but they are crippling themselves by saving all their hard > work in a presentation format, IMHO. In many mathematical subject areas most of the work really happens before anything is entered into a computer at all. Therefore, presentation considerations do not (and maybe should not) enter the work until the key ideas have been worked out. > > If my requirements go beyond publishing, my primary tools are > > different (although it would help if they could export to LaTeX > > when it comes to publishing), but then I don't mind the extra > > effort required. > with respect, is that not short-sighted? the "extra effort required" > can scale up into man years In emerging subject areas it is often not obvious how a mathemtically consistent machine processable representation should be structured, nor is it clear if and how this could be useful in the future. While these questions are certainly important and worthwhile, they are not the only ones that drive mathematical innovation. Thus, having data formats which are optimized for presentation, and others which are optimized for machine processing of the logical content is, IMHO, not crippling at all, but reflects the different priorities, styles of work, and subject areas in the mathematical sciences. Marcel 9-Nov-1998 12:07:09-GMT,3605;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA17872 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 05:07:07 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id MAA06156; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:44:18 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407351 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:44:16 +0100 Received: from ROSE.IPM.AC.IR (vax.ipm.ac.ir [194.225.70.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id MAA06123 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:43:59 +0100 (MET) Received: by ROSE.IPM.AC.IR (MX V4.1 VAX) id 49; Mon, 09 Nov 1998 15:12:05 +0330 Message-ID: <009CEF7B.C5DEEF40.49@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 15:12:04 +0330 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Roozbeh Pournader Subject: Re: Quotes, HTML, and FrontPage To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L On Mon, 9 Nov 1998 Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > why dont you write > > some stuff > > and process it with a DSSSL or XSL style sheet, which could target the > screen, paper (using TeX) or an audio renderer? Ok, I'll try, but will mass users be able to use them? Are splendid quality free renderers available for poor students using Linux? (or even rich ones using Win95?) I think TeX society should not go under indirect supervision of ISO, W3C, etc. because there will come some time that one considers charging, then major industries will pay, no problem, but smaller ones, and also students must forget everything (remember GIF and CompuServe?) > TeX is a typesetting engine, pretty damn good it is too. i want to use > it, does most of what i want. i don't care what its input is, because I > dont want to write it, i want a computer to write it for me, based on > my abstract text, and my stylesheet. Lamport LaTeX is a system that does that > for me, and very well it has served me, but now i want better. so i > turn to XML and its style sheets, to replace *Lamport LaTeX*. Knuth's TeX > itself stays underneath, untouched as it always was. what *LaTeX 3* > might do as an intermediate layer is less clear. Aha! I understood it. But why are you trying to convert LaTeX to another engine? Why not doing this kind of work with TeX himself (!), and have smaller load and more speed? Also, I want to ask, ``Exactly how do you want your computer to do the writing for you?'' As my point of view, I think that there is no winner in the race between generic markup and visual markup which you can see as the difference between ``quoted'' and \quote{quoted}. Some authors will prefer this and some that. The real point is that I want my input to be as readable as possible, and also, as portable as possible. You can't imagine, an end user really prefers the \texttt command to become somehow shorter. (Don't blame me saying she must say \gnat, since she doesn't listen. She is only preparing her homework, she says. :) I, as a TeX programmer, also want the programming interface, more powerful and easier, and considering experimental L3PL, I am very hopeful. --Roozbeh 9-Nov-1998 12:47:04-GMT,5862;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA18530 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 05:46:58 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA09893; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:20:47 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407406 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:20:45 +0100 Received: from na.uni-tuebingen.de (root@na.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de [134.2.161.64]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA09880 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:20:43 +0100 (MET) Received: from na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de (na6 [134.2.161.170]) by na.uni-tuebingen.de (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA18863 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:20:38 +0100 (MET) Received: from na.uni-tuebingen.de (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA02098 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:20:37 +0100 (MET) X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (X11; I; SunOS 5.6 sun4m) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 References: <199811061649.RAA18880@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> <13894.46384.268699.379786@srahtz> <3646CC04.6171ADF1@na.uni-tuebingen.de> <13894.53699.585814.765836@srahtz> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <3646DE15.11B3C148@na.uni-tuebingen.de> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:20:37 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Marcel Oliver Subject: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > in my personal view, no current authoring tools except LaTeX are of > any real use (except to capture plain text); and unfortunately, LaTeX > is almost totally discredited by the poor usage of its > practitioners. yes yes yes there are millions of great LaTeX users out > there, but what actually hits the system here is almost always > diseased in some way. This seems to be a much more down-to-earth problem, and much easier to solve (maybe at least partially in future releases of LaTeX2e) than the lofty goals of LaTeX3. My basic claim is that base LaTeX is too narrowly defined, and therefore causes a lot of the document exchange problems which seem to occur frequently not only between author and publisher, but also between different authors. In particular: - The set of tools which come with the core LaTeX distribution is too small for serious work. Extensions exist (such as the quasi-standard AMS math package), but are not sufficiently promoted by third parties (some publishers' author packages re-implement subsets of amsmath in incompatible ways). Solution: Move the best-of-breed third-party packages into the LaTeX core distribution. For mathematical publishing the choice seems to be rather obvious, in Physics, as I understand, things are much more in a mess (ReVTeX...) and may need serious revision. In other subject areas I don't really know, but this could and should be sorted out. - The biggest mess of all is the front matter. I remember this has been discussed before on this list. Did anything ever result from that discussion? I guess a solution could be found within LaTeX2e and shipped as default with future updates. This certainly very nontrivial exercise should at the very least achieve the following: o Define a comprehensive interface (key-val syntax???) for all marginally common frontmatter features. o Specify a way in which individual publishers are allowed to extend the standard if necessary. o Provide backwards-compatibility to common existing front-matter conventions (default, AMS, Elsevier, possibly others), if necessary, as package options. o Be interfaced in such a way that the standard document classes can be easily retrofitted with the new conventions. (Package which can be loaded on top of these classes, or, better, as a package option. Personally, I would prefer if such new conventions could be made the default - I know the issue about the standard classes being frozen - if a reasonable auto-detect of the new features is possible without breaking existing documents.) o Some nice front page defaults for "report" and "book" which could save authors in may cases from hacking with \titlepage. - Lack of a good single source of documentation. There is not a good book on how to author documents in LaTeX. Lamport's book is not inclusive enough; the Companion, or Kopka-Daly, are pretty good if it comes to solving concrete problems, but don't offer much guidance for how to write documents that are intended for submission to publishers, or require easy exchange in loosely organized (academic) collaborations. I.e., we need the definitive reference "LaTeX for Authors", preferably written by someone who understands the publishing process in all stages, and specifically documenting the "official", "definitive" solutions to the first two problems above. A regular update schedule would not hurt, so maybe every new LaTeX could be shipped as full distribution (TeX Live...) on CD together with this printed or electronic manual? Am I dreaming here? Marcel 9-Nov-1998 12:51:21-GMT,3919;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA18613 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 05:51:12 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA08814; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:10:51 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407383 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:10:49 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA08120 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:03:34 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id LAA24015; hop 0; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 11:55:32 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:02:34 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <009CEF7B.C5DEEF40.49@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> Message-ID: <13894.55757.217128.444765@srahtz> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:02:21 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: Quotes, HTML, and FrontPage To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <009CEF7B.C5DEEF40.49@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> > Ok, I'll try, but will mass users be able to use them? the mass users use Microsoft software. Internet Explorer 5 renders XML natively > Are splendid quality > free renderers available for poor students using Linux? yes, of course. the renderer is TeX! > I think TeX society should not go under indirect supervision > of ISO, W3C, etc. because there will come some time that one considers > charging oh come! dont be *too* paranoid. if we have to pay a license fee to use ISO standards, the world will have become *very* odd... > Aha! I understood it. But why are you trying to convert LaTeX to another > engine? I am not. I want TeX to run TeX code. > Why not doing this kind of work with TeX himself (!), and have > smaller load and more speed? TeX? small and fast? you are joking, right? > Also, I want to ask, ``Exactly how do you want your computer to do the > writing for you?'' i dont want it to write, i want it to take stuff and turn it into typeset pages, with the instruction that the contents of should be represented as a list item object > that. The real point is that I want my input to be as readable as possible, > and also, as portable as possible. You can't imagine, an end user really the text may be *stored* as ggg, that does not follow that your editor will show exactly that. you are from Iran - do you want to type Farsi (excuse me if wrong) in ASCII encoding for the rest of your life? or type on your local keyboard and see the glyphs on the screen? [1] > I, as a TeX programmer, also want the programming interface, more > powerful and easier, and considering experimental L3PL, I am very hopeful. > oh sure, agreed on that, writing style files will be better. but who wants to write different style files for every renderer.... sebastian [1] ok so you probably use a latin alphabet :-} but you see what i mean 9-Nov-1998 12:54:26-GMT,2241;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA18656 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 05:54:22 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA10291; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:24:16 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407413 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:24:14 +0100 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA10268 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:24:12 +0100 (MET) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98110912243170@man.ac.uk> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:24:31 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: Re: Quotes, HTML, and FrontPage To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L > > I think TeX society should not go under indirect supervision > > of ISO, W3C, etc. because there will come some time that one considers > > charging > oh come! dont be *too* paranoid. if we have to pay a license fee to use > ISO standards, the world will have become *very* odd... >From what I understand with regard to Fortran standards, if you want a copy of the standard, you have to pay a substantial sum to ISO. -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ My opinions are not necessarily those of NRAL or the University of Manchester. 9-Nov-1998 12:58:59-GMT,5511;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA18740 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 05:58:55 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA11181; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:29:22 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407445 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:29:20 +0100 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA11132 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:29:16 +0100 (MET) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98110912272255@man.ac.uk> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:27:22 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L > > practitioners. yes yes yes there are millions of great LaTeX users out > > there, but what actually hits the system here is almost always > > diseased in some way. > > This seems to be a much more down-to-earth problem, and much easier to > solve (maybe at least partially in future releases of LaTeX2e) than the > lofty goals of LaTeX3. Yes. > My basic claim is that base LaTeX is too narrowly defined, and therefore > causes a lot of the document exchange problems which seem to occur > frequently not only between author and publisher, but also between > different authors. In particular: I agree. > - The set of tools which come with the core LaTeX distribution is too > small for serious work. Extensions exist (such as the quasi-standard > AMS math package), but are not sufficiently promoted by third parties > (some publishers' author packages re-implement subsets of amsmath in > incompatible ways). Right. > Solution: Move the best-of-breed third-party packages into the > LaTeX core distribution. For mathematical publishing the choice > seems to be rather obvious, in Physics, as I understand, things are > much more in a mess (ReVTeX...) and may need serious revision. > In other subject areas I don't really know, but this could and should > be sorted out. For astronomy, it's also a mess. I would really like to see things like Daly's bibliography packages moved into the core distribution. It would look nicer if this were the case before requiring all publishers to force authors to use natbib (and a .bst they've generated from custom-bib:). > - The biggest mess of all is the front matter. I remember this has > been discussed before on this list. Did anything ever result from > that discussion? Yes, we should get back to that and away from the loftier stuff! > o Define a comprehensive interface (key-val syntax???) for all > marginally > common frontmatter features. > > o Specify a way in which individual publishers are allowed to extend > the standard if necessary. > > o Provide backwards-compatibility to common existing front-matter > conventions (default, AMS, Elsevier, possibly others), if necessary, > as package options. > > o Be interfaced in such a way that the standard document classes > can be easily retrofitted with the new conventions. (Package > which can be loaded on top of these classes, or, better, as a > package > option. Personally, I would prefer if such new conventions could > be made the default - I know the issue about the standard classes > being frozen - if a reasonable auto-detect of the new features > is possible without breaking existing documents.) > > o Some nice front page defaults for "report" and "book" which could > save authors in may cases from hacking with \titlepage. > > - Lack of a good single source of documentation. There is not a good > book on how to author documents in LaTeX. Lamport's book is not > inclusive enough; the Companion, or Kopka-Daly, are pretty good if it > comes to solving concrete problems, but don't offer much guidance for > how to write documents that are intended for submission to publishers, > or require easy exchange in loosely organized (academic) > collaborations. > > I.e., we need the definitive reference "LaTeX for Authors", preferably > written by someone who understands the publishing process in all > stages, > and specifically documenting the "official", "definitive" solutions > to the first two problems above. > > A regular update schedule would not hurt, so maybe every new LaTeX > could be shipped as full distribution (TeX Live...) on CD together > with this printed or electronic manual? > > Am I dreaming here? Hopefully not! -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ 9-Nov-1998 13:00:42-GMT,3012;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA18798 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 06:00:36 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA12389; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:33:03 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407460 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:33:01 +0100 Received: from heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk (exim@heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk [128.232.32.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA12367 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:32:59 +0100 (MET) Received: from dorceus.cl.cam.ac.uk (cl.cam.ac.uk) [128.232.1.34] (rf) by heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 1.82 #1) id 0zcqV5-0005ZR-00; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:32:55 +0000 Message-ID: Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:32:53 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Robin Fairbairns Subject: Re: Quotes, HTML, and FrontPage To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 09 Nov 1998 12:24:31 GMT." <98110912243170@man.ac.uk> > > > I think TeX society should not go under indirect supervision > > > of ISO, W3C, etc. because there will come some time that one considers > > > charging > > oh come! dont be *too* paranoid. if we have to pay a license fee to use > > ISO standards, the world will have become *very* odd... in fact, there do exist iso standards which require you to pay implementation licence fees. there are very strict guidelines, however, about standardising patented techniques: in particular, the owner of the patent is required to declare that they will never refuse an application for licence. > From what I understand with regard to Fortran standards, if you want a > copy of the standard, you have to pay a substantial sum to ISO. if you want a copy of the latex book, you have to pay a sustantial sum to addison wesley longman. less, i admit, than one pays to one's national standards body[*] for a transposed copy of something as big as fortran, but the principle is the same. personally, i would be quite happy to be using something for which a formal specification, to which i could test compliance, existed. but i think i'm a bit unusual in that. perhaps it comes from having seen the standardsation process from the inside... r [*] none but a true idiot _buys_ standards from iso. bsi's charges for standards are extortionate, but as nothing by comparison with iso's. 9-Nov-1998 13:00:50-GMT,4018;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA18804 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 06:00:48 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id MAA04504; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:28:25 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407338 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:28:23 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA04490 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:28:20 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id LAA22391; hop 0; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 11:20:14 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Mon, 9 Nov 1998 11:28:06 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199811061649.RAA18880@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> <13894.46384.268699.379786@srahtz> <3646CC04.6171ADF1@na.uni-tuebingen.de> Message-ID: <13894.53699.585814.765836@srahtz> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 11:28:03 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: pattern matching in LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <3646CC04.6171ADF1@na.uni-tuebingen.de> Marcel Oliver writes: > Since you are working for Elsevier, what is your vision for authors' > electronic submission of manuscripts? In your opinion, will LaTeX > have a place as much as it has at present. ie not much.... > or would you like to use XML as the exclusive > format for submission? What tools would authors use in that case? Microsoft Word 2010 :-} in my personal view, no current authoring tools except LaTeX are of any real use (except to capture plain text); and unfortunately, LaTeX is almost totally discredited by the poor usage of its practitioners. yes yes yes there are millions of great LaTeX users out there, but what actually hits the system here is almost always diseased in some way. sorry and all that, but the dull accountants in suits who run evil empires like Elsevier cannot cope with LaTeX. dont blame me, I am probably the smallest cog in the machine... so i am hoping for new authoring tools, based on XML, in the next millenium. until then i personally will use LaTeX > In many mathematical subject areas most of the work really happens > before anything is entered into a computer at all. Therefore, > presentation considerations do not (and maybe should not) enter the > work until the key ideas have been worked out. not being a mathematician, i am not sure how to comment on this. i had just assumed that publishing "logical" math is a Good Thing > ones that drive mathematical innovation. Thus, having data formats > which are optimized for presentation, and others which are optimized for > machine processing of the logical content is, i take the point that you need both, that we cannot get rid of presentation math, because it performs a valuable function. but for the *default*, low-class, mass-market math, surely you'd agree that content markup is desirable? surely school textbook math should have not have \hspace s in? sebastian 9-Nov-1998 13:10:38-GMT,2564;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA18962 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 06:10:36 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA13892; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:42:14 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407595 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:42:11 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA13866 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:42:09 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.128] (sl102.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.128]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id NAA29749 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:42:03 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <199811051318.OAA24936@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:41:53 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13894.46524.671044.810596@srahtz> At 09:28 +0000 1998/11/09, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > > Are we to believe that you watch "millions and > >millions of people every day"? > >yes. some people get their kicks from oral sex with students, others >of us stand behind people and watch them type angle brackets. But there are at most 86401 seconds in a day, so if you work all day long with no interrutions, you would need to watch tens of new people every second. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 9-Nov-1998 13:22:26-GMT,3512;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA19201 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 06:21:52 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA12606; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:34:41 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407467 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:34:38 +0100 Received: from na.uni-tuebingen.de (root@na.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de [134.2.161.64]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA12568 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:34:35 +0100 (MET) Received: from na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de (na6 [134.2.161.170]) by na.uni-tuebingen.de (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA18889 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:34:30 +0100 (MET) Received: from na.uni-tuebingen.de (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA02103 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:34:29 +0100 (MET) X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (X11; I; SunOS 5.6 sun4m) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 References: <199811061649.RAA18880@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> <13894.46384.268699.379786@srahtz> <3646CC04.6171ADF1@na.uni-tuebingen.de> <13894.53699.585814.765836@srahtz> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <3646E154.E86C1099@na.uni-tuebingen.de> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:34:28 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Marcel Oliver Subject: Re: pattern matching in LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > not being a mathematician, i am not sure how to comment on this. i had > just assumed that publishing "logical" math is a Good Thing I guess the problem is not whether math is logical, but that published math contains a lot of omissions or jumps which people who work in the field know how to fill in. This is a necessary mechanism for optimal human-to-human communication. > > ones that drive mathematical innovation. Thus, having data formats > > which are optimized for presentation, and others which are optimized for > > machine processing of the logical content is, > i take the point that you need both, that we cannot get rid of > presentation math, because it performs a valuable function. but for > the *default*, low-class, mass-market math, surely you'd agree that > content markup is desirable? surely school textbook math should have > not have \hspace s in? Absolutely. I guess on this level things are, at least in principle, taken care of by LaTeX, so I assume we are talking about one step further: That, at present, I cannot take a piece of LaTeX code, read it unambiguously into Mathematica and work with it. (I am using this just as an example because I am most familiar with the two, but I guess everybody can replace these by their favorite systems...) Marcel 9-Nov-1998 13:23:29-GMT,2424;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA19215 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 06:23:23 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA19884; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:59:02 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407694 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:58:57 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA19821 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:58:50 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id MAA26472; hop 0; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:50:33 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:58:21 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <98110912243170@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: <13894.58694.741951.449787@srahtz> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:51:18 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: Quotes, HTML, and FrontPage To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <98110912243170@man.ac.uk> Phillip Helbig writes: > > oh come! dont be *too* paranoid. if we have to pay a license fee to use > > ISO standards, the world will have become *very* odd... > > From what I understand with regard to Fortran standards, if you want a > copy of the standard, you have to pay a substantial sum to ISO. > that sounds like a reasonable fine for those using Fortran. you also have to buy newspapers and books and electricity and food. sebastian 9-Nov-1998 13:25:32-GMT,2998;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA19242 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 06:25:25 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA19773; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:58:42 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407688 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:58:38 +0100 Received: from nag.co.uk (openmath.nag.co.uk [192.156.217.16]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA19727 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:58:35 +0100 (MET) Received: (from davidc@localhost) by nag.co.uk (AIX4.2/UCB 8.7/8.7) id MAA29790; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:58:08 GMT References: <199811061649.RAA18880@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> <13894.46384.268699.379786@srahtz> <3646CC04.6171ADF1@na.uni-tuebingen.de> <13894.53699.585814.765836@srahtz> <3646E154.E86C1099@na.uni-tuebingen.de> Message-ID: <199811091258.MAA29790@nag.co.uk> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:58:08 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: David Carlisle Subject: Re: pattern matching in LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <3646E154.E86C1099@na.uni-tuebingen.de> (message from Marcel Oliver on Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:34:28 +0100) > That, at present, I cannot take a piece of LaTeX code, read it > unambiguously into Mathematica and work with it. (I am using this just > as an example because I am most familiar with the two, but I guess > everybody can replace these by their favorite systems...) which rather fits in with what I do as a `day job'. Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 11:20:22 GMT From: David Carlisle To: www-math@w3.org Subject: New OpenMath Standard Draft Resent-From: www-math@w3.org X-Mailing-List: archive/latest/259 X-Loop: www-math@w3.org Sender: www-math-request@w3.org Resent-Sender: www-math-request@w3.org Precedence: list The Esprit OpenMath Consortium is pleased to announce that a new draft OpenMath Standard and related supporting documents is available from the project web site at http://www.nag.co.uk/projects/OpenMath/omstd/ The above page contains links to the draft standard (as gzipped Postscript and pdf) and also to a separate document describing a possible type system for OpenMath Objects, and a proposal for a new set of core Content Dictionaries. We welcome comments on all aspects of ths release. David Carlisle for the Esprit OpenMath Consortium. 9-Nov-1998 13:27:10-GMT,3590;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA19271 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 06:26:53 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA20136; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:59:45 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407706 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:59:37 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA19810 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:58:48 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id MAA26487; hop 0; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:50:46 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:58:29 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199811061649.RAA18880@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> <13894.46384.268699.379786@srahtz> <3646CC04.6171ADF1@na.uni-tuebingen.de> <13894.53699.585814.765836@srahtz> <3646DE15.11B3C148@na.uni-tuebingen.de> Message-ID: <13894.59096.241111.350977@srahtz> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:58:00 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <3646DE15.11B3C148@na.uni-tuebingen.de> Marcel Oliver writes: > My basic claim is that base LaTeX is too narrowly defined, and therefore > causes a lot of the document exchange problems which seem to occur > frequently not only between author and publisher, but also between > different authors yup, i'd agree > Solution: Move the best-of-breed third-party packages into the > LaTeX core distribution. For mathematical publishing the choice well, AMSLaTeX *is* core, isnt it? i think the big thing that should move to "packages" is natbib... > - The biggest mess of all is the front matter. I remember this has > been discussed before on this list. Did anything ever result from > that discussion? presumably not, or we would have heard about it. i agree 100% its needed. solving this would be a major step forward. Chris and Frank, now step forward and say "yes, but it all _depends_, where is the precise specification of the problem etc etc etc"..... if you ask me, its a case for a _de facto_ standard, if someone strong-minded steps forward > comes to solving concrete problems, but don't offer much guidance for > how to write documents that are intended for submission to publishers, > or require easy exchange in loosely organized (academic) > collaborations. perhaps some of us believe that writing such a book would encourage a process we believe is retrograde :-} sebastian 9-Nov-1998 13:32:03-GMT,2557;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA19370 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 06:31:42 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA19994; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:59:22 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407701 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:59:15 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA19903 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:59:07 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id MAA26494; hop 0; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:50:53 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:58:39 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199811051318.OAA24936@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de> Message-ID: <13894.59201.965020.424896@srahtz> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:59:45 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Hans Aberg writes: > But there are at most 86401 seconds in a day, so if you work all day long > with no interrutions, i do > you would need to watch tens of new people every > second. i have 10 windows on my computer monitoring the input from ten typists > at most 86401 seconds in a day your days, maybe. i live on the planet Zog, remember? sebastian 9-Nov-1998 13:35:43-GMT,2474;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA19439 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 06:35:29 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA24089; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 14:13:27 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407820 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 14:13:25 +0100 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA24070 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 14:13:22 +0100 (MET) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98110913124818@man.ac.uk> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:12:48 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: Re: Quotes, HTML, and FrontPage To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L > Phillip Helbig writes: > > > oh come! dont be *too* paranoid. if we have to pay a license fee to use > > > ISO standards, the world will have become *very* odd... > > > > From what I understand with regard to Fortran standards, if you want a > > copy of the standard, you have to pay a substantial sum to ISO. > > > that sounds like a reasonable fine for those using Fortran. Well, it applies to ALL standards. > you also have to buy newspapers and books and electricity and food. Yes, of course, I have no problem with this in principle (I use VMS not linux and don't mind paying for the work someone has done). However, if one USEs a standard, in practice one would need a copy, so it's either pay money or do it illegally. -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ 9-Nov-1998 13:52:22-GMT,2589;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA19734 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 06:51:49 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA27669; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 14:27:30 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407902 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 14:27:27 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA27637 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 14:27:23 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id NAA27701; hop 0; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:19:07 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:27:02 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <98110913124818@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: <13894.60926.95203.15412@srahtz> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:28:30 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: Quotes, HTML, and FrontPage To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <98110913124818@man.ac.uk> Phillip Helbig writes: > linux and don't mind paying for the work someone has done). However, if > one USEs a standard, in practice one would need a copy, so it's either > pay money or do it illegally. strange. I use software based on standards every day of my life, and I don't own any of them. how is your copy of ASCII? actually, its a lie, i do have a standard, DSSSL. which is freely available because someone had the nerve to stand up and say that because it was partly developed using US Govt money, their laws say that it has to be made available. whether this story is true, I don't know. sebastian 9-Nov-1998 13:57:27-GMT,3284;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA19828 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 06:56:58 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA27522; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 14:26:30 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407893 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 14:26:28 +0100 Received: from heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk (exim@heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk [128.232.32.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA27510 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 14:26:26 +0100 (MET) Received: from dorceus.cl.cam.ac.uk (cl.cam.ac.uk) [128.232.1.34] (rf) by heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 1.82 #1) id 0zcrKs-00089H-00; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:26:26 +0000 Message-ID: Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:26:24 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Robin Fairbairns Subject: Re: Quotes, HTML, and FrontPage To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 09 Nov 1998 13:12:48 GMT." <98110913124818@man.ac.uk> > > > From what I understand with regard to Fortran standards, if you want a > > > copy of the standard, you have to pay a substantial sum to ISO. > > > > that sounds like a reasonable fine for those using Fortran. > > Well, it applies to ALL standards. as i said, it's terribly rare for sensible people to buy from iso. what's more, if iso ever does get involved in xml/xsl standardisation (and it would require a serious access of sanity in the relevant committees for this to happen) i wouldn't be at all surprised if the resulting standard appeared on the web. there's a precedent: vrml, which was once being touted as a serious part of the web, is iso-standardised and the iso standard is available from the web. > > you also have to buy newspapers and books and electricity and food. > > Yes, of course, I have no problem with this in principle (I use VMS not > linux and don't mind paying for the work someone has done). However, if > one USEs a standard, in practice one would need a copy, so it's either > pay money or do it illegally. this is of course tosh. i used to write standard fortran all the time, once, long ago. i had a little note (written by someone who knew) which told me which of the extensions available i should avoid. i have never read a fortran standard: fortran standards, by and large, are only of use to people writing fortran compilers. similarly, many sensible people write entirely reasonable latex on the basis of the `not so short intro' rather than the supposedly definitive lamport book. i have little doubt that similar documents are going to spring up in the xml world, if they don't already exist... r 9-Nov-1998 14:11:45-GMT,2484;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA20108 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 07:11:38 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA29072; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 14:40:02 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407940 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 14:39:59 +0100 Received: from sarah.albany.edu (sarah.albany.edu [169.226.1.103]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA29002 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 14:39:27 +0100 (MET) Received: from hilbert.math.albany.edu (hilbert.math.albany.edu [169.226.23.52]) by sarah.albany.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id IAA12379 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 08:39:07 -0500 (EST) Received: (from hammond@localhost) by hilbert.math.albany.edu (8.8.4/8.8.3) id IAA07992 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 08:39:05 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <199811091339.IAA07992@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 08:39:05 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "William F. Hammond" Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Phillip Helbig writes in support of others arguing for a bigger base set of commands and packages (corresponding to an enlarged "LaTeX Companion"?). An underlying issue that is not dealt with in these arguments is the need for fully functional electronic access to libraries and archives. Currently the only post 1985 technology implemented usefully for the large preprint archive at LANL is TimBL's www. People in public libraries can only read those articles in PDF, which I view as an alternative to the public DVI standard. (And, yes, DVI may need some updating.) Packages and styles designed to work in that environment need to be done somewhat differently. Listen to Sebastian. -- Bill 9-Nov-1998 14:13:17-GMT,2261;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA20140 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 07:12:48 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA29501; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 14:43:33 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407954 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 14:43:29 +0100 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA29472 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 14:43:27 +0100 (MET) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98110913435142@man.ac.uk> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:43:51 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: Re: Quotes, HTML, and FrontPage To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L > Phillip Helbig writes: > > linux and don't mind paying for the work someone has done). However, if > > one USEs a standard, in practice one would need a copy, so it's either > > pay money or do it illegally. > > strange. I use software based on standards every day of my life, and I > don't own any of them. how is your copy of ASCII? Sorry, I wasn't thinking about the equivalent of the Fortran programmer, but rather the equivalent of the Fortran compiler writer, who probably DOES need a real copy of the standard. -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ 9-Nov-1998 14:23:38-GMT,2267;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA20360 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 07:23:32 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA00157; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 14:48:38 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407977 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 14:48:36 +0100 Received: from heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk (exim@heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk [128.232.32.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA00141 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 14:48:35 +0100 (MET) Received: from dorceus.cl.cam.ac.uk (cl.cam.ac.uk) [128.232.1.34] (rf) by heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 1.82 #1) id 0zcrgI-00001f-00; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:48:34 +0000 Message-ID: Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 13:48:33 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Robin Fairbairns Subject: Re: Quotes, HTML, and FrontPage To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 09 Nov 1998 13:43:51 GMT." <98110913435142@man.ac.uk> > Sorry, I wasn't thinking about the equivalent of the Fortran programmer, > but rather the equivalent of the Fortran compiler writer, who probably > DOES need a real copy of the standard. which is why, by and large, commercial-quality compilers come to be written by commercial outfits, to whom a few hundred quid on acquiring the relevant standards is peanuts. in any case, standardisation of xml and xsl isn't being done by iso (unless iso gets an access of common sense some time soon, it's not going to get a look in, even). w3c standards are all freely available, so that this whole sub-thread of the discussion is a non-issue. r 9-Nov-1998 15:54:15-GMT,2642;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA22320 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 08:54:14 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA10435; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:17:18 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408100 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:17:16 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA10418 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:17:14 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.128] (sl79.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.105]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id QAA15783 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:17:12 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <199811051318.OAA24936@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:06:45 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13894.59201.965020.424896@srahtz> At 12:59 +0000 1998/11/09, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: >Hans Aberg writes: > > you would need to watch tens of new people every second. >i have 10 windows on my computer monitoring the input from ten typists And then these windows need to switch several times a second to an entirely new set of users. And there is a problem how to from the input derive that the input was made happily. >i live on the planet Zog, remember? I gather this is the case. :-) Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 9-Nov-1998 16:02:15-GMT,2579;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA22487 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 09:02:13 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA14444; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:44:59 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408188 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:44:56 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA14374 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:44:47 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id PAA04185; hop 0; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 15:36:39 GMT Received: from SRAHTZ (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Mon, 9 Nov 1998 15:44:08 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.1 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199811051318.OAA24936@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de> Message-ID: <13895.3483.598000.227662@SRAHTZ> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 15:43:23 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Hans Aberg writes: > And then these windows need to switch several times a second to an entirely > new set of users. And there is a problem how to from the input derive that > the input was made happily. they have special keyboards which analyse the sweat on their fingertips, and work out if they are unhappy or happy sebastian 9-Nov-1998 16:06:56-GMT,2649;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA22652 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 09:06:54 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA14390; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:44:50 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408184 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:44:46 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA14340 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:44:32 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id PAA04171; hop 0; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 15:36:28 GMT Received: from SRAHTZ (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Mon, 9 Nov 1998 15:43:52 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.1 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: Message-ID: <13895.3418.375000.233026@SRAHTZ> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 15:42:18 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: ISO LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Hans Aberg writes: > The idea of an ISO LaTeX is in fact not very good because the standard must > be charged to pay for the salaries of the ISO bureaucrats. It means that this is true, but not universal (see DSSSL). still, ISO standards are a good thing, because they have *some* credibility for independence, editing, and longevity. I'd rather have an ISO standard than a W3C one, since + the membership of W3C entirely depends on companies buying their way in + the membership is largely US-based + their standards of writing and editing are lax + they change the things as it suits them + would _you_ trust people with hair that long :-} sebastian 9-Nov-1998 16:12:43-GMT,3056;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA22757 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 09:11:35 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA12604; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:38:20 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408138 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:38:18 +0100 Received: from labpar.fcfm.buap.mx ([148.228.125.65]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA12576 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:38:14 +0100 (MET) Received: from fismat1.fcfm.buap.mx (fismat1.fcfm.buap.mx [148.228.125.1]) by labpar.fcfm.buap.mx (950413.SGI.8.6.12/950213.SGI.AUTOCF) via ESMTP id IAA27766; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 08:30:27 -0800 Received: from localhost by fismat1.fcfm.buap.mx (SMI-8.6/SMI-SVR4) id JAA02765; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 09:36:13 -0600 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Message-ID: Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 09:36:12 -0600 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "Alvaro Castan'eda Mendoza" Subject: Re: ISO LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Hi. I think that we can define some like a GNU-ISO or a FREE-ISO, it is a ISO for free and public domain software, it also may be for LaTeX. On Mon, 9 Nov 1998, Hans Aberg wrote: > The idea of an ISO LaTeX is in fact not very good because the standard must > be charged to pay for the salaries of the ISO bureaucrats. It means that > the standard cannot be put up on URL's for example. The result is that > people do not buy it, and so the next version will not be as good as if it > could have been otherwise. > > This is a discussion that pops up from time to time in newsgroups such as > comp.std.c and comp.std.c++: The fellows working on developing these > standards want them to be free, so that as many as possible can read them, > but ISO insists on this charge. People that have been working for a long > time on developing such standards are generally very unhappy with the > situation: It is reasonable to charge for standards which only a few > engineers on wealthy companies need to read, but for standards of more > general use it is a poor idea. > > Hans Aberg > * Email: Hans Aberg > * Home Page: > * AMS member listing: > 9-Nov-1998 16:23:18-GMT,2887;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA23053 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 09:23:14 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA16396; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:56:48 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408259 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:56:46 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA16359 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:56:39 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.128] (sl78.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.104]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id QAA20145 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:56:31 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:56:29 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: ISO LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: At 09:36 -0600 1998/11/09, Alvaro Castan'eda Mendoza wrote: > Hi. I think that we can define some like a GNU-ISO or a FREE-ISO, >it is a ISO for free and public domain software, it >also may be for LaTeX. I am not sure what this is: ISO is an organization that has as rule to over-charge standards as a means paying for its largely considered inefficient bureaucracy. There are other alternative standardization organizations. Some claim that it is possible to have ISO standards which are not charged for (HTML is claimed top be in this category) by claiming to ISO it is unacceptable to those sponsoring the development of the standard, by raising funds paying the bureaucrats, and so forth, but many of those supposedly free standards are in reality pre-ISO working documents. So even though the idea of ISO is laudable in theory, in practise it is not, as it does not have the effect that people think it will have. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 9-Nov-1998 16:30:48-GMT,2562;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA23236 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 09:30:12 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA17350; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 17:07:43 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408270 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 17:07:41 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA16948 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 17:03:24 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.128] (sl106.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.132]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id RAA20757 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 17:03:06 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <199811051318.OAA24936@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 17:01:46 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: Quotes and punctuation To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13895.3483.598000.227662@SRAHTZ> At 15:43 +0000 1998/11/09, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: >they have special keyboards which analyse the sweat on their >fingertips, and work out if they are unhappy or happy I doubt this is possible; it's like those people believing that a polygraph can tell if a person is telling a lie or not. You must have been duped. :-) Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 9-Nov-1998 16:43:46-GMT,2076;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA23533 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 09:42:33 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA18780; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 17:21:00 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408294 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 17:20:57 +0100 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA18767 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 17:20:56 +0100 (MET) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98110916203777@man.ac.uk> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:20:37 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: Re: ISO LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L sebastian writes: > editing, and longevity. I'd rather have an ISO standard than a W3C > one, since > + would _you_ trust people with hair that long :-} Well, you should have seen some of the characters (not just me:) at the last WG5 (ISO Fortran subcommittee) meeting. :) -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ My opinions are not necessarily those of NRAL or the University of Manchester. 9-Nov-1998 16:45:19-GMT,3899;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA23605 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 09:45:17 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA18101; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 17:14:34 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408279 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 17:14:32 +0100 Received: from heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk (exim@heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk [128.232.32.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA18086 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 17:14:30 +0100 (MET) Received: from dorceus.cl.cam.ac.uk (cl.cam.ac.uk) [128.232.1.34] (rf) by heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 1.82 #1) id 0zctxV-00000Z-00; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:14:29 +0000 Message-ID: Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:14:26 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Robin Fairbairns Subject: Re: ISO LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 09 Nov 1998 15:42:18 GMT." <13895.3418.375000.233026@SRAHTZ> sebastian writes: > Hans Aberg writes: > > The idea of an ISO LaTeX is in fact not very good because the standard must > > be charged to pay for the salaries of the ISO bureaucrats. It means that the _real_ work that iso cs does (and for which you pay) is the diplomacy and the maintenance of standards in drafting. one regularly gets comments from keith brannon in ittf on standards whose technical content he knows absolutely nothing about -- what he's highlighting is sloppy drafting that has left ambiguities in the standard. however, the difficulty finding a credible and useful committee to standardise latex would kill the enterprise stone dead before it even started. i would recommend not even thinking about standardising latex. > this is true, but not universal (see DSSSL). still, ISO standards are > a good thing, because they have *some* credibility for independence, > editing, and longevity. I'd rather have an ISO standard than a W3C > one, since > > + the membership of W3C entirely depends on companies buying their > way in i sit on bsi committees because people pay for uk academics to do that. you have to buy your way in to earn the right to `give' them your expertise... > + the membership is largely US-based ime, the americans shout loudest in iso, so their theoretical numerical minority is not so significant. (also, their national procedures make them really difficult to negotiate with...) > + their standards of writing and editing are lax > + they change the things as it suits them these two are the real problem with non-traditional `standards'. > + would _you_ trust people with hair that long :-} there are plenty of long-haired people on iso working groups (the things that write standards). there are even some very long-haired people in suits at the political levels. the real problem with iso standardisation process is the tendency to reject things for irrational reasons. hence the new jtc1/sc3? to redo all the work the w3c has already done on xml/xsl. we (jtc1/sc24) have already knocked the w3c's png standard into shape, but for some reason the x*l work isn't thought `good enough'; by the time sc3? has done anything, the world will have moved on way beyond the point where they could have any influence. r 9-Nov-1998 15:44:30-GMT,2711;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA22099 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 08:44:21 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA10518; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:18:08 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408104 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:18:06 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA10457 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:17:32 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.128] (sl79.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.105]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id QAA15801 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:17:16 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:16:05 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: ISO LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L The idea of an ISO LaTeX is in fact not very good because the standard must be charged to pay for the salaries of the ISO bureaucrats. It means that the standard cannot be put up on URL's for example. The result is that people do not buy it, and so the next version will not be as good as if it could have been otherwise. This is a discussion that pops up from time to time in newsgroups such as comp.std.c and comp.std.c++: The fellows working on developing these standards want them to be free, so that as many as possible can read them, but ISO insists on this charge. People that have been working for a long time on developing such standards are generally very unhappy with the situation: It is reasonable to charge for standards which only a few engineers on wealthy companies need to read, but for standards of more general use it is a poor idea. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 9-Nov-1998 17:04:16-GMT,2778;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA23968 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 10:03:10 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA20439; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 17:36:44 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408322 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 17:36:42 +0100 Received: from sarah.albany.edu (sarah.albany.edu [169.226.1.103]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA20429 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 17:36:39 +0100 (MET) Received: from hilbert.math.albany.edu (hilbert.math.albany.edu [169.226.23.52]) by sarah.albany.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA26554 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 11:36:04 -0500 (EST) Received: (from hammond@localhost) by hilbert.math.albany.edu (8.8.4/8.8.3) id LAA12505 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 11:36:02 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <199811091636.LAA12505@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 11:36:02 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "William F. Hammond" Subject: Re: Quotes, HTML, and FrontPage To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Sebastian Rahtz writes: > strange. I use software based on standards every day of my life, and I > don't own any of them. how is your copy of ASCII? For the most part I think that it does not make sense for me to rely on a standard that is "owned" because I then have the concern that it could be changed in an unfair way. It's probably reasonable to trust ISO. If you want the SGML standard, a nicely annotated copy of it is in Goldfarb's _SGML Handbook_ and it's probably impractical to think about asking for the creation of a web-served version. (I don't about revisions of the standard in regard to possible revisions of the book.) The book has a readable tutorial. As for the rest it's like the Unix manual. Mostly, it's more than you want to know, but you may want to have it. Its price, as I recall, is roughly the same order of magnitude as the ISO thing. You can survive without it if you go to "comp.text.sgml" and to Robin Cover's web site on SGML. -- Bill 9-Nov-1998 17:18:38-GMT,2281;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA24363 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 10:18:08 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA21289; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 17:43:32 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408342 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 17:43:29 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA21177 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 17:42:55 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.128] (sl67.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.93]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id RAA24587 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 17:42:39 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: Your message of "Mon, 09 Nov 1998 15:42:18 GMT." <13895.3418.375000.233026@SRAHTZ> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 17:40:56 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: ISO LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: At 16:14 +0000 1998/11/09, Robin Fairbairns wrote: >the _real_ work that iso cs does (and for which you pay) is the >diplomacy and the maintenance of standards in drafting. The the maintenance is done by volunteers; a trademark of the development of the standards is the lack of diplomacy. :-) Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 9-Nov-1998 17:28:17-GMT,2535;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA24597 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 10:27:10 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA22232; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 17:52:53 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408349 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 17:52:51 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA22220 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 17:52:47 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id QAA08006; hop 0; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:44:47 GMT Received: from screavie.elsevier.co.uk by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:52:29 +0000 Received: from lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk (lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.7]) by screavie.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id QAA17950 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:52:15 GMT Received: (from srahtz@localhost) by lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) id QAA04107; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:52:21 GMT References: <199811091636.LAA12505@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Message-ID: <199811091652.QAA04107@lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 16:52:21 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: Quotes, HTML, and FrontPage To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811091636.LAA12505@hilbert.math.albany.edu> > For the most part I think that it does not make sense for me to > rely on a standard that is "owned" because I then have the concern > that it could be changed in an unfair way. perhaps we could have an example of a "standard" that is not "owned"; it is completely contradictory!! ISO is "owned" by its members Sebastian 9-Nov-1998 17:43:35-GMT,2546;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA25006 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 10:43:27 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA23911; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 18:09:40 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408394 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 18:09:38 +0100 Received: from heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk (exim@heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk [128.232.32.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA23897 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 18:09:35 +0100 (MET) Received: from dorceus.cl.cam.ac.uk (cl.cam.ac.uk) [128.232.1.34] (rf) by heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 1.82 #1) id 0zcuoo-0008Au-00; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 17:09:34 +0000 Message-ID: Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 17:09:31 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Robin Fairbairns Subject: Re: Quotes, HTML, and FrontPage To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 09 Nov 1998 16:52:21 GMT." <199811091652.QAA04107@lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk> > > For the most part I think that it does not make sense for me to > > rely on a standard that is "owned" because I then have the concern > > that it could be changed in an unfair way. > > perhaps we could have an example of a "standard" that is not "owned"; > it is completely contradictory!! i imagine was thinking of `standards' such as rtf -- things that are specifically `owned' by a commercial organisation (and, apparently, changed at that organisation's whim). > ISO is "owned" by its members who are national bodies, specifically required to represent the interests of nation states. (those are the `p'[articipating] and `o'[bserving] members: there are also provisions for `l'[iaison] members, but they don't have -- can't have -- votes.) iso and iec and itu are parts of the united nations general setup... r [*] sorry, i've forgotten and deleted the mail 9-Nov-1998 18:07:00-GMT,4909;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA25587 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 11:06:58 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA26629; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 18:39:01 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408454 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 18:38:58 +0100 Received: from ROSE.IPM.AC.IR (vax.ipm.ac.ir [194.225.70.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA26568 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 18:38:27 +0100 (MET) Received: by ROSE.IPM.AC.IR (MX V4.1 VAX) id 77; Mon, 09 Nov 1998 21:06:08 +0330 Message-ID: <009CEFAD.3BBA2D20.77@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 21:06:07 +0330 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Roozbeh Pournader Subject: Re: Quotes, HTML, and FrontPage To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Sebastian wrote: > the mass users use Microsoft software. Internet Explorer 5 renders XML > natively I can't understand, XML is good or bad? If it is good, why does Microsoft support it?! ;) > > Are splendid quality > > free renderers available for poor students using Linux? > yes, of course. the renderer is TeX! A small misunderstanding from my part, I think. Are you asking to change LaTeX input syntax to become SGML-compatible (or XML-compatible), and write SGML directly in it, or you are speaking of a complete (i.e., fully complete) support for equivalents of SGML things in LaTeX and a convertor from SGML to LaTeX? > i dont want it to write, i want it to take > stuff and > turn it into typeset pages, with the instruction that the contents of > should be represented as a list item object Aha, good. I agree. Specially when Internet users are getting more happy with those SGML languages, this could be a great advance for TeX to the open public, where others can use it easily. But what about a math interface, which a big part of TeX community are users of? Please don't speak of MathML, ok? ;) I don't like neither those things which look unnecessary, nor putting or around every math atom. All these, also make my files very large. > the text may be *stored* as ggg, that does not follow > that your editor will show exactly that. Ok, but I like my editor to exactly show things, because I will freely chosse my editor, ranging from things like emacs, to smaller editors like joe or my favourite one in DOS (!), i.e., Turbo Pascal (!). And in this level I like readability. Some enhancements that make typing easier are really welcome, or color renderings, like gray comments etc. > you are from Iran - do you want to type Farsi (excuse me if > wrong) in ASCII encoding for the rest of your life? or type on your > local keyboard and see the glyphs on the screen? [1] > ... > [1] ok so you probably use a latin alphabet :-} but you see what i mean It was interesting for me to hear of Persian language (We say `Farsi' in Persian, and say `Persian' in English.) What I currently do, is typing Persian using local keyboard in an editor my colleagues in the FarsiTeX project have written, and then give the file to TeX to produce the output using some modified LaTeX and some class files which are both done by myself. I have never (well, hardly ever ;) used Latin alphabet for coding Persian. My main goal is to make the editor part as simple as possible, so the user can use it on any simple system with any simple O/S. The everyday user doesn't like loading a big editor for simple tasks such as typing a memo, which previously could be done using old dear `vi'. Got it? Also, someone who has grown up with TeX input language, loves the input syntax. :) (Maybe I am a record holder, since I have been a TeX user since 15 years old, and a TeX programmer since 17.) > oh sure, agreed on that, writing style files will be better. but who > wants to write different style files for every renderer.... I agree. If you wanna unite the electronic publishing world, it's a great goal, I'm with you. But I'm not hopeful. Other parts of the world are not as intelligent as European Community who got united. Specially, U.S. government and Iranian government can't bear each other :)))) (Also, TeX and Word, Linux and NT, ...) Apart from these, I agree with your general idea now, but I should think more. --Roozbeh 9-Nov-1998 18:52:49-GMT,2166;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA26777 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 11:52:41 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA25768; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 18:30:31 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408433 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 18:30:29 +0100 Received: from sarah.albany.edu (sarah.albany.edu [169.226.1.103]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id SAA25752 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 18:30:26 +0100 (MET) Received: from hilbert.math.albany.edu (hilbert.math.albany.edu [169.226.23.52]) by sarah.albany.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA01158 for ; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:30:22 -0500 (EST) Received: (from hammond@localhost) by hilbert.math.albany.edu (8.8.4/8.8.3) id MAA13350 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:30:21 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <199811091730.MAA13350@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:30:21 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "William F. Hammond" Subject: Re: Quotes, HTML, and FrontPage To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Sebastian writes: > perhaps we could have an example of a "standard" that is not "owned"; > it is completely contradictory!! > > ISO is "owned" by its members Do you mean that "http", the protocol and "HTML", the language, are "owned"? I thought that TimBL and CERN gave them to the world for free. You did make your point. So let's changed "owned" to some other word or phrase. -- Bill 10-Nov-1998 11:00:53-GMT,3879;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id EAA22768 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 04:00:40 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id LAA12369; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 11:23:00 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407265 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 11:22:57 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA12329 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 11:22:44 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id KAA23936; hop 0; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 10:14:38 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Tue, 10 Nov 1998 10:22:30 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <009CEFAD.3BBA2D20.77@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> Message-ID: <13896.3918.854132.703060@srahtz> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 10:02:54 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: Quotes, HTML, and FrontPage To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <009CEFAD.3BBA2D20.77@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> Roozbeh Pournader writes: > > the mass users use Microsoft software. Internet Explorer 5 renders XML > > natively > > I can't understand, XML is good or bad? If it is good, why does Microsoft > support it?! ;) so that they can suck people into using it, then change it in ways incompatible with the standard, and hope you stay locked in. cf the Halloween documents > LaTeX input syntax to become SGML-compatible (or XML-compatible), and write > SGML directly in it, or you are speaking of a complete > (i.e., fully complete) support for equivalents of SGML things in LaTeX > and a convertor from SGML to LaTeX? the latter > But what about a math interface, which a big part of TeX community > are users of? Please don't speak of MathML, ok? ;) hard not to > I don't like neither those things which look unnecessary, > nor putting or around every math atom. All > these, also make my files very large. who cares about file size? anyway, we have to assume that we'll use structured math editors. i know most people on this list will scream, but interfaces like MathType (which exports MathML) are not at all bad > What I currently do, is typing Persian using local keyboard > in an editor my colleagues in the FarsiTeX project have written, contradicing the above, where you say you rely on plain ASCII editors! > user doesn't like loading a big editor for simple tasks such as > typing a memo, which previously could be done using old dear `vi'. > Got it? no. you use a special editor for special input, why not do the same with math? > Also, someone who has grown up with TeX input language, > loves the input syntax. :) i reserve my love for humans and plants :-} > Specially, U.S. government and Iranian government can't bear > each other but you won the footbal match. well done, i enjoyed watching it sebastian 10-Nov-1998 11:50:47-GMT,4350;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id EAA23627 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 04:50:36 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id MAA17974; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 12:14:49 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407343 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 12:14:46 +0100 Received: from nag.co.uk (openmath.nag.co.uk [192.156.217.16]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA17958 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 12:14:41 +0100 (MET) Received: (from davidc@localhost) by nag.co.uk (AIX4.2/UCB 8.7/8.7) id LAA14804; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 11:14:23 GMT References: <009CEFAD.3BBA2D20.77@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> Message-ID: <199811101114.LAA14804@nag.co.uk> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 11:14:23 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: David Carlisle Subject: XML (was quotes, a very long time ago) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <009CEFAD.3BBA2D20.77@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> (message from Roozbeh Pournader on Mon, 9 Nov 1998 21:06:07 +0330) > Please don't speak of MathML, ok? ;) Ah. When I'm not being `latex3 project' I do, these days, have another hat which says `W3C Math (MathML) Committee member'. It's not all bad, you know:-) > All these, also make my files very large. Does it really? What people do now (ie before any of the browsers have native MathML support) is typically make most of the mathematics in their HTML documents as inlined GIF images. MathML only looks large because you make the mistake of looking at it. GIF is much larger but you don't (unless you are Sebastian) try and read it bit by bit in a binary editor. > I will freely choose my editor, ranging from things like emacs, to > smaller editors like joe or my favourite one in DOS (!), i.e., Turbo > Pascal (!). I tend to use emacs for everything, in case you hadn't noticed emacs users are a minority. Some of us will continue to use that kind of interface, but MathML offers the hope of using systems like Scientific Word, and even Microsoft Word via the MathType/Equation Editor thing and getting something useable out the back, not some obscure rtf extension (out of MS Word), or LaTeX (out of Scientific word) which is even more obscure to many people... There is a very large class of users who would greatly benefit from being able to enter essentially school or undergraduate level mathematics in a wysywig fashion and have the mathematics being portable from their wysywig editor into tex for decent mathematical typesetting, and (soon?) into browsers for online display, but also symbolic algebra systems such as Mathematica, or Maple (oh I believe Axiom is jolly good too:-). For more complete control over the semantics you probably need something like OpenMath layered over MathML, but that is even more verbose, and not really relevant to the typesetting aspects of this list. There will (perhaps? Sebastian would probably say will not) be a future for a `tex like' syntax for document markup, and mathematical markup in particular, but whatever happens there in the `traditional' tex world, there will _certainly_ be a very large number of documents marked up to some Mathematics SGML/XML dtd (MathML being the current favourite, but any other one is likely to look equally verbose and alien to a TeX user). (La)TeX can play a role in typesetting these documents to its normal high standards of mathematical typesetting. Just because some people are working in this area does not mean that latex is necessarily abandoning its traditional users, or that they have to use any such XML system. Although perhaps in the end the rather arcane XML syntax may seem like a price worth paying _if_ it achieves the goals of integration with symbolic algebra packages and on line browsers. David 10-Nov-1998 12:35:36-GMT,3047;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA24387 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 05:35:30 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA22487; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 13:08:19 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407418 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 13:08:17 +0100 Received: from nag.co.uk (openmath.nag.co.uk [192.156.217.16]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA22465 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 13:08:05 +0100 (MET) Received: (from davidc@localhost) by nag.co.uk (AIX4.2/UCB 8.7/8.7) id MAA29750; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 12:07:42 GMT References: <98110912272255@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: <199811101207.MAA29750@nag.co.uk> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 12:07:42 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: David Carlisle Subject: frontmatter was: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <98110912272255@man.ac.uk> (message from Phillip Helbig on Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:27:22 GMT) > > - The biggest mess of all is the front matter. I remember this has > > been discussed before on this list. Did anything ever result from > > that discussion? > Yes, we should get back to that and away from the loftier stuff! There are plans (only plans) to have some new classes next year in addition to the current article/report/book that will have some new features, one of which would be an improved frontmatter interface. There are of course existing extended frontmatter interfaces in many of the publishers journal class files (eg Elsevier and AMS). I wrote one for the London Mathematical society last year. which has some extended commands to deal with multiple authors. ftp://ftp.lms.ac.uk/pub/jcm/latex/ A much sterner test for a new frontmatter interface would be revtex as that is not just for a single journal, one needs an interface that can cope with several different typograpic styles, and ordering arrangemens, and cope with a community of authors who go in for bizarre practices like having a 200 author author-list that is probably longer than the document text. I think it is no secret that a revtex latex2e interface has been under development. Unfortunately the author (who will remain nameless but once lived in Manchester, and has spent the year slowly moving towards Oxford) found himself short of time to work on tex projects and it has been delayed. However probably it could soon be got out at least for test purposes.... David 10-Nov-1998 13:04:25-GMT,3821;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA24934 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 06:04:23 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA24349; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 13:28:35 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407429 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 13:28:34 +0100 Received: from nag.co.uk (openmath.nag.co.uk [192.156.217.16]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA24339 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 13:28:31 +0100 (MET) Received: (from davidc@localhost) by nag.co.uk (AIX4.2/UCB 8.7/8.7) id MAA14652; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 12:28:13 GMT References: <98110912272255@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: <199811101228.MAA14652@nag.co.uk> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 12:28:13 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: David Carlisle Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <98110912272255@man.ac.uk> (message from Phillip Helbig on Mon, 9 Nov 1998 12:27:22 GMT) > Solution: Move the best-of-breed third-party packages into the > LaTeX core distribution. In principle promoting an extended `core' distribution would be a good thing. The main problem is _how_ to go about doing it. There is one overriding constraint. Any mechanism which introduces extra packages into a central latex `minimal distribution' must _not_ generate any extra work at the latex support addresses (latex-l and latex-bugs). Given the number of people currently active supporting latex, any extra support work is likely to have the effect that we can not cope and all support stops. However we would be prepared to put in time to help set up any mechanisms needed. So we can not simply just pick some (one? two? fifty?) packages from ctan/latex/contrib and stick them in ctan/latex/packages/tools and carry on as before. There are one or two clear contenders for generally useful packages. natbib, cite, hyperref, .. however if anyone really tries to fill in the dots and make an explicit list, then value judgements will sometimes have to be made between essentially similar packages. This is something that ctan explicitly does _not_ do. Anything that involves making judgements involves being prepared to explain choices, and to review them later as packages develop (or packages previously chosen stop being developed). so... an enlarged base latex distribution would require * an agreed mechanism for creating and maintaining such a distribution. * volunteers to actually do the work. (Beware: latex support takes more time than you think: I once thought it would only take up one weekend and a free trip to Hamburg). * Some method of interfacing to the latex3 project. Even if such an extended list was maintained by volunteers outside the project, the latex3 project as a body is ultimately responsible for latex, and would want to retain the right to have the final word about how or if such an extended list should be produced. * agreement from the tex distributors that they would actually ship such an extended set. (Probably this is not so much of a problem now distributions have generally moved to CD from floppy disk, but I am sure most would not want to ship the whole of latex/contrib) David 10-Nov-1998 13:33:01-GMT,4642;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA25385 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 06:32:57 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA29700; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 14:02:32 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407516 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 14:02:30 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA29688 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 14:02:23 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id MAA00368; hop 0; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 12:54:24 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Tue, 10 Nov 1998 13:02:19 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 I); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <98110912272255@man.ac.uk> <199811101228.MAA14652@nag.co.uk> Message-ID: <13896.14781.711560.872729@srahtz> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 13:03:57 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811101228.MAA14652@nag.co.uk> David Carlisle writes: > Any mechanism which introduces extra packages into a central latex > `minimal distribution' must _not_ generate any extra work at the latex > support addresses (latex-l and latex-bugs). > have you read Eric Raymond's "Cathedral and Bazaar" paper? your starting point is the Cathedral system, of a tightly controlled core run by mages; and, of course, given this, your conclusion is undeniable. However, Raymond does articulate Another Way (basically, The Linux Way) which could be applied to LaTeX. I hasten to stress that its Your call, since You `own' LaTeX! no desire to put on pressure. > ... however if anyone really tries to fill in the > dots and make an explicit list, then value judgements will sometimes > have to be made between essentially similar packages. This is something > that ctan explicitly does _not_ do. Anything that involves making no, CTAN does not, but others of us have been doing it for some while. that is, those of us who actively maintain texmf trees in TeX distributions. I think the value judgements, in this case, are pretty easy. actually, i'd throw out some of the things that you have in there at present.... > an enlarged base latex distribution would require > > * an agreed mechanism for creating and maintaining such a distribution. > devolve macros/latex/packages to a 3rd party, but say in your documentation that this is considered a "recommended" level > * volunteers to actually do the work. (Beware: latex support takes more > time than you think: I once thought it would only take up one weekend > and a free trip to Hamburg). dare we ask how many members of the LaTeX team are actually active? we hear from you, Frank and Chris, but rather seldom from any others -- does this mean they don't like talking in public (the "James Clark syndrome"), or are simply too busy or have moved on from LaTeX? > * agreement from the tex distributors that they would actually ship such > an extended set. (Probably this is not so much of a problem now > distributions have generally moved to CD from floppy disk, but > I am sure most would not want to ship the whole of latex/contrib) I cannot speak for the others, but i would very much welcome an agreed "recommended" level of packages above the base level, so that one can stop saying to people "oh, sorry, you have XXXtex, they dont ship package ZZZ" Sebastian PS my personal world view is that LaTeX-as-a-whole has gone beyond salvation. the constellation of packages large and small has beyond control, and no committee or steering group can now recall the diaspora. 10-Nov-1998 13:56:05-GMT,2647;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA25756 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 06:55:59 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA02283; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 14:24:10 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407553 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 14:24:08 +0100 Received: from nag.co.uk (openmath.nag.co.uk [192.156.217.16]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA02265 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 14:24:05 +0100 (MET) Received: (from davidc@localhost) by nag.co.uk (AIX4.2/UCB 8.7/8.7) id NAA29574; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 13:23:36 GMT References: <98110912272255@man.ac.uk> <199811101228.MAA14652@nag.co.uk> <13896.14781.711560.872729@srahtz> Message-ID: <199811101323.NAA29574@nag.co.uk> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 13:23:36 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: David Carlisle Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13896.14781.711560.872729@srahtz> (message from Sebastian Rahtz on Tue, 10 Nov 1998 13:03:57 +0000) > but others of us have been doing it for some while. Now, I wonder who I had in mind for volunteering for this.... > actually, i'd throw out some of the things that you have in > there at present.... But that is the point, the stuff currently in there now is not there because it is `superior' it is there because it is `written by us' ie it is a totally objective criterion. Except of course for the exceptions, things like calc which we have adopted, and things by us which are not in the core distribution but for one reason or other are scattered around ctan. But my mother always said that it was exceptions that prove the rule. > we hear from you, Frank and Chris, Well I suppose that we are mainly the ones doing core tex coding on the kernel. There are of course other things you don't see. In particular Rainer is most vulnerable to being swamped if the bug report database gets used for an extended distribution. (Also Martin Schroeder who helps front the gnats system.) David 10-Nov-1998 14:46:18-GMT,3480;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA26685 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 07:46:12 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA08158; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:13:15 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407635 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:13:13 +0100 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA08134 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:13:09 +0100 (MET) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98111014073073@man.ac.uk> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 14:07:30 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: Re: frontmatter was: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L > > Yes, we should get back to that and away from the loftier stuff! I'll try to find some time to start thinking about this again! > There are plans (only plans) to have some new classes next year in > addition to the current article/report/book that will have some new > features, one of which would be an improved frontmatter interface. > > There are of course existing extended frontmatter interfaces in many of > the publishers journal class files (eg Elsevier and AMS). > A much sterner test for a new frontmatter interface would be revtex as > that is not just for a single journal, one needs an interface that can > cope with several different typograpic styles, and ordering arrangemens, > and cope with a community of authors who go in for bizarre practices > like having a 200 author author-list that is probably longer than the > document text. It seems to me that three constraints are necessary: o it should look as much like present LaTeX as possible o it should be flexible enough to address the needs of all present and future(!) journals o one should not have to bother with features which are not needed in a particular application It seems to me that something similar to BibTeX is the best solution. There have been some preliminary versions of this mentioned on this list. The journal could modify the \maketitle command to get all the frontmatter stuff (institute, email, present address, corresponding author, acknowledgements to title or authors etc etc) out of a .bib-like file, using what it needs and complaining if something is not there. The author just writes \title{efwe}\author{Fwfe}\date{fsfs} as usual (OK, perhaps some optional arguments to \date are needed). -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ 10-Nov-1998 15:09:27-GMT,3075;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA27180 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 08:09:22 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA09767; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:28:37 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407674 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:28:35 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA09747 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:28:32 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id OAA03449; hop 0; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 14:20:30 GMT Received: from screavie.elsevier.co.uk by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Tue, 10 Nov 1998 14:28:25 +0000 Received: from lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk (lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.7]) by screavie.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id OAA00373 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 14:28:15 GMT Received: (from srahtz@localhost) by lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) id OAA07064; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 14:28:20 GMT References: <98111014073073@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: <199811101428.OAA07064@lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 14:28:20 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: frontmatter was: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <98111014073073@man.ac.uk> > It seems to me that something similar to BibTeX is the best solution. > There have been some preliminary versions of this mentioned on this > list. The journal could modify the \maketitle command to get all the > frontmatter stuff (institute, email, present address, corresponding > author, acknowledgements to title or authors etc etc) out of a .bib-like > file, using what it needs and complaining if something is not there. The > author just writes \title{efwe}\author{Fwfe}\date{fsfs} as usual (OK, but one of the problems with BibTeX is the lack of structure in an entry! that model will not satisfy the need to express the fact that there are 10 authors; 4 are are from institution B, 3 from institution C; author 9 is at institution B and D; author 10 is at instutition D, but currently on leave at A; author 10 is deceased. author 7 is the corresponding author. sebastian 10-Nov-1998 15:13:35-GMT,2730;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA27272 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 08:13:34 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA11262; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:42:03 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407698 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:42:00 +0100 Received: from nag.co.uk (openmath.nag.co.uk [192.156.217.16]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA11241 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:41:58 +0100 (MET) Received: (from davidc@localhost) by nag.co.uk (AIX4.2/UCB 8.7/8.7) id OAA29688; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 14:41:37 GMT References: <98111014073073@man.ac.uk> <199811101428.OAA07064@lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk> Message-ID: <199811101441.OAA29688@nag.co.uk> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 14:41:37 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: David Carlisle Subject: Re: frontmatter was: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811101428.OAA07064@lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk> (message from Sebastian Rahtz on Tue, 10 Nov 1998 14:28:20 GMT) > that model will not satisfy the need to express the fact that > there are 10 authors; 4 are are from institution B, 3 from institution > C; author 9 is at institution B and D; author 10 is at instutition D, > but currently on leave at A; author 10 is deceased. author 7 is the > corresponding author. for the revtex model we had each author could have multiple `main' addresses. In addition any number of `additional' addresses for `visiting..' or `previously at..' type addresses. there were also named `collaborations' ie subsets of the author list grouped in some way orthogonal to address. Authors may appear all in one list with superscript index to addresses (which may appear below the author list, or in footnotes, or at the end of the document, depending on the style) alternatively there may be a separate author list for each (group of) main addresses. The hard part is to get an input syntax that can cope with these type of requirements and at the same time is not impossibly complicated to use on a simple two-authors-at-one-institution paper. David 10-Nov-1998 15:42:38-GMT,2748;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA27897 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 08:42:19 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA14161; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:08:29 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407728 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:08:27 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA14143 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:08:24 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id PAA05316; hop 0; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:00:10 GMT Received: from screavie.elsevier.co.uk by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:07:54 +0000 Received: from lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk (lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.7]) by screavie.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id PAA01264 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:07:44 GMT Received: (from srahtz@localhost) by lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) id PAA07188; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:07:49 GMT References: <98111014073073@man.ac.uk> <199811101428.OAA07064@lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk> <199811101441.OAA29688@nag.co.uk> Message-ID: <199811101507.PAA07188@lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:07:49 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: frontmatter was: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811101441.OAA29688@nag.co.uk> > for the revtex model we had each author could have multiple `main' > addresses. In addition any number of `additional' addresses for > `visiting..' or `previously at..' type addresses. good. but you would then agree that a BibTeX set of key=value things would not cope with this? > Authors may appear all in one list with superscript index to addresses i hope this "superscript index" is in a fit state to be turned into a hyperlink? Sebastian 10-Nov-1998 15:45:16-GMT,6193;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA27945 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 08:45:06 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA13971; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:06:21 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407724 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:06:19 +0100 Received: from math.ams.org (math.ams.org [130.44.210.14]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA13956 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:06:11 +0100 (MET) Received: from sun06.ams.org by math.ams.org via smtpd (for relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) with SMTP; 10 Nov 1998 15:06:04 UT Received: from sun06.ams.org by sun06.ams.org (PMDF V5.1-10 #27147) id <0F2700501OM20T@sun06.ams.org> for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 10:06:03 -0500 (EST) MIME-version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Gnus v5.5/Emacs 20.2 Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Lines: 87 References: <98110912272255@man.ac.uk> <199811101228.MAA14652@nag.co.uk> <13896.14781.711560.872729@srahtz> Message-ID: <199811101506.QAA13956@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 10:06:02 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Comments: Resent-From: mjd@ams.org Comments: Originally-From: Michael John Downes From: "Michael J. Downes" Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Sebastian Rahtz's message of Tue, 10 Nov 1998 13:03:57 +0000 David Carlisle writes: > > Any mechanism which introduces extra packages into a central latex > > `minimal distribution' must _not_ generate any extra work at the latex > > support addresses (latex-l and latex-bugs). > > Sebastian Rahtz writes: > have you read Eric Raymond's "Cathedral and Bazaar" paper? your > starting point is the Cathedral system, of a tightly controlled core > run by mages; and, of course, given this, your conclusion is > undeniable. However, Raymond does articulate Another Way (basically, > The Linux Way) which could be applied to LaTeX. I had just read that last week: http://www.redhat.com/redhat/cathedral-bazaar/ and was pondering that very question. Essentially what it would amount to is handing off LaTeX development work to a large world-wide group of "parallel processors" under the following strategy: 1. No pre-screening of the developers. Anyone who wants to work on a piece is free to go ahead and do so. 2. No explicit coordination from the top to divide up the work in an optimal way. Some people might end up working simultaneously on the same problem. Raymond says that in practice this has not been a problem for Linux because there is a natural tendency for people to choose different tasks (all the parallel processors are *different types* and choose their own work); each significant task, in fact, tends to get done by two or three people in slightly different ways: Buzzwords! "Distributed genetic optimization algorithm" 3. The main kind of central coordination involves looking at what contributors have done and selecting pieces to be officially blessed into the standard distribution. For Linux this was done originally entirely by Linus, then later by designated teams for particular areas. I imagine this would often involve picking the best of two or three choices and merging in some nice details from the alternatives that were not selected. 4. Very frequent releases One potential area for trouble that I see is that there is a symbiosis on a given computer between the LaTeX system and the documents that it serves. If one cannot guarantee line break fidelity in existing documents when upgrading to a new LaTeX, people will have to choose between a. Not upgrading b. Upgrading and adding some correction to all the old documents to ensure that their line breaks remain unchanged. c. Upgrading and keeping the old version of LaTeX installed as well (and tying each document to a particular version of LaTeX (and to particular versions of all the packages that it uses (which will not seldom follow a different release schedule than that of the LaTeX kernel) and even of tfm files (recall the scenario a few years ago with interword spacing in the tfm files generated by fontinst: first rather narrow, then changed to wider values in a later release))) I guess this would be equivalent in the Linux world to upgrading and finding that some applications that worked with the old Linux don't work with the new one. In the Linux case, however, most of the applications would presumably be upgraded in due time by their owners, whereas in the case of LaTeX documents *you* are the owner and have to do all the upgrade work yourself. I know that I find myself in this situation rather often: I go back to a document that I wrote two years ago and try to run it through LaTeX again; then I find that one of the pieces that it requires is missing or doesn't work any more. The potential benefits of the bazaar model sound very attractive, enough to warrant a serious look at what it might require. But as a matter of fact I would say that LaTeX development is already proceeding under something very like the bazaar model (the whole contrib area), with only the core being under central control; and even there, improvements have been submitted and accepted from outside the LaTeX team. A more thorough bazaar strategy might involve little more than making the source code repository public. I don't know the details of how that works in the Linux world. Michael Downes 10-Nov-1998 16:00:40-GMT,2284;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA28329 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 09:00:39 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA16838; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:31:09 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407773 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:31:06 +0100 Received: from nag.co.uk (openmath.nag.co.uk [192.156.217.16]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA16823 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:31:04 +0100 (MET) Received: (from davidc@localhost) by nag.co.uk (AIX4.2/UCB 8.7/8.7) id PAA16736; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:30:45 GMT References: <98111014073073@man.ac.uk> <199811101428.OAA07064@lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk> <199811101441.OAA29688@nag.co.uk> <199811101507.PAA07188@lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk> Message-ID: <199811101530.PAA16736@nag.co.uk> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:30:45 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: David Carlisle Subject: Re: frontmatter was: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811101507.PAA07188@lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk> (message from Sebastian Rahtz on Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:07:49 GMT) > good. but you would then agree that a BibTeX set of key=value things > would not cope with this It doesn't naturally fit that model, but then I not sure it naturally fits any model. Some of the requirements are just so weird that it can't be helped that the input syntax is rather contorted. It doesn't currently use a key value syntax. > i hope this "superscript index" is in a fit state to be turned into a > hyperlink? er yes, it uses some package that goes by the name of hyperref, perhaps you know it? David 10-Nov-1998 16:05:50-GMT,2412;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA28446 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 09:05:48 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA17690; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:39:44 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407794 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:39:40 +0100 Received: from mailer.scri.fsu.edu (mailer.scri.fsu.edu [144.174.112.142]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA17653 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:39:37 +0100 (MET) Received: from ibm11 (ibm11.scri.fsu.edu [144.174.131.11]) by mailer.scri.fsu.edu (8.8.7/8.7.5) with SMTP id KAA16065 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 10:39:36 -0500 (EST) Received: by ibm11 (AIX 4.1/UCB 5.64) id AA19116; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 10:36:18 -0500 X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL21] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <9811101536.AA19116@ibm11> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 10:36:17 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Mimi Burbank Subject: Re: frontmatter was: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811101441.OAA29688@nag.co.uk> from "David Carlisle" at Nov 10, 98 02:41:37 pm David Carlisle writes: > for the revtex model we had each author could have multiple `main' > addresses. In addition any number of `additional' addresses for > `visiting..' or `previously at..' type addresses. I read this list with great interest, but must comment that maintaining RevTeX is a herculean undertaking, and the AIP is run by mad scientists suffering from dementia and schizophrenia .... and those who use their software begin to suffer as well ;-) mimi burbank (who works with about 60 physicists of varying <<>> ) 10-Nov-1998 16:15:27-GMT,4601;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA28682 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 09:15:23 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA17890; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:41:08 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407805 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:41:06 +0100 Received: from na.uni-tuebingen.de (root@na.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de [134.2.161.64]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA17868 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:41:04 +0100 (MET) Received: from na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de (na6 [134.2.161.170]) by na.uni-tuebingen.de (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA24675 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:40:59 +0100 (MET) Received: (from oliver@localhost) by na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) id QAA06618; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:40:58 +0100 (MET) X-Authentication-Warning: na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de: oliver set sender to oliver@na.uni-tuebingen.de using -f Message-ID: <199811101540.QAA06618@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:40:58 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Marcel Oliver Subject: Re: frontmatter was: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > > > It seems to me that something similar to BibTeX is the best solution. > > There have been some preliminary versions of this mentioned on this > > list. The journal could modify the \maketitle command to get all the > > frontmatter stuff (institute, email, present address, corresponding > > author, acknowledgements to title or authors etc etc) out of a .bib-like > > file, using what it needs and complaining if something is not there. The > > author just writes \title{efwe}\author{Fwfe}\date{fsfs} as usual (OK, > > but one of the problems with BibTeX is the lack of structure in an > entry! that model will not satisfy the need to express the fact that > there are 10 authors; 4 are are from institution B, 3 from institution > C; author 9 is at institution B and D; author 10 is at instutition D, > but currently on leave at A; author 10 is deceased. author 7 is the > corresponding author. I'd like to add two more problems with this idea: o It requires coordination of external data structions between the various authors as well as between authors and publisher, if they all want to get the same printed output. Any solution which does not require the sending of additional files would be much preferred. o Two papers by the same author with the same publisher which are to appear at the same time may carry different addresses, because the papers were written at different institutions and should carry as the main address the address of the institution at which the work was performed. This can not easily accomodated in a BibTeX-like solution. David Carlisle wrote: > The hard part is to get an input syntax that can cope with these type of > requirements and at the same time is not impossibly complicated to use > on a simple two-authors-at-one-institution paper. I can actually see that such a model may make sense when it comes to 200 authors per paper... what about furthering the analogy with BibTeX: Nothing prevents me from inserting an explicit thebibliography environment, which is certainly preferred for trivial bibliographies. Now if one can come up with a hidden, well-defined data-structure for frontmatter items, then one could come up with the following scheme: Several alternative modules at input level: "bibtex like" OR "direct commands from within the document" OR "legacy commands standard classes" OR "legacy commands AMS" OR "legacy commands XXX" In both cases the data is stored in internal macros. Several alternatives at output level which access only the internal macros: "APS style" (possible several variations) OR "plain article" OR "plain book" OR "AMS style" (I guess several) OR ... Marcel 10-Nov-1998 16:29:52-GMT,3783;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA29120 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 09:29:51 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA18690; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:47:51 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407813 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:47:49 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA18678 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:47:47 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id PAA07118; hop 0; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:39:43 GMT Received: from screavie.elsevier.co.uk by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:47:41 +0000 Received: from lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk (lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.7]) by screavie.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id PAA02022 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:47:33 GMT Received: (from srahtz@localhost) by lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) id PAA07264; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:47:38 GMT References: <98110912272255@man.ac.uk> <199811101228.MAA14652@nag.co.uk> <13896.14781.711560.872729@srahtz> <199811101506.QAA13956@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de> Message-ID: <199811101547.PAA07264@lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:47:38 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811101506.QAA13956@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de> Michael writes: > areas. I imagine this would often involve picking the best of two > or three choices and merging in some nice details from the > alternatives that were not selected. Isnt this where You end up with a vast amount of work? and, being perfectionists, You will want to rewrite it all :-} > 4. Very frequent releases > > One potential area for trouble that I see is that there is a symbiosis > on a given computer between the LaTeX system and the documents that it true. its an issue the Linux example does not cover, you are right. but can it get much worse than it is now? how many conversations have I got in my email box with people trying to install JadeTeX and finding that they have to have the very latest LaTeX, or it all falls to pieces? (answer: lots) > kernel) and even of tfm files (recall the scenario a few years ago > with interword spacing in the tfm files generated by fontinst: first > rather narrow, then changed to wider values in a later release))) i still have nightmares about it, thanks > a document that I wrote two years ago and try to run it through LaTeX > again; then I find that one of the pieces that it requires is missing > or doesn't work any more. indeed. and thats under the Mage system we have now... I'd have serious doubts about a Bazaar model for the LaTeX kernel. but a LaTeX-agreed "recommended" layer of packages would be a genuine advance, IMHO. Sebastian 10-Nov-1998 16:32:24-GMT,4637;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA29183 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 09:32:20 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA18738; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:48:10 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407817 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:48:07 +0100 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA18716 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:48:03 +0100 (MET) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98111015254411@man.ac.uk> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 15:25:44 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Let me just add my 2˘ from someone who has had good experience with the Cathedral and is somewhat sceptical of the bazaar. A few, good releases as opposed to `release early, release often' seems preferable to me. Ideally, everything would be distributed with the OS and one would upgrade once a year. I like the idea of maintenance releases, if necessary, as opposed to individual patches. I want maintenance to be possible by someone who doesn't understand the details of the code he is maintaining. My experience is mostly with VMS and related stuff. There is some free VMS stuff, but this is also `cathedral mode' from what I can tell, being developed by the `select few'. I have the impression that a lot of LaTeX developers prefer VMS (including Lamport?) so I might be preaching to the choir but I'm sure many people on this list are fans of Stallman, gnu, Linu{x|s} etc. I think a bazaar approach to LaTeX would make updating even more difficult than it is now. (Standard LaTeX is OK, but stuff in contrib has to be done pretty much by hand.) And I think the documentation and user-level syntax could be more uniform than it is now. Although I enjoy system maintenance, I would prefer to do `real work' and not have to daily monitor the net for the latest updates. As a VMS fan, it would be interesting to see something which has, in my view, the advantages of VMS which was developed at a bazaar and not at a cathedral. And I understand that things like the compilers for VMS from DEC (Digitally Enhanced Compaq:) are developed by a really small group of people. And they are really good. Also in the VMS world is the OSU HTTP_SERVER, which is free and which many people say is better than commercial stuff. But it's the work of one person, so very much in the cathedral (or at least country church:) mode. The fact that linux is `as good as commercial unix' from my point of view doesn't necessarily mean that linux is very good; it could also mean that commercial unix is very bad. Probably, the truth lies somewhere in-between. Getting back to the original thread, from my point of view a goal in using LaTeX for journals is that one can use the full strength of LaTeX. In practice, one finds that one's own favourite packages are `not supported' at the journal end. In particular, this applies to natbib. So I think all essential stuff should be in the core part and not in the contributed part. Since the contrib stuff is not in all distributions etc it's almost as bad as having to find the various packages outside of CTAN---in any case, they have to be installed by hand, one can't count on a colleague/journal being able to process a document written using them etc. And keep in mind the colleague is often not a LaTeX guru but just a normal guy. To me, this implies cathedral mode. -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ My opinions are not necessarily those of NRAL or the University of Manchester. 10-Nov-1998 16:38:47-GMT,4143;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA29323 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 09:38:41 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA20945; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 17:07:57 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407902 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 17:07:55 +0100 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA20928 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 17:07:53 +0100 (MET) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98111016021016@man.ac.uk> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:02:10 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: Re: frontmatter was: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L > > but one of the problems with BibTeX is the lack of structure in an > > entry! that model will not satisfy the need to express the fact that > > there are 10 authors; 4 are are from institution B, 3 from institution > > C; author 9 is at institution B and D; author 10 is at instutition D, > > but currently on leave at A; author 10 is deceased. author 7 is the > > corresponding author. > > I'd like to add two more problems with this idea: > > o It requires coordination of external data structions between > the various authors as well as between authors and publisher, if > they all want to get the same printed output. Any solution which > does not require the sending of additional files would be much > preferred. Yes. However, why not send additional files? Not the equivalent of the .bib, but the equivalent of the .blg. This can be frozen even after the author has updated his equivalent of .bib. Or make it so that a TRIVIAL change (as including the .blg in the .tex file) avoids sending extra files. However, LaTeX2e introduced a standard way to send additional files. So I don't see this as a problem since there are many solutions. > o Two papers by the same author with the same publisher which are to > appear at the same time may carry different addresses, because the > papers were written at different institutions and should > carry as the main address the address of the institution at which > the work was performed. This can not easily accomodated in a > BibTeX-like solution. This is something which must be dealt with regardless of what scheme one uses. > David Carlisle wrote: > > The hard part is to get an input syntax that can cope with these type of > > requirements and at the same time is not impossibly complicated to use > > on a simple two-authors-at-one-institution paper. > > I can actually see that such a model may make sense when it comes to > 200 authors per paper... what about furthering the analogy with > BibTeX: Nothing prevents me from inserting an explicit thebibliography > environment, which is certainly preferred for trivial bibliographies. As above, the two should be compatible. > Now if one can come up with a hidden, well-defined data-structure for > frontmatter items, then one could come up with the following scheme: -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ My opinions are not necessarily those of NRAL or the University of Manchester. 10-Nov-1998 16:46:11-GMT,3022;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA29501 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 09:46:05 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA22805; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 17:23:24 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407944 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 17:23:22 +0100 Received: from nag.co.uk (openmath.nag.co.uk [192.156.217.16]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA22785 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 17:23:20 +0100 (MET) Received: (from davidc@localhost) by nag.co.uk (AIX4.2/UCB 8.7/8.7) id QAA16808; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:22:49 GMT References: <98111016021016@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: <199811101622.QAA16808@nag.co.uk> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:22:49 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: David Carlisle Subject: Re: frontmatter was: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <98111016021016@man.ac.uk> (message from Phillip Helbig on Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:02:10 GMT) > Yes. However, why not send additional files? Not the equivalent of the > .bib, but the equivalent of the .blg. bbl? The publisher is likely to want `the equivalent of the .bib'. While authors may be given latex classes and supporting packages to produce a manuscript that looks more or less like the printed journal, these days the main requirement of the electronic document, especially the frontmatter section, is that it can be parsed and the data stuck into some document database maintained in house by the publisher. In some cases the publisher may want to convert the whole document (as they don't use tex in house at all) but even when they do use tex to format, they probably want to extract the frontmatter fields as data. So the aim of the game is to provide a system where the author provides as much information as possible, not one where they supply the information half digested with a view to one particular set of formatting requirements. (speaking of .bib -> .bbl one thing I did was to try to make a bibtex style set up so that essentially the .bbl file contained sufficient information to re-create the .bib fields, so that even though the author could submit the putatively `formatted' version of the bibliography, the individual fields like author name and journal title and dates were unambiguously marked up in the result, not needing to be guessed from font changes). David 10-Nov-1998 17:10:21-GMT,4910;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA00100 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 10:10:14 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA23920; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 17:33:57 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407952 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 17:33:55 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA23902 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 17:33:53 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id QAA09679; hop 0; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:25:45 GMT Received: from screavie.elsevier.co.uk by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:33:38 +0000 Received: from lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk (lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.7]) by screavie.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id QAA03002 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:33:29 GMT Received: (from srahtz@localhost) by lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) id QAA07366; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:33:35 GMT References: <98111015254411@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: <199811101633.QAA07366@lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:33:35 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <98111015254411@man.ac.uk> Phillip Helbig writes: > Let me just add my 2" from someone who has had good experience with ^ so, in VMS world you pay for things in inches. figures. > developed by the `select few'. I have the impression that a lot of > LaTeX developers prefer VMS (including Lamport?) so I might be preaching gracious? are there are LaTeX developers using VMS? those strange e-TeX people do, I assume, but beyond them? > I think a bazaar approach to LaTeX would make updating even more > difficult than it is now. (Standard LaTeX is OK, but stuff in contrib > has to be done pretty much by hand.) And I think the documentation and > user-level syntax could be more uniform than it is now. sorry, but i think thats an argument for Bazaar. as it stands now, "contrib" is beyond the pale, roll your own, unknown, orphan. it needs bringing into the fold. > Although I enjoy system maintenance, I would prefer to do `real work' > and not have to daily monitor the net for the latest updates. why should you? surely this whole exercise is not for the casual user; most Linux users dont recompile their kernel daily, after all, but get a new CD once a year. the stage i want to reach is that those CDs would be built on the same premises > The fact that linux is `as good as commercial unix' from my point of > view doesn't necessarily mean that linux is very good; it could also i am not sure the objective quality of Linux is at issue. would anyone deny that its an extraordinary creation, by an unusual process? if its good enough for Bill Gates' minions to attack, its good enough for me.... (strange, where are the Microsoft memos attacking VMS? oh no, sorry, they won that war some years ago :-]) > Getting back to the original thread, from my point of view a goal in > using LaTeX for journals is that one can use the full strength of LaTeX. speaking from the point of view of a commercial publisher, we'd rather you didnt use LaTeX at all, full stop :-} > So I think all essential stuff should be in the core part and not in the > contributed part. Since the contrib stuff is not in all distributions > etc it's almost as bad as having to find the various packages outside of this is the whole point of the argument, surely?! to get the contrib stuff OUT of that state, and into a mode where everyone knows that "natbib" is part of "latex level 2". > them etc. And keep in mind the colleague is often not a LaTeX guru but > just a normal guy. > > To me, this implies cathedral mode. but our bishops dont have the resources to maintain the fabric; they can just keep the roof on the chapter house, and the naves are full of chickens. they need a police force to clean up the whole building sebastian 10-Nov-1998 17:24:22-GMT,2487;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA00447 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 10:19:43 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA25154; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 17:47:28 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407974 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 17:47:26 +0100 Received: from heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk (exim@heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk [128.232.32.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA25144 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 17:47:24 +0100 (MET) Received: from dorceus.cl.cam.ac.uk (cl.cam.ac.uk) [128.232.1.34] (rf) by heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 1.82 #1) id 0zdGwo-00031G-00; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:47:18 +0000 Message-ID: Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:47:17 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Robin Fairbairns Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:33:35 GMT." <199811101633.QAA07366@lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk> sebastian quoting philip helbig: > > I think a bazaar approach to LaTeX would make updating even more > > difficult than it is now. (Standard LaTeX is OK, but stuff in contrib > > has to be done pretty much by hand.) And I think the documentation and > > user-level syntax could be more uniform than it is now. > > sorry, but i think thats an argument for Bazaar. as it stands now, "contrib" > is beyond the pale, roll your own, unknown, orphan. it needs bringing > into the fold. there were plans, once upon a time, remember. that's why there's `supported' and `other'. but what with writers of high-quality stuff (such as donald arseneau) going for other/misc for most submissions, and the fact that pretty much anything goes to supported unless the author claims he really doesn't want it, the distinction has rather faded. r 10-Nov-1998 17:59:08-GMT,2429;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA01499 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 10:59:06 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA00077; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 18:18:44 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408101 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 18:18:41 +0100 Received: from heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk (exim@heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk [128.232.32.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA00037 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 18:18:39 +0100 (MET) Received: from dorceus.cl.cam.ac.uk (cl.cam.ac.uk) [128.232.1.34] (rf) by heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 1.82 #1) id 0zdHR9-0000iu-00; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 17:18:39 +0000 Message-ID: Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 17:18:38 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Robin Fairbairns Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:56:36 GMT." <199811101656.QAA29932@nag.co.uk> > I suspect that that is _not_ what is needed, people, including people > claiming they want to fight in a bazaar really want a set of files that > gets official blessing. To do blessings you need a cathedral (a fount > may help as well). > > > but our bishops dont have the resources to maintain the fabric; > > which is where we came in.... so what we need is a few people with the gall of napoleon to turn up one morning and put mitres on their own heads. it seems plain to me that unless someone stands up and says "i'm doing this blessing stuff", it's not going to get done. this is largely because it's a big job and no-one wants to offer someone else's time. the problem is that not every potential candidate has the skill of a napoleon, to match the gall to crown him- or herself. r 10-Nov-1998 17:32:59-GMT,3202;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA00784 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 10:32:40 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA27303; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 18:06:45 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408070 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 18:06:42 +0100 Received: from na.uni-tuebingen.de (root@na.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de [134.2.161.64]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id SAA27275 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 18:06:38 +0100 (MET) Received: from na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de (na6 [134.2.161.170]) by na.uni-tuebingen.de (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) with ESMTP id SAA24858 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 18:06:35 +0100 (MET) Received: from na.uni-tuebingen.de (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) with ESMTP id SAA06739 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 18:06:28 +0100 (MET) X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (X11; I; SunOS 5.6 sun4m) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <36487293.A2ECE3B9@na.uni-tuebingen.de> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 18:06:27 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Marcel Oliver Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L I think the discussion is drifting in the wrong direction. As far as I as an individual user of LaTeX am concerned, things are fine. If I need something, I can find it in teTeX, if it's not there, I'll get it from CTAN. No problem. The question is only: What packages are necessary for author-author and author-publisher document exchange (in all fields in which LaTeX is used)? I, as the author of a scientific article, want to be sure that if I stick to certain conventions (which may be well be much narrower than the whole of CTAN), any reasonable publisher will process my manuscript without delay (and screwups due to retyping, the publisher not knowing about amsmath, etc.). The publisher will probably also want the same guidelines in order to reject the screwy stuff for electronic submission, thus giving the author an "incentive" to submit reasonable files. This, however, cannot work unless a base of packages is defined (if the base is too narrow, authors will do screwy things out of desperation), and UNLESS IT IS WELL DOCUMENTED, which, as far as the practical problems go, is problem number one (perhaps on the same level as the frontmatter stuff). Marcel 10-Nov-1998 17:42:54-GMT,3190;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA01050 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 10:42:43 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA26133; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 17:57:37 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407985 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 17:57:33 +0100 Received: from nag.co.uk (openmath.nag.co.uk [192.156.217.16]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA26072 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 17:57:13 +0100 (MET) Received: (from davidc@localhost) by nag.co.uk (AIX4.2/UCB 8.7/8.7) id QAA29932; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:56:36 GMT References: <98111015254411@man.ac.uk> <199811101633.QAA07366@lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk> Message-ID: <199811101656.QAA29932@nag.co.uk> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:56:36 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: David Carlisle Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811101633.QAA07366@lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk> (message from Sebastian Rahtz on Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:33:35 GMT) Sebastian writes this is the whole point of the argument, surely?! to get the contrib stuff OUT of that state, Having followed Michael's url and read this treatise on religious or secular program development I'm confused. You seem to be asking for a change from the current model to a linux style `bazaar' model. But I thought that was what we had now? The core latex code is essentially stable apart from fixing the occasional more or less obscure bug that comes up. All new development work (on latex2) is in classes and packages, which means that principally it is `bazaar style' and happening in contrib. As in the linux model where you have some distrution like redhat or debian that periodically scoops up a set of tools and makes a distribution out of it the same happens for latex. The point is though that _you_ do it with texlive it is not done by the latex3 project (who I suppose are supposed to be doing Linus impersonations in this model). > and into a mode where everyone knows that > "natbib" is part of "latex level 2". So is all that's needed is a note sent to the tex implementers list saying `please include all the files that are installed by the texlive `recommended' option? I suspect that that is _not_ what is needed, people, including people claiming they want to fight in a bazaar really want a set of files that gets official blessing. To do blessings you need a cathedral (a fount may help as well). > but our bishops dont have the resources to maintain the fabric; which is where we came in.... David 10-Nov-1998 18:03:02-GMT,2821;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA01599 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 11:03:00 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA00803; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 18:25:12 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408113 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 18:25:10 +0100 Received: from nag.co.uk (openmath.nag.co.uk [192.156.217.16]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id SAA00785 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 18:25:07 +0100 (MET) Received: (from davidc@localhost) by nag.co.uk (AIX4.2/UCB 8.7/8.7) id RAA16684; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 17:24:49 GMT References: <36487293.A2ECE3B9@na.uni-tuebingen.de> Message-ID: <199811101724.RAA16684@nag.co.uk> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 17:24:49 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: David Carlisle Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <36487293.A2ECE3B9@na.uni-tuebingen.de> (message from Marcel Oliver on Tue, 10 Nov 1998 18:06:27 +0100) Marcel > The question is only: > > What packages are necessary for author-author and author-publisher > document exchange I think this is a very good point. > and UNLESS IT IS WELL DOCUMENTED, which, as > far as the practical problems go, is problem number one Documented, and agreed. If you (for example:-) were to volunteer to draw up a list of `must have' packages, and wrap them all in some consistent installation and documentation format, and document how this is the minimum required latex installation for document interchange. Then this will be a lot of work (thanks for volunteering!) but it will only help the user who is trying to submit his article if you also pursuade the publisher to accept such documents. For example last I heard were still recommending their authors use latex 2.09, so getting (some) publishers to move may take as much effort as producing the list in the first place. Of course this is a chicken and egg situation. You can't really expect that publishers accept such a list until it exists. (Although as I just pointed out, essentially the tex live CDs provide such a list already). David 10-Nov-1998 18:12:54-GMT,3653;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA01921 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 11:11:46 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA01108; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 18:29:19 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408119 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 18:29:17 +0100 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA01098 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 18:29:14 +0100 (MET) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98111017263922@man.ac.uk> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 17:26:39 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L > I think the discussion is drifting in the wrong direction. > As far as I as an individual user of LaTeX am concerned, things > are fine. If I need something, I can find it in teTeX, if it's > not there, I'll get it from CTAN. No problem. First, not everyone uses tetex or even unix. Second, `getting it from CTAN' is, for a normal `individual user', too much work. The typical user doesn't even know what CTAN is. Even if he does, is he familiar with getting stuff from it? As Joe User he can't install it system wide, so several people could have their own, perhaps inconsistent copies. Even if he knows the ropes and/or is the system manager, installing several packages just to format one document might be too much. > What packages are necessary for author-author and author-publisher > document exchange (in all fields in which LaTeX is used)? Yes, that's the question. > I, as the author of a scientific article, want > to be sure that if I stick to certain conventions (which may be > well be much narrower than the whole of CTAN), any reasonable > publisher will process my manuscript without delay (and screwups > due to retyping, the publisher not knowing about amsmath, etc.). > The publisher will probably also want the same guidelines in order > to reject the screwy stuff for electronic submission, thus giving > the author an "incentive" to submit reasonable files. Also, I want colleagues/co-authors to process it with a minimum of effort. > This, however, cannot work unless a base of packages is defined > (if the base is too narrow, authors will do screwy things out > of desperation), and UNLESS IT IS WELL DOCUMENTED, which, as > far as the practical problems go, is problem number one > (perhaps on the same level as the frontmatter stuff). Yes, it must not be too narrow and must be well documented. -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ My opinions are not necessarily those of NRAL or the University of Manchester. 10-Nov-1998 18:53:35-GMT,7178;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA02992 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 11:52:08 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA06106; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 19:18:49 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408174 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 19:18:47 +0100 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA06087 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 19:18:43 +0100 (MET) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98111018050396@man.ac.uk> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 18:05:04 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L > Phillip Helbig writes: > > Let me just add my 2" from someone who has had good experience with > ^ > so, in VMS world you pay for things in inches. figures. Well, that was `compose c |' so I guess you don't have the DEC multinational character set available and/or don't have 8-bit email. I routinely use compose sequences for stuff like Ċöĝä and so on when sending emails to Scandinavian colleagues. Even if they don't do email from VMS, it arrives as intended. I guess it's down to where their 8-bit character set corresponds to the DEC Multinational Character set. OK, back to 7-bit printable ASCII mode:) > > developed by the `select few'. I have the impression that a lot of > > LaTeX developers prefer VMS (including Lamport?) so I might be preaching > > gracious? are there are LaTeX developers using VMS? those strange > e-TeX people do, I assume, but beyond them? Yes, beyond them. I won't mention any names but let other list members out themselves. :} (My favourite(?) response to `I use VMS' is `is that still legal?'. VMS is MORE modern, has MORE features, is MORE robust and MORE up-to-date than any other OS; some people think it's old and unix is new (actually unix is older) or compare 20-year-old VMS machines to new unix ones and don't consider the comparison the other way around. > sorry, but i think thats an argument for Bazaar. as it stands now, "contrib" > is beyond the pale, roll your own, unknown, orphan. it needs bringing > into the fold. Yes, but one could integrate it into the cathedral as, not a cornerstone, but an additional chapel. > > Although I enjoy system maintenance, I would prefer to do `real work' > > and not have to daily monitor the net for the latest updates. > why should you? surely this whole exercise is not for the casual user; > most Linux users dont recompile their kernel daily, after all, but get > a new CD once a year. the stage i want to reach is that those CDs > would be built on the same premises The casual user suffers if a colleague uses some non-core stuff which is not at his installation. The only solution is a canonical installation which includes almost everything. > i am not sure the objective quality of Linux is at issue. would anyone deny > that its an extraordinary creation, by an unusual process? if its good > enough for Bill Gates' minions to attack, its good enough for > me.... Well, I have other quality criteria. :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) > (strange, where are the Microsoft memos attacking VMS? oh no, > sorry, they won that war some years ago :-]) Not at all. > OpenVMS systems enjoy a leading market share in many worldwide > business-critical markets, and its growth continues as noted that > one out of every five OpenVMS AlphaServer 8200 and 8400 systems > are being purchased by customers new to Compaq. OpenVMS is the > number one rated operating system in the healthcare market, and > OpenVMS has a dominant share of the worlds lottery market. More > than 90 percent of the worlds CPU chips are manufactured on > lines running OpenVMS, more than 50 percent of the worlds > cellular phone billing systems run OpenVMS. And 75 percent of the > worlds top financial exchanges run on Compaq OpenVMS and Tandem > Himalaya systems. There are a lot of things which are too important for anything but VMS. Not highly visible in the academic community, unfortunately, but millions of systems world-wide doing lots of important stuff (like controlling Intel production lines:). I've heard a couple of stories from BIG companies which tried to switch to unix then WENT BACK to VMS. With Compaq now SELLING VMS (my only gripe with DEC of old was that it's marketing was not as good as its products---but that's still better than the other way around) we will see a renaissance, especially after people start using the Galaxy software (for some applications, an order of magnitude more efficiency ON THE SAME HARDWARE than with another OS). > > Getting back to the original thread, from my point of view a goal in > > using LaTeX for journals is that one can use the full strength of LaTeX. > speaking from the point of view of a commercial publisher, we'd rather > you didnt use LaTeX at all, full stop :-} That's fine. But if the publisher ASKS the author to use LaTeX, I think it should be something other than some badly hacked custom .sty files back from the 2.09 days. > > So I think all essential stuff should be in the core part and not in the > > contributed part. Since the contrib stuff is not in all distributions > > etc it's almost as bad as having to find the various packages outside of > this is the whole point of the argument, surely?! to get the contrib > stuff OUT of that state, and into a mode where everyone knows that > "natbib" is part of "latex level 2". Yes, that's the goal, but the question is: the bazaar or make it part of the cathedral somehow. Or perhaps there's another paradigm?! > > them etc. And keep in mind the colleague is often not a LaTeX guru but > > just a normal guy. > > > > To me, this implies cathedral mode. > > but our bishops dont have the resources to maintain the fabric; they > can just keep the roof on the chapter house, and the naves are full of > chickens. they need a police force to clean up the whole building Perhaps some of us should form an order and become monks?! -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ 10-Nov-1998 19:24:42-GMT,3245;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA03920 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 12:24:38 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA02525; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 18:45:27 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408133 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 18:45:24 +0100 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA02510 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 18:45:23 +0100 (MET) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98111017425382@man.ac.uk> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 17:42:53 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L > Then this will be a lot of work (thanks for volunteering!) but it will > only help the user who is trying to submit his article if you also > pursuade the publisher to accept such documents. For example last I > heard were still > recommending their authors use latex 2.09, so getting (some) publishers > to move may take as much effort as producing the list in the first place. Well, let's say it's just down to stupidity on the part of SOME publishers. LaTeX2e is certainly better, especially from the publishers' point of view, than 2.09. If they won't even take THAT step, then I doubt they will go through this either. I've been discussing with some colleagues here a boycott of the journal MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY in favour of ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS, mainly due to the antediluvian LaTeX stuff at MNRAS. It seems a lot of people are really pissed off, but those who make these decisions don't seem to care. It seems to me any publisher worth his salt would have a representative on this list. Some do, some don't---I guess that answers my question. > Of course this is a chicken and egg situation. You can't really expect > that publishers accept such a list until it exists. (Although as I just > pointed out, essentially the tex live CDs provide such a list already). Well, the LaTeX core DOES exist, and many don't even accept that. -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ My opinions are not necessarily those of NRAL or the University of Manchester. 10-Nov-1998 20:35:46-GMT,2834;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id NAA05725 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 13:35:44 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id VAA13695; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 21:05:26 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408257 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 21:05:24 +0100 Received: from ROSE.IPM.AC.IR (vax.ipm.ac.ir [194.225.70.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id VAA13630 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 21:04:43 +0100 (MET) Received: by ROSE.IPM.AC.IR (MX V4.1 VAX) id 166; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 23:33:01 +0330 Message-ID: <009CF08A.EA78CA00.166@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 23:32:59 +0330 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Roozbeh Pournader Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Phillip Helbig wrote: > First, not everyone uses tetex or even unix. Second, `getting it from > CTAN' is, for a normal `individual user', too much work. The typical > user doesn't even know what CTAN is. Even if he does, is he familiar > with getting stuff from it? As Joe User he can't install it system > wide, so several people could have their own, perhaps inconsistent > copies. Even if he knows the ropes and/or is the system manager, > installing several packages just to format one document might be too > much. I agree very much. I make examples from our "far from technology" country. In our user list of FarsiTeX (who are about 300-400), almost everyone has Internet access, and almost 50% are computer hackers/programmers. But the people who know CTAN are about 15, and the people who have used it at least one are about 8. >From these 8, not all can install a package without others help, and in these "others", only one person is not an implementation team member! (Haahaa! I can count the users here! Which one of you can do the same in his country? ;) The mass will use any package we provide. METAPOST (sorry, not a LaTeX package!) is not in the FarsiTeX distribution (since the great manager doesn't like it) then no one uses METAPOST in Iran except me and few friends. (There are two other TeX distributions in Iran that are commercial and very expensive, and it follows that the situation is worse there.) --Roozbeh 10-Nov-1998 21:16:44-GMT,3854;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id OAA06728 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 14:16:15 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id VAA16869; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 21:50:14 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408283 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 21:50:12 +0100 Received: from ROSE.IPM.AC.IR (vax.ipm.ac.ir [194.225.70.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id VAA16758 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 21:49:02 +0100 (MET) Received: by ROSE.IPM.AC.IR (MX V4.1 VAX) id 184; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 00:17:50 +0330 Message-ID: <009CF091.2D3DA080.184@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 00:17:48 +0330 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Roozbeh Pournader Subject: Re: XML (was quotes, a very long time ago) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L David wrote: > these days, have another > hat which says `W3C Math (MathML) Committee member'. It's not all bad, > you know:-) Interesting, interesting! I find every TeX guru somewhere in the *ML world. Today I was looking at the XML FAQ, and found \emph{The Typographer}'s name there (i.e., Peter Flynn). Where should I fly? :))))))))) > MathML only looks large > because you make the mistake of looking at it. GIF is much larger > but you don't (unless you are Sebastian) try and read it bit by bit > in a binary editor. A somehow good, somehow bad comparison. The good part is known, the bad part is that I want to author the MathML, and know every bit of it. Even if the world goes using MathML for math writing, I will clang to writing it by hand. I can't install a graphical MathML editor on every platform I use (currently Linux, MSDOS, Win95, and VMS). > I tend to use emacs for everything, in case you hadn't noticed emacs > users are a minority. Someone has said (I can't remember who): ``Life is too short to learn emacs''. The first time I got in emacs, I could not get out and killed the process from another session :))))) Since then, when I use a piece of software, I first ask: how can one get out of it? ;) > Some of us will continue to use that kind of interface, but MathML > offers the hope of using systems like Scientific Word, and even > Microsoft Word via the MathType/Equation Editor thing and getting Oh oh! First rule: good freely available TeX material should exits always. An undergraduate student whose father's salary is 100 dollars in month can't buy softwares, and this is the case in Iran. (Sorry for localizing.) > something useable out the back, not some obscure rtf extension (out of > MS Word), or LaTeX (out of Scientific word) which is even more obscure to > many people... Many people, but not everyone, I think even if I get very professional in MathML, a simple MathML formula like the famous equivalent of x = \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^{2} - 4ac}}{2a} seems very obscure to me. > There is a very large class of users who would greatly benefit from > being able to enter essentially school or undergraduate level > mathematics in a wysywig fashion and have the mathematics being portable > from their wysywig editor into tex for decent mathematical typesetting, > and (soon?) into browsers for online display, but also symbolic algebra > systems such as Mathematica, or Maple I agree. --Roozbeh 10-Nov-1998 21:19:00-GMT,2558;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id OAA06913 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 14:17:54 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id VAA16891; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 21:50:36 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408287 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 21:50:33 +0100 Received: from ROSE.IPM.AC.IR (vax.ipm.ac.ir [194.225.70.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id VAA16785 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 21:49:27 +0100 (MET) Received: by ROSE.IPM.AC.IR (MX V4.1 VAX) id 171; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 00:17:35 +0330 Message-ID: <009CF091.243A7F80.171@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 00:17:33 +0330 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Roozbeh Pournader Subject: Re: Quotes, HTML, and FrontPage To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Sebastian wrote: > but interfaces like > MathType (which exports MathML) are not at all bad I don't like your suggestion, but the users do. I spoke to some of them today. > no. you use a special editor for special input, why not do the same > with math? I must think about it. Your philosophy is right, but why does it seem wrong in application, I don't know ;) My idea is making the writing/editing possible in a text terminal. (Perhaps with some character shape changes in case of local languages.) But you need a big system to write math. If you can write your changes in e-lisp for emacs, I agree with you, but not every user wants to switch to another program for writing his formulas (specially professionals). They prefer writing the input themselves, and this is not possible with MathML. > i reserve my love for humans and plants :-} Intersting point to notice. My girlfriend hates TeX. You know why. ;) > but you won the footbal match. well done, i enjoyed watching it You can't imagine, you can't imagine, Football is one of very few legal hobbies here. It's one of few reasons people are allowed to cheer, to dance, to be happy. --Roozbeh. 10-Nov-1998 21:46:59-GMT,2865;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id OAA07582 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 14:46:51 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id WAA19183; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 22:25:15 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408326 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 22:25:13 +0100 Received: from blaubaer.kn-bremen.de (root@blaubaer.kn-bremen.de [194.94.232.249]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id WAA19172 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 22:25:11 +0100 (MET) Received: from dream.kn-bremen.de (uucp@localhost) by blaubaer.kn-bremen.de (8.9.1/8.9.1) with UUCP id WAA07023 for latex-l@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 22:10:29 +0100 Received: by dream.kn-bremen.de (1.65/waf) via UUCP; Tue, 10 Nov 98 22:11:53 CET for latex-l@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de References: X-Mailer: Helldiver 1.08 (Waffle 1.65) Lines: 21 Message-ID: <5BQS2AeOBh108h@dream.kn-bremen.de> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 22:11:53 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Martin Schroeder Organization: The Dreaming Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In <199811101724.RAA16684@nag.co.uk> David Carlisle writes: >Then this will be a lot of work (thanks for volunteering!) but it will >only help the user who is trying to submit his article if you also >pursuade the publisher to accept such documents. For example last I >heard were still >recommending their authors use latex 2.09, so getting (some) publishers >to move may take as much effort as producing the list in the first place. If you mean the one that is in a beautiful town in Germany with some ruins of a castle, they now have a quite interesting set of document classes and are recommending _them_. But you can always ask the author of the successor of the cm-fonts -- he designed them... :-))) Best regards Martin -- Martin Schr"oder, MS@Dream.KN-Bremen.DE The three most dangerous things in the world are a programmer with a soldering iron, a hardware type with a program patch and a user with an idea. (The Wizardry Compiled by Rick Cook) 10-Nov-1998 23:21:22-GMT,5274;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id QAA09998 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:21:15 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id AAA24209; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 00:01:12 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407039 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 00:01:09 +0100 Received: from ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.2]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id XAA23973 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 23:57:33 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 23:57:27 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 23:57:17 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 23:56:52 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 23:57:23 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13896.50277.481367.373287@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: What is (... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: , <199811101724.RAA16684@nag.co.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13896.50277.481367.373287@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 23:57:23 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811101724.RAA16684@nag.co.uk> > (Beware: latex support takes more > time than you think: I once thought it would only take up one weekend > and a free trip to Hamburg). I can't think who gave you that idea;-)...so there's no such thing as a free trip---what's new? Latex/Linux: compare and contrast! I have not yet read the article and only skimmed the discussion here so far but the following bit of history may be relevant. A few years ago we were challenged (I think that is the right word) to make the LaTeX distribution and modification conditions more GNU-like;. Following e-mail discussions that make the current discussion look like a single lost packet, this led to a meeting with the Archbishop of Free Software himself, with whom Frank and I had a very challenging (definitely the right word here) and profitable discussion. The result was that we (well, at least the three of us) understood several fundamental differences between maintaining (and developing) a certain two large bits of software: one a compiler system and the other a document processing system. The results of these discussions for LaTeX, clarifying and explaining our policy, are in modguide.tex. I am not at all keen on the concept of "lessons from history" but it seems likely that there are also fundamental differences between an OS system and a document processing system. One of these differences, which is very important and I think also distinguishes LaTeX from Linux, is that LaTeX is both defining a language for describing documents as well as implementing a processor for that language; whereas a lot of parts of both Linux and gcc are implementing processes whose interfaces are defined (and often standardised) elsewhere. Very few people send C code to others who are not C programmers and certainly not to publishers, secretaries, their bosses etc etc etc. (OK, it is possible to distribute some code packages quite widely to people who have access to a reasonable compiler and expect it to get configured, compiled, installed etc reasonably easily). There is nothing in my experience of the Linux world which is anything like any of this at all; what am I missing? Another is that, because the functionality of a compiler or an OS is itself usable only via compiled executables, there is typically a layer of people between the users of the systems and the writers of the code that defines the systems; this multi-level structure does not typically exist with LaTeX. If `using Linux' for most people involved writing bits of code in (a small subset of) C, and that code acted directly on the kernel data structures, then I would not be `using it' and Linus would not be a sane and contented person! None of the above is intended to argue in favour of any particular set-up for handling LaTeX but just to indicate that it needs its own solution, not that which works for a different system. chris 10-Nov-1998 23:21:28-GMT,3067;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id QAA10011 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:21:22 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id AAA24157; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 00:00:36 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407029 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 00:00:34 +0100 Received: from ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.1]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id XAA23893 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 23:56:12 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 23:56:06 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 23:55:48 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 23:55:22 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN2 in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 23:55:58 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13896.50111.843267.752713@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: What is (... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <199811101656.QAA29932@nag.co.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13896.50111.843267.752713@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 23:55:58 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Robin Fairbairns wrote -- > there were plans, once upon a time, remember. that's why there's > `supported' and `other'. plans for what? As I recall, that division was made as it is one that the ctan maintainers could manage ... it was not much to do with what anyone thought was more (or less) useful. > but what with writers of high-quality stuff (such as donald arseneau) > going for other/misc for most submissions, and the fact that pretty > much anything goes to supported unless the author claims he really > doesn't want it, the distinction has rather faded. I had not realised that it was breaking down in such amazing ways! But I sympathise with Donald not wanting to claim any support for his stuff:-)! chris 10-Nov-1998 23:23:19-GMT,9552;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id QAA10055 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 16:23:07 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id AAA24177; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 00:01:04 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407033 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 00:01:02 +0100 Received: from kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE (Ufrank@kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE [134.93.8.158]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id XAA23939 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 23:57:03 +0100 (MET) Received: (from Ufrank@localhost) by kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE (8.8.8/8.8.8) id XAA30661 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 23:57:02 +0100 (MET) X-Authentication-Warning: kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE: Ufrank set sender to latex3 using -f Received: (from latex3@localhost) by frank.zdv.uni-mainz.de (8.6.9/8.6.9) id XAA27547; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 23:54:17 +0100 References: <199811061649.RAA18880@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> <13894.46384.268699.379786@srahtz> <3646CC04.6171ADF1@na.uni-tuebingen.de> <13894.53699.585814.765836@srahtz> <3646DE15.11B3C148@na.uni-tuebingen.de> Message-ID: <199811102254.XAA27547@frank.zdv.uni-mainz.de> Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1998 23:54:17 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Frank Mittelbach Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <3646DE15.11B3C148@na.uni-tuebingen.de> i think that we have several problems here which to some extend pulling the ship into different directions; i think we first need to dis-tangle some of this a bit before it really makes sense to talk models (or even approaches) some claims: - one of the major driving forces of latex is not necessarily the quality of its output but the exchangeability and portability of its input while maintaining a reasonable quality output and (with the necessary skill/knowledge (luck?)) being able to produce without too much fuss really high quality output from a nearly unchanged source - by mid 1992 this was seriously in danger because too many kernel dialects floated around, maintenance was poor and because of a few other reasons. in essence by that time it was often impossible to run even a moderately simple document at one site and expect it to compile without errors somewhere else (let alone produce the same visual document) - 2e was the try to bring that chaos back into some order and by the same time introduce a number of enhancements (at one hand to help promoting the new standard but at the other to provide a basis that allow extensions which can peacefully live together (or at least better than in the past) - i claim that we more or less actually achieved this, it is again possible to exchange documents quite freely as long as they are "clean and simple". Simple here goes a long way further than original latex as defined by lamport, even though Marcel thinks (and he is right) that it is still narrow (but it does cover graphics, color, fonts especially ps fonts, input and output encoding, language support (although i don't think that is where it should be one day) math via amsmath and other stuff) - what hasn't been addressed at all (or only very very marginally) was style or layout design --- [ by the way, anybody who knows my talk given at Stanford 1990 or so about what is wrong with LaTeX 2.09 will see that what i said back then is actually overachieved already with 2e --- so no need for anything like ltx3, is there? well don't answer that now :-} ] - and neither has be front matter stuff been addressed unfortunately Marcel wrote > My basic claim is that base LaTeX is too narrowly defined, and > therefore causes a lot of the document exchange problems which seem > to occur frequently not only between author and publisher, but also > between different authors. well, as David explained, the core LaTeX is simply being defined of what we support personally plus some extensions like amsmath or psnfss for which we either have definite maintenance paths or thought we can support in addition. for this block of the core we provide very strict consistency checks and documents that used this stuff two years ago will run now and will do so in with the december release (will produce identical output) --- exceptions proving the rule. this stability is extremely important in the latex community, even upward compatible changes are considered bad by the majority of the users as we often had to find out because any such change means that some document only works if everybody uses version xyz dated... so portability goes down the drain. the need to be up-to-date if extensions are part of the game is far more accepted (ie getting a new package) but to be forced to change "the latex installation" is unfortunately something most people think is an unnecessary luxury since after all it does work. so ... i followed the discussion with interest and some amusement (sometimes) in my opinion the "core" whatever this is at a certain point in time can only be maintained by a cathedral solution, and staying with the picture, without much better arguments as those brought forward so far, i wouldn't give my blessing to anything else. but as Michael said, we do have the bazaar situation already in anything that appears in contrib (supported or other(wise)) and that is essentially what people feel which is the problem. the crux therefore seems to me how to make the "core" bigger ie move some of the bazaar stuff into the cathedral in an acceptable way second, the linux example is a red herring. its development and implementation model works because it doesn't effect peoples use of the system as it is the single system that is effected if you upgrade your linux (but your ip protocol stays the same it is still tcpic if not the linux model would die too); with latex the situation is that the "system" is not the single latex installation but the combination of all those latex systems out there that you like to communicate with. =================================================================== so ... i do see some good reasons for extending the "core" distribution but it would require new maintenance and support models and it would need somewhat conservative people that understand why it can be dangerous to fix the spacing in article.cls (even though we all know that design-wise it is mostly rubbish) all such extensions and new ideas are great and producing code that works better is fine and those people who know me know that my name is attached to a few extentions that have finally ended up being in standard use --- but with my background in TeX programming i can only say that it is very hard and difficult to try keeping the bigger picture in mind when taking out the knife to make things better. this is all fine if you write your own package class or whatever to serve your private writing style but it is a very different situation if you try to maintain a world wide distributed system which is supposed to be portable world wide. ==================================================================== so ... what i would ask for an extended "core" distribution is (as a minimum) - stability within the distribution, ie all packages would need to work with each other in any legal combination - source stability between distributions, eg at least 98% of the documents should work without problems and without changes to the result in a suitable large number of different maintenance releases - clearly defined and supported maintenance cycles such as the core LaTeX nowadays has (they may be longer, eg a year, but one should not go back to the old days of 2.09 maintenance which was applied whenever it was raining in California) - a maintenance method that supports this core distribution, the current method using latexbug and ending up on the screen of ltx3 project people can't be the way from that point on ==================================================================== so ... in my mind this would mean a lot of volunteer work and a lot of good ideas how to actually set something like this up. perhaps both is possible but it is not enough to draw a recommended list (even though this would need to be at the start of it) it needs more taken the above it would need - standard installation concepts (and thus reimplementation at least of the setup) - standard integration into a regression test concept (see recent tub article by me and David on this for the current core) - a support structure and people how fill it with life - interface documentation (and probably development) for those parts which are not yet clearly defined - ... good night frank ps i should have said something of the about aspects as promised in the beginning but i'm too tired --- perhaps tomorrow 11-Nov-1998 1:40:25-GMT,3000;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id SAA13009 for ; Tue, 10 Nov 1998 18:40:23 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id BAA26520; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 01:17:57 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407102 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 01:17:50 +0100 Received: from wonko.kammer.uni-hannover.de (root@wonko.kammer.uni-hannover.de [130.75.139.49]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id BAA26508 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 01:17:34 +0100 (MET) Received: from milliways.kammer.uni-hannover.de.kammer.uni-hannover.de (reinhard@milliways.kammer.uni-hannover.de [130.75.139.56]) by wonko.kammer.uni-hannover.de (8.8.7/8.8.0) with ESMTP id BAA21015 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 01:17:10 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <009CF091.2D3DA080.184@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> X-Mailer: VM 6.37 under Emacs 20.2.1 Message-ID: <199811110017.BAA21015@wonko.kammer.uni-hannover.de> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 01:17:10 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Reinhard Kotucha Subject: Re: XML (was quotes, a very long time ago) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <009CF091.2D3DA080.184@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> >>>>> "Roozbeh" == Roozbeh Pournader writes: > Someone has said (I can't remember who): ``Life is too short to > learn emacs''. Of course, if you want to use all the features available... > The first time I got in emacs, I could not get > out and killed the process from another session :))))) Since > then, when I use a piece of software, I first ask: how can one > get out of it? ;) Why didn't you use the pull down menues? There is no editor which is more friendly to beginners than emacs. And what about (La)TeX without emacs/auc-tex? Reinhard -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reinhard Kotucha Phone: +49-511-751355 Berggartenstr. 9 D-30419 Hannover mailto:reinhard@kammer.uni-hannover.de ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 11-Nov-1998 9:47:30-GMT,2395;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id CAA22025 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 02:47:26 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA12809; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:18:44 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407354 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:18:42 +0100 Received: from nag.co.uk (openmath.nag.co.uk [192.156.217.16]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA12777 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:18:26 +0100 (MET) Received: (from davidc@localhost) by nag.co.uk (AIX4.2/UCB 8.7/8.7) id JAA16146; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 09:17:53 GMT References: <009CF091.2D3DA080.184@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> <199811110017.BAA21015@wonko.kammer.uni-hannover.de> Message-ID: <199811110917.JAA16146@nag.co.uk> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 09:17:53 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: David Carlisle Subject: Re: XML (was quotes, a very long time ago) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811110017.BAA21015@wonko.kammer.uni-hannover.de> (message from Reinhard Kotucha on Wed, 11 Nov 1998 01:17:10 +0100) > The first time I got in emacs, I could not get > out and killed the process from another session :))))) Since > then, when I use a piece of software, I first ask: how can one > get out of it? ;) > Why didn't you use the pull down menues? Wrong answer. Firstly If you started with emacs 18 as I did then you didn't get menus. well in later versions there was emacstool under sunview which had some kind of mouse support, but not in the style of emacs 19 and 20. The right answers are 1) You are not supposed to leave emacs until you power your machine down. 2) It is obvious that to leave an editor you type ^X ^C what else would it be? that works in all the editors I use. David 11-Nov-1998 9:47:35-GMT,2140;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id CAA22034 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 02:47:34 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA12581; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:16:16 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407350 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:16:13 +0100 Received: from alpha.ntp.springer.de (alpha.ntp.springer.de [192.129.24.9]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA12552 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:16:10 +0100 (MET) Received: from ALPHA.NTP.SPRINGER.DE by ALPHA.NTP.SPRINGER.DE (PMDF V5.1-10 #19300) id <01J41L23H8HW0003T8@ALPHA.NTP.SPRINGER.DE> for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:15:39 CE X-VMS-To: IN%"LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE" MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Message-ID: <01J41L23H8HY0003T8@ALPHA.NTP.SPRINGER.DE> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:15:39 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Joerg Knappen Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Martin Schroeder schrieb: > If you mean the one that is in a beautiful town in Germany with some ruins > of a castle, they now have a quite interesting set of document classes and > are recommending _them_. But you can always ask the author of the > successor of the cm-fonts -- he designed them... :-))) Just for the record: The new classes and options were designed and written by my colleague who is also one of the founding members of Dante e. V. --J"org Knappen 11-Nov-1998 10:06:27-GMT,2926;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id DAA22361 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 03:05:55 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA14059; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:32:55 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407370 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:32:53 +0100 Received: from heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk (exim@heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk [128.232.32.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA14048 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:32:52 +0100 (MET) Received: from dorceus.cl.cam.ac.uk (cl.cam.ac.uk) [128.232.1.34] (rf) by heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 1.82 #1) id 0zdWdw-00062m-00; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 09:32:52 +0000 Message-ID: Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 09:32:49 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Robin Fairbairns Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 10 Nov 1998 23:55:58 +0100." <13896.50111.843267.752713@fell.open.ac.uk> chris rowley wrote: > Robin Fairbairns wrote -- > > > there were plans, once upon a time, remember. that's why there's > > `supported' and `other'. > > plans for what? > > As I recall, that division was made as it is one that the ctan > maintainers could manage ... it was not much to do with what anyone > thought was more (or less) useful. i wasn't a ctan maintainer at the time, but as i interpreted it the intention was that `supported' really meant some sort of guarantee of quality -- hence the inordinate time it took for my footnote (now footmisc) package to get on to the archive (i wrote the first version over christmas 1993, thanks to your kind christmas present to us all that year ;-) > > but what with writers of high-quality stuff (such as donald arseneau) > > going for other/misc for most submissions, and the fact that pretty > > much anything goes to supported unless the author claims he really > > doesn't want it, the distinction has rather faded. > > I had not realised that it was breaking down in such amazing ways! > But I sympathise with Donald not wanting to claim any support for > his stuff:-)! but the ridiculous thing is, he's as conscientious about supporting his packages (wherever they are in the tree) as anyone else. (if not more...) r 11-Nov-1998 10:10:48-GMT,8342;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id DAA22442 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 03:10:47 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA14182; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:34:38 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407376 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:34:36 +0100 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA14171 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:34:34 +0100 (MET) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98111109074366@man.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 09:07:43 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Frank wrote: > i think that we have several problems here which to some extend > pulling the ship into different directions; i think we first need to > dis-tangle some of this a bit before it really makes sense to talk > models (or even approaches) I won't quote most of his post but I agree wholeheartedly with his assessment. > - one of the major driving forces of latex is not necessarily the > quality of its output but the exchangeability and portability of its > input while maintaining a reasonable quality output and (with the > necessary skill/knowledge (luck?)) being able to produce without too > much fuss really high quality output from a nearly unchanged source YES! > - i claim that we more or less actually achieved this, it is again Yes, and praise where praise is due! Good job! > - and neither has be front matter stuff been addressed unfortunately Well, we're getting to that. > for this block of the core we provide very strict consistency checks > and documents that used this stuff two years ago will run now and will > do so in with the december release (will produce identical output) --- I think this is essential. > this stability is extremely important in the latex community, even > upward compatible changes are considered bad by the majority of the > in my opinion the "core" whatever this is at a certain point in time > can only be maintained by a cathedral solution, and staying with the > picture, without much better arguments as those brought forward so > far, i wouldn't give my blessing to anything else. Agreed. > second, the linux example is a red herring. its development and > implementation model works because it doesn't effect peoples use of > the system as it is the single system that is effected if you upgrade > your linux (but your ip protocol stays the same it is still tcpic if > not the linux model would die too); with latex the situation is that > the "system" is not the single latex installation but the combination > of all those latex systems out there that you like to communicate > with. I agree. The model isn't applicable everywhere. > i do see some good reasons for extending the "core" distribution but > it would require new maintenance and support models and it would need > somewhat conservative people that understand why it can be dangerous > to fix the spacing in article.cls (even though we all know that > design-wise it is mostly rubbish) Yes. It's good to mention that conservative people are needed! > - stability within the distribution, ie all packages would need to > work with each other in any legal combination Yes. This is a problem with some of the contrib stuff---not all combinations work together OK, sometimes the order in which they are loaded is important etc. > - clearly defined and supported maintenance cycles such as the core > LaTeX nowadays has (they may be longer, eg a year, but one should > not go back to the old days of 2.09 maintenance which was applied > whenever it was raining in California) Perhaps less effort could be put into rapid updates (twice a year) and use the save labour to implement some of the improvements we've been talking about---isn't once a year enough? A problem I have with updating LaTeX is deciding whether to make the (substantial, if one includes non-core stuff) effort of updating EVERYTHING (installing from scratch is easy enough, even trivial, at least on VMS with Ralf G"artner's distribution, but I want to keep customisations) OR finding the 1% or whatever which has actually changed and replacing that, which all told is about the same amount of work. There is also the issue of updates which can be made simply by replacing files and those which require a rebuild in some sense. Again, updating the core stuff automatically is easy enough, but we want more. Perhaps one could move to the following update model. Once a year there is a new version, as there is now twice a year. Whenever bugs are fixed which can be fixed simply by replacing files, these are announced. There can be a patch web page, a mailing list, whatever. Users can decide whether they need to download the new file (or edit their current one by hand, perhaps, if it's a trivial change) or wait until they next do a `real' upgrade, which will of course include all of these fix-by-replacing-this-file changes. When the `real' upgrade arrives, it will also indicate to what extent it o is just a set of replacement files o includes some new files o requires a rebuild If no rebuild is required, people who like a rapid update could have it even more rapidly than at present. Once a year, one could still do everything in one go, which is probably often enough for those who prefer everything in one go anyway. Perhaps some folks will note a similarity to the VMS update model: there are OS upgrades periodically, but patches are announced when they are available. There is a patch mailing list and they can be downloaded via the net. Each maintainer can decide if the patch is important enough to be installed now etc. Periodically there are maintenance releases (like 7.1-2 which is coming in January or so) which are essentially collections of all patches since the last release (but also perhaps provide minor changes like additional hardware support) while major OS upgrades (like 7.2 next spring) are less frequent, introduce new features and require a `rebuild' in some sense. This seems to work well. I guess there are about the same number of VMS users as LaTeX users(?) and about the same mixture of folks who are doing essentially the same stuff they were ten years ago and are interested in keeping it going without change under the new version and innovators who make use of many new features when they come out. As a user and lover of VMS and LaTeX, I notice that I feel more comfortable with keeping my OS upgraded as than I do keeping [TEXMF...] upgraded, although of course the former is actually much more complex (especially when one includes layered products like compilers etc and considers the interaction between various bits). Of course, VMS is designed quite differently than, for example, the unix `bag of tools' philosophy. I guess I want less a bag of tools, a bazaar, and more something like the cathedral, which seems to work well with VMS. Since LaTeX is essentially quite restricted in its aims, I think it's worth going for a cathedral model and bringing as much stuff as possible under its roof. Comments? -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ My opinions are not necessarily those of NRAL or the University of Manchester. 11-Nov-1998 10:26:01-GMT,3185;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id DAA22668 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 03:25:48 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA16016; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:56:15 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407404 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:56:13 +0100 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA15066 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:45:40 +0100 (MET) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98111109410187@man.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 09:41:01 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L > None of the above is intended to argue in favour of any particular > set-up for handling LaTeX but just to indicate that it needs its own > solution, not that which works for a different system. > > > chris I agree. With regard to the comparison between LaTeX and OS's, Linux etc. I think it's fair to point out that there are OS's which are produced in cathedrals (or by the Pope himself) and those cobbled together at bazaars and in each category there are better and worse examples. There is also a selection effect in that a lot of people talk about linux since it was something of a surprise that it worked out so well---we probably don't hear much about failed bazaar projects. Never having used any microsoft stuff(!) I'm not that competent to comment, but probably one reason one hears so many complaints about it is because one expects more from a cathedral (well, someone said His Billness is the Antichrist, but you get the idea[1]). In other words, people don't hear much about either failed bazaars or good cathedrals, since that's what's expected, but hear about successful bazaars and failed cathedrals. There are a lot of very good cathedral products out there which are very good and chugging away and are very successful but one never hears anything about them. Imagine if one judged countries of the world by how often they appear on the news! -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ My opinions are not necessarily those of NRAL or the University of Manchester. 11-Nov-1998 10:28:37-GMT,2418;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id DAA22705 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 03:28:01 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA16189; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:58:29 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407419 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:58:27 +0100 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA15354 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:49:45 +0100 (MET) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98111109490802@man.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 09:49:08 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: Re: XML (was quotes, a very long time ago) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L > > The first time I got in emacs, I could not get > > out and killed the process from another session :))))) Since > > then, when I use a piece of software, I first ask: how can one > > get out of it? ;) > > Why didn't you use the pull down menues? I suppose it is possible that things hang and they are not accessible. I've never seen it with emacs, but I don't use emacs much (and then often -nw). Something I've seen a lot on different platforms though is that some `invisible emacs' hogs the CPU and the user, unless he does a ps, doesn't even know it's running. -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ My opinions are not necessarily those of NRAL or the University of Manchester. 11-Nov-1998 10:33:35-GMT,4857;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id DAA22789 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 03:33:29 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id LAA16344; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 11:00:29 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407432 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 11:00:27 +0100 Received: from nag.co.uk (openmath.nag.co.uk [192.156.217.16]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA15487 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:50:49 +0100 (MET) Received: (from davidc@localhost) by nag.co.uk (AIX4.2/UCB 8.7/8.7) id JAA16164; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 09:50:30 GMT References: <009CF091.2D3DA080.184@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> Message-ID: <199811110950.JAA16164@nag.co.uk> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 09:50:30 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: David Carlisle Subject: Re: XML (was quotes, a very long time ago) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <009CF091.2D3DA080.184@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> (message from Roozbeh Pournader on Wed, 11 Nov 1998 00:17:48 +0330) > I can't install a graphical MathML editor on every platform I use > (currently Linux, MSDOS, Win95, and VMS). The original (which I was not on) MathML committee made the decision to make MathML an XML application. (This was rather lucky as since then XML has really taken off and become the flavour of the month...) That inevitably meant that MathML would have a very verbose syntax, as the main difference between XML and SGML is that all the minimisation and shortcut markup features in SGML are thrown out of XML. They made the decision at around that time (which is still quite controversial, I suppose, that the important thing about MathML would be that it should markup the structure. The original charter had a `requirement' that MathML (then called HTML Math) would be easy to edit by hand. This aim is _explicitly_ dropped in the MathML recommendation, hand editing (although nice) was not the priority. That being said, in fact it _is_ possible to hand write MathML, I have done quite a lot of that this year. However I do not think that that is really the way things will work. I do not think you will have to buy or install a graphical editor. For emacs for instance I would expect that you would be able to write something like $x^2+2$ and hit a key and have it insert the right thing which, for those that don't know MathML is either x 2 + 2 in Presentation MathML or x 2 2 in Content MathML (hope I got those right:-) me> Some of us will continue to use that kind of interface, but MathML me> offers the hope of using systems like Scientific Word, and even me> Microsoft Word via the MathType/Equation Editor thing and getting > Oh oh! First rule: good freely available TeX material should exits always. > An undergraduate student whose father's salary is 100 dollars in month > can't buy softwares, and this is the case in Iran. (Sorry for localizing.) I do understand the importance of free software. (I have, after all spent probably by now thousands of hours supporting free software of one sort or another). However the TeX world is not really the problem, TeX users are used to the idea of high level markup and transformations from one format to another while retaining meaning. But Microsoft is not ever going to make MSWord write TeX. It _will_ however make it write XML and possibly MathML. This gives the chance to bring `the tex world' in to line, and in communication with, the (much larger) world using more conventional commercial software. The free tools will still be there and will get modified, given time, to support MathML and TeX equally well, it is getting the expensive tools to be any good that is harder. It's a strange world. > a simple MathML formula like the famous equivalent of > x = \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^{2} - 4ac}}{2a} > seems very obscure to me. but as of today the above is `very obscure' to most systems other than latex, but the MathML version can be read (and written) by (test versions of) most of the major symbolic algebra packages and (hopefully soon) by the major web browsers, and also, by TeX. David 11-Nov-1998 11:12:42-GMT,3244;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id EAA23386 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 04:12:40 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id LAA19268; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 11:35:13 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407451 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 11:35:11 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA19244 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 11:35:04 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id KAA26842; hop 0; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:26:58 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:34:47 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <009CF091.2D3DA080.184@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> Message-ID: <13897.25532.338237.646561@srahtz> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:15:24 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: XML (was quotes, a very long time ago) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <009CF091.2D3DA080.184@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> Roozbeh Pournader writes: > Interesting, interesting! I find every TeX guru somewhere in the > *ML world. Today I was looking at the XML FAQ, and found > \emph{The Typographer}'s name there (i.e., Peter Flynn). > Where should I fly? :))))))))) actually, i'd say that TeXxies are marginal in the XML world. most of the big names either abandoned TeX some time back, or never knew it, so far as I can see. > Oh oh! First rule: good freely available TeX material should exits always. "rule"? you make it sound like the silly US constitution, as if to say "right"! > Many people, but not everyone, I think even if I get very professional > in MathML, a simple MathML formula like the famous equivalent of > x = \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^{2} - 4ac}}{2a} > seems very obscure to me. you can carry on writing this, and have converters to turn it to MathML, no problem (I say this, having worked on a LaTeX to MathML conversion system with Eitan Gurari, and I assure you that it works). BUT BUT BUT you will find it hard indeed to generate *semantic* MathML from your TeX markup. Someone might want to consider writing a LATeX package which implements a markup for semantic math which will translate to MathML easily Sebastian 11-Nov-1998 12:01:12-GMT,2716;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA24190 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 05:01:06 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id MAA25432; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:34:57 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407574 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:34:55 +0100 Received: from ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.1]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA25416 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:34:53 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:34:16 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:32:32 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:32:04 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:33:16 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13897.29973.17154.209050@fell.o] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: XML (was ... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <98111109490802@man.ac.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13897.29973.17154.209050@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:33:16 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: XML (was quotes, a very long time ago) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <98111109490802@man.ac.uk> > Something I've seen a lot on different platforms though is > that some `invisible emacs' hogs the CPU and the user, unless he does a > ps, doesn't even know it's running. It's not only the invisible ones that have this property: it needs to change its name as it is now: One Twenty Eight Megabytes And ... But in fact there are far worse offenders around these days. chris 11-Nov-1998 12:06:28-GMT,3037;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA24260 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 05:05:56 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id MAA25084; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:31:45 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407570 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:31:43 +0100 Received: from ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.2]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA25074 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:31:41 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:30:42 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:29:30 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:29:03 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:29:58 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13897.29597.404548.937641@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: What is (... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <98111109410187@man.ac.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13897.29597.404548.937641@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:29:58 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <98111109410187@man.ac.uk> > but probably one reason one hears so many complaints about it is because > one expects more from a cathedral (well, someone said His Billness is > the Antichrist, but you get the idea[1]). This suggests a new line in jokes(probably it exists somewhere?): If Bill were The Pope then (maybe the if is redundanrt here?) Or if The Pope ran MS then But, on second thoughts, I am not sure that I can think of much that would change in either organisation under such a swap. > Imagine if one judged countries of the world by > how often they appear on the news! Eg the US of A? (Just got that one in before Sebastian.) But perhaps that is one country that does want to be judged by the media it lives on? chris 11-Nov-1998 12:25:20-GMT,2776;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA24587 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 05:25:16 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA28026; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:00:20 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407599 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:00:17 +0100 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA28001 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:00:16 +0100 (MET) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98111111485782@man.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 11:48:57 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L > > but probably one reason one hears so many complaints about it is because > > one expects more from a cathedral (well, someone said His Billness is > > the Antichrist, but you get the idea[1]). The [1] was supposed to refer to a footnote I forgot to put in. See below for the Fortran90 code! > If Bill were The Pope then (maybe the if is redundanrt here?) Would there be an increase in premarital sex in Redmond? > Or if The Pope ran MS then At least there would be a functioning support network. > Eg the US of A? (Just got that one in before Sebastian.) But perhaps > that is one country that does want to be judged by the media it lives on? I was thinking of the fact that one usually only hears about countries in the news when something bad happens. I hear Monica's selling her story. Could she get more if it was Bill Gates instead of Bill Clinton? Would it be more believable? Would she have said `so THAT's why you call it microsoft'? -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ My opinions are not necessarily those of NRAL or the University of Manchester. 11-Nov-1998 12:34:25-GMT,4687;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA24754 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 05:33:52 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA28405; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:04:38 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407624 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:04:37 +0100 Received: from ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.1]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA28384 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:04:33 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:04:14 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:03:53 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:03:26 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN2 in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:04:03 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13897.30605.630705.504541@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: XML (was ... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <009CF091.2D3DA080.184@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13897.30605.630705.504541@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:04:03 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: XML (was quotes, a very long time ago) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811110950.JAA16164@nag.co.uk> David Carlisle wrote -- > The original (which I was not on) MathML committee made the decision to > make MathML an XML application. (This was rather lucky as since then XML > has really taken off and become the flavour of the month...) Only in the "real soon now" world; I would say that, even with the mega-bucks behind it, it still needs to be `real-world tested'. I am not trying to knock it but it is not unknown for things like this to fail the reality test despite being excellent concepts and well-implemented. I really wanted to write my assessment of MathML and its relationship to a (vanishingly) small world to everyone but those in it of research mathematics but that deserves a full paper. MathML and Sebastian's ideas of semantic mark-up cater very well for the ideal of what Physicists and Computer Scientists (ie people who designed Mathematica and Maple) think maths and maths notation is. This kind of maths does exist and, from very little knowledge, I believe those physicists who say that they can use, indeed need, a maths notation that is like The Ultimate Programming Language. One where, for example, making a symbol bold has an absolute meaning (like changing `while' to `until' in programming. The kind of maths I indulge in (when not indulging in chat on serious e-mail lists, etc etc:-) is not like this, even at the undergraduate level). It's use of notation and its relation to the semantics are very complex and probably;y not well-understood (they are more like the relationship of natural language to the real world than like the relationship of Pascal to machine code). I know that David is aware of this and that he was addressing other issues. But other contributors have mentioned this complexity and it does have to be addressed. There are other very mundane reasons why some aspects of the MathML-way-of-thinking are good for all users of math notation. One of these is the concept of ; this is a bad name for something that Don called a `subformula' but which is very badly handled (both syntactically and semantically in `standard TeX/LaTeX'). i shall write more about this some time as it highlights the need to change the way people think whilst not wishing to remove from them their beloved \s (note that I am not so sure about allowing the {}s to remain!). chris 11-Nov-1998 12:34:33-GMT,2333;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA24759 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 05:34:31 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA28231; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:03:24 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407606 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:03:22 +0100 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA28215 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:03:20 +0100 (MET) X-VMS-To: LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98111112023277@man.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:02:32 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: forgot it again! To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L > > > but probably one reason one hears so many complaints about it is because > > > one expects more from a cathedral (well, someone said His Billness is > > > the Antichrist, but you get the idea[1]). > > The [1] was supposed to refer to a footnote I forgot to put in. See > below for the Fortran90 code! Here it is: PROGRAM BILL CHARACTER (LEN=1), DIMENSION(9) :: & & GATES=(/'B','I','L','L','G','A','T','E','S'/) PRINT*, 'The number of the beast is ', SUM(IACHAR(GATES)),'; only off by 3!' END PROGRAM BILL -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ My opinions are not necessarily those of NRAL or the University of Manchester. 11-Nov-1998 12:58:34-GMT,3950;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA25119 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 05:58:17 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA00026; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:23:36 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407639 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:23:33 +0100 Received: from nag.co.uk (openmath.nag.co.uk [192.156.217.16]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA29976 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:23:16 +0100 (MET) Received: (from davidc@localhost) by nag.co.uk (AIX4.2/UCB 8.7/8.7) id MAA14610; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:22:43 GMT References: <009CF091.2D3DA080.184@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> <13897.30605.630705.504541@fell.open.ac.uk> Message-ID: <199811111222.MAA14610@nag.co.uk> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:22:43 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: David Carlisle Subject: Re: XML (was quotes, a very long time ago) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13897.30605.630705.504541@fell.open.ac.uk> (message from Chris Rowley on Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:04:03 +0100) > it still needs to be `real-world tested'. Clearly it fails that test today, but who knows what tomorrow will bring. > I am not trying to knock it > MathML and Sebastian's ideas of semantic mark-up cater very well for > the ideal of what Physicists and Computer Scientists (ie people who > designed Mathematica and Maple) think maths and maths notation is. True. The phrase that you are supposed to use in this context (for some strange reason) is ``K through 12'' I am not sure if that automatically means anything to American readers, it didn't mean anything to me until it was explained that this meant basically starting school until first year University. Ie almost no 20th century mathematics. Not surprisingly, 19th Century Mathematics is by now reasonably stable, rather like LaTeX 2.09 I suppose. > The kind of maths I indulge in (when not indulging in chat on serious > e-mail lists, etc etc:-) is not like this, But (Content) MathML is not designed for you. OpenMath is. OpenMath is what I am supposed to be doing (when not indulging in chat on serious e-mail lists, etc etc:-). The import of MathMl for OpenMath is that it potentially supplies a rendering mechanism. > Don called a `subformula' but which is very badly handled (both > syntactically and semantically in `standard TeX/LaTeX'). Since Chris and I appear to be pretending to reply to each other's messages while in fact speaking to a wider audience, I could point out in particular the fact that not everyone seems to realise, that if you put something inside {....} in TeX in math mode the effect is rather strange, all spacing is frozen, and all line breaking is prevented, just as if that had been an \mbox construction if you actually used an explicit box, it would also fix other things, like \textstyle, but in all other respects groups in math mode behave like boxes (except for \begingroup groups which just behave really strangely:-) A typical MathML renderer is recommended to progressively alter its line breaking behaviour depending on the depth of mrow nesting, which is rather different from the TeX all or nothing behaviour. (As far as I know none of the currently available MathMl renderers actually do this, or get anywhere near TeX quality generally, but it is early days yet). David 11-Nov-1998 13:04:23-GMT,2654;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA25230 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 06:04:17 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA01854; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:42:15 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407671 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:42:13 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA01823 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:42:04 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id MAA02421; hop 0; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:34:01 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:41:47 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <009CF091.2D3DA080.184@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> <13897.30605.630705.504541@fell.open.ac.uk> <199811111222.MAA14610@nag.co.uk> Message-ID: <13897.34231.184172.75776@srahtz> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:40:23 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: XML (was quotes, a very long time ago) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811111222.MAA14610@nag.co.uk> David Carlisle writes: > it was explained that this meant basically starting school until first > year University. Ie almost no 20th century mathematics. Not you and Chris sound like Simon Rattle saying that "if you listen to enough Luciano Berio, you'll really like it, _honest_. and that Dallapiccola, he'll have you on the edge of your seats" the cognoscenti will realize that i stopped advancing in music about the same date i stopped advancing in math, ie c. 1968 [1] Sebastian [1] no, Chris, no! I am NOT proud of my ignorance! 11-Nov-1998 13:08:06-GMT,3504;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA25296 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 06:08:04 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA01836; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:42:08 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407667 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:42:06 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA01822 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:42:03 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id MAA02402; hop 0; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:33:48 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:41:35 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <009CF091.2D3DA080.184@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> <13897.30605.630705.504541@fell.open.ac.uk> Message-ID: <13897.33070.82784.22548@srahtz> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:21:02 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: XML (was quotes, a very long time ago) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13897.30605.630705.504541@fell.open.ac.uk> Chris Rowley writes: > Only in the "real soon now" world; I would say that, even with the > mega-bucks behind it, it still needs to be `real-world tested'. > an awful lot of people have their shirts on XML. its extremely widely deployed. are you still waiting for Java to be real-world tested too? some people are still waiting for everything except FORTRAN to be real-world tested. > MathML and Sebastian's ideas of semantic mark-up cater very well for > the ideal of what Physicists and Computer Scientists (ie people who > designed Mathematica and Maple) think maths and maths notation is. leaving me out of it, since I have no views, why is your math more "real" than their math? your view comes over as awfully elitist and snobbish :-} > level). It's use of notation and its relation to the semantics are > very complex and probably;y not well-understood (they are more like > the relationship of natural language to the real world than like the fine. you carry on with presentation mathml. no-one forces you to use content mathml. i dont see any conflict > of these is the concept of ; this is a bad name for something > that Don called a `subformula' but which is very badly handled (both > syntactically and semantically in `standard TeX/LaTeX'). i shall presumably you would agree, then, that one possibility is a new LaTeX (presentation) math markup learning the lessons of MathML? sebastian 11-Nov-1998 13:38:11-GMT,3377;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA25810 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 06:38:05 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA05178; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 14:12:48 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407714 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 14:12:44 +0100 Received: from heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk (exim@heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk [128.232.32.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA05162 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 14:12:41 +0100 (MET) Received: from dorceus.cl.cam.ac.uk (cl.cam.ac.uk) [128.232.1.34] (rf) by heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 1.82 #1) id 0zda4f-0006zM-00; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:12:41 +0000 Message-ID: Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:12:39 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Robin Fairbairns Subject: Re: XML (was quotes, a very long time ago) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:40:23 GMT." <13897.34231.184172.75776@srahtz> sebastian writes: > David Carlisle writes: > > it was explained that this meant basically starting school until first > > year University. Ie almost no 20th century mathematics. Not > > you and Chris sound like Simon Rattle saying that "if you listen to > enough Luciano Berio, you'll really like it, _honest_. and that > Dallapiccola, he'll have you on the edge of your seats" rattle's right, of course ;-) > the cognoscenti will realize that i stopped advancing in music about > the same date i stopped advancing in math, ie c. 1968 [1] (and the very fact that you're *such* a texpert reminds us all that tex has applications beyond those for which it was originally designed.) however, i think you're being unfair to Them. by common consent, the quality of tex's (and hence latex's) typesetting of mathematics has had a significant influence on the extent to which they've been `taken up' in many fields of endeavour. an important one of those fields has been mathematics itself. we are (or are supposed to be) discussing the future of latex on this list. in that context, the relation of latex to xml (and its friends and relations) has arisen. imho, it's valuable to have input from practising mathematicians on xml's suitability as a vehicle for `current mathematics', just as i would welcome input from a composer on musicml's suitability for expressing dallapiccola's effusions[*]. let's not lose sight of what we're discussing, though: we need to know if the xml-related efforts can provide us with models of what we want to do within latex, or whether it's too restrictive for the full generality of what latex does for people today. robin [*] unlikely, i would imagine: his scores look *very* odd ;-) 11-Nov-1998 17:03:25-GMT,2633;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA00096 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:02:56 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA25460; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 17:29:57 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407891 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 17:29:54 +0100 Received: from salmon.maths.tcd.ie (mmdf@salmon.maths.tcd.ie [134.226.81.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA25440 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 17:29:52 +0100 (MET) Received: from turing.maths.tcd.ie by salmon.maths.tcd.ie with SMTP id ; 11 Nov 98 16:29:52 +0000 (GMT) Received: (from tim@localhost) by turing.maths.tcd.ie (8.8.7/8.8.5) id QAA30625 for LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 16:29:52 GMT References: <98110912272255@man.ac.uk> <199811101228.MAA14652@nag.co.uk> <13896.14781.711560.872729@srahtz> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.93.2i Message-ID: <19981111162952.B30536@maths.tcd.ie> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 16:29:52 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Timothy Murphy Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13896.14781.711560.872729@srahtz>; from Sebastian Rahtz on Tue, Nov 10, 1998 at 01:03:57PM +0000 On Tue, Nov 10, 1998 at 01:03:57PM +0000, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > I cannot speak for the others, but i would very much welcome an agreed > "recommended" level of packages above the base level, so that one can > stop saying to people "oh, sorry, you have XXXtex, they dont ship > package ZZZ" I wonder if it would not be possible to lay down a fairly strict protocol governing "acceptable" packages, so that one could automate downloading? At present one actually has to read the README to find out what to do (eg put associated font files in the right place). -- Timothy Murphy e-mail: tim@maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland 11-Nov-1998 17:17:20-GMT,3122;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA00501 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:17:14 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA27252; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 17:51:32 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407909 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 17:51:31 +0100 Received: from sarah.albany.edu (sarah.albany.edu [169.226.1.103]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA27242 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 17:51:26 +0100 (MET) Received: from hilbert.math.albany.edu (hilbert.math.albany.edu [169.226.23.52]) by sarah.albany.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA16474 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 11:51:15 -0500 (EST) Received: (from hammond@localhost) by hilbert.math.albany.edu (8.8.4/8.8.3) id LAA10405 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 11:51:14 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <199811111651.LAA10405@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 11:51:14 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "William F. Hammond" Subject: Re: XML (was quotes, a very long time ago) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L David -- (Private) I know very few mathematicians who have thought about it who "trust" MathML. For myself I will be prepared to live with it, but I doubt that it achieves what it claims beyond the level of engineering mathematics. Have you seen my draft on notation? He may have circulated it to the cathedral chapter. But nobody replied, so I don't know. If that body feels that it lacks the expertise, it should get help. The draft may be found at http://www.albany.edu/~hammond/gellmu/notation. It is plain text and it is *very* drafty. (I think that I showed it to Miner.) Are you familiar with Richard Fateman's experiment with a table of integrals? Oh! Eitan Gurari's stuff with Sebastian brings up the question whether the MathML Cathedral Chapter understands that DVI, like the new scalable vector graphics (SVG) proposal at W3C, is XML. And did Adobe understand this when they made PDF? Hmmm... DVI processors usually seek, as I recall. (But probably not Geoffrey Tobin's "dv2dt".) That means that DVI is not browser ready. Still at an authoring site you could upgrade it (analogous to Eitan Gurari's game, but with regular special-free DVI) and hope to make browser fodder, couldn't one? I would not be a good quick judge of whether it is practical; I'm just not close enough to DVI. -- Bill 11-Nov-1998 17:22:45-GMT,2547;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA00484 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:16:12 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA27393; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 17:54:16 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407915 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 17:54:14 +0100 Received: from salmon.maths.tcd.ie (mmdf@salmon.maths.tcd.ie [134.226.81.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA27383 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 17:54:12 +0100 (MET) Received: from turing.maths.tcd.ie by salmon.maths.tcd.ie with SMTP id ; 11 Nov 98 16:54:13 +0000 (GMT) Received: (from tim@localhost) by turing.maths.tcd.ie (8.8.7/8.8.5) id QAA30804 for LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 16:54:12 GMT References: <98111015254411@man.ac.uk> <199811101633.QAA07366@lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.93.2i Message-ID: <19981111165412.C30536@maths.tcd.ie> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 16:54:12 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Timothy Murphy Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811101633.QAA07366@lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk>; from Sebastian Rahtz on Tue, Nov 10, 1998 at 04:33:35PM +0000 On Tue, Nov 10, 1998 at 04:33:35PM +0000, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > but our bishops dont have the resources to maintain the fabric; they > can just keep the roof on the chapter house, and the naves are full of > chickens. they need a police force to clean up the whole building It seems to me that the development models for Linux and LaTeX are very similar. The entry to the Linux kernel is pretty strictly controlled, as far as I can see. Of course Linus is much kinder than Them. -- Timothy Murphy e-mail: tim@maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland 11-Nov-1998 17:38:39-GMT,3092;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA00996 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:38:35 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA28846; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 18:13:25 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407953 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 18:13:23 +0100 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA28832 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 18:13:21 +0100 (MET) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98111117095539@man.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 17:09:55 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L > > I cannot speak for the others, but i would very much welcome an agreed > > "recommended" level of packages above the base level, so that one can > > stop saying to people "oh, sorry, you have XXXtex, they dont ship > > package ZZZ" Yes, this is the problem. > I wonder if it would not be possible > to lay down a fairly strict protocol > governing "acceptable" packages, > so that one could automate downloading? > > At present one actually has to read the README > to find out what to do > (eg put associated font files in the right place). Right. A pain. I think the solution is to put more stuff in the core part. One can actually automatise updating the core quite easily. Of course, stuff in core must be guaranteed to work with other stuff in the core etc. On the other hand, it's nice to have contrib stuff `use at your own risk' at some official (CTAN) site. To sum up, get rid of contrib/supported. If it's supported, it should go into the core. Perhaps one needs a filter here to avoid redundancy in the core and assure quality, but basically if it's good, someone has taken the effort and is supporting it, after this filter why not put it in the core. There is then core and everything else, which can be like a trial area. Gradually core can grow. -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ My opinions are not necessarily those of NRAL or the University of Manchester. 11-Nov-1998 17:40:13-GMT,2546;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA01045 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:39:58 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA28500; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 18:08:28 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407947 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 18:08:26 +0100 Received: from salmon.maths.tcd.ie (mmdf@salmon.maths.tcd.ie [134.226.81.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA28490 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 18:08:24 +0100 (MET) Received: from turing.maths.tcd.ie by salmon.maths.tcd.ie with SMTP id ; 11 Nov 98 17:08:22 +0000 (GMT) Received: (from tim@localhost) by turing.maths.tcd.ie (8.8.7/8.8.5) id RAA30856 for LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 17:08:22 GMT References: <98111018050396@man.ac.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.93.2i Message-ID: <19981111170821.D30536@maths.tcd.ie> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 17:08:21 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Timothy Murphy Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <98111018050396@man.ac.uk>; from Phillip Helbig on Tue, Nov 10, 1998 at 06:05:04PM +0000 On Tue, Nov 10, 1998 at 06:05:04PM +0000, Phillip Helbig wrote: > The casual user suffers if a colleague uses some non-core stuff which is > not at his installation. The only solution is a canonical installation > which includes almost everything. I must say I would prefer the exact opposite -- a system where one could automatically retrieve anything needed -- fonts or packages -- over the net. I mean a TeX system which regarded the CTANs as part of the system, so kpathsea (or whatever) looked first on the local system, and then further afield if necessary. -- Timothy Murphy e-mail: tim@maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland 11-Nov-1998 17:45:04-GMT,2903;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA01189 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:44:30 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA28325; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 18:06:02 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407943 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 18:06:00 +0100 Received: from sarah.albany.edu (sarah.albany.edu [169.226.1.103]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id SAA28309 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 18:05:56 +0100 (MET) Received: from hilbert.math.albany.edu (hilbert.math.albany.edu [169.226.23.52]) by sarah.albany.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA17771 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:05:54 -0500 (EST) Received: (from hammond@localhost) by hilbert.math.albany.edu (8.8.4/8.8.3) id MAA10552 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:05:53 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <199811111705.MAA10552@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:05:53 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "William F. Hammond" Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Phillip Helbig writes: > There are a lot of very good cathedral products out there which are > very good and chugging away and are very successful but one never > hears anything about them. I do not doubt this point. In fact, there is one, a computer algebra system, that I use. That said, all other things being equal, I find it easier to trust an item if (1) it is of modular design, (2) it is platform and OS independent, and (3) I know that the source is available for free. I regard each of these characteristics as something that promotes its long term reliability for me. [The computer algebra system to which I alluded is reasonable for (1) and (2) and not completely terrible in regard to (3) if one knows the ropes although, to my knowledge, the source is not freely available. (I think that the source is available for inspection at a price, but I would never go there.)] I have seen many, many proprietary things lacking these characteristics that have failed me and others at critical moments. (And I have never understood whether "bugs" are covered by copyrights and, if applicable, patents. ;-) ) -- Bill 11-Nov-1998 17:48:33-GMT,2549;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA01288 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:48:01 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA29541; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 18:22:04 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407970 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 18:22:01 +0100 Received: from salmon.maths.tcd.ie (mmdf@salmon.maths.tcd.ie [134.226.81.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA29524 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 18:21:59 +0100 (MET) Received: from turing.maths.tcd.ie by salmon.maths.tcd.ie with SMTP id ; 11 Nov 98 17:21:59 +0000 (GMT) Received: (from tim@localhost) by turing.maths.tcd.ie (8.8.7/8.8.5) id RAA30918 for LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 17:21:58 GMT References: , <199811101724.RAA16684@nag.co.uk> <13896.50277.481367.373287@fell.open.ac.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.93.2i Message-ID: <19981111172158.E30536@maths.tcd.ie> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 17:21:58 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Timothy Murphy Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13896.50277.481367.373287@fell.open.ac.uk>; from Chris Rowley on Tue, Nov 10, 1998 at 11:57:23PM +0100 On Tue, Nov 10, 1998 at 11:57:23PM +0100, Chris Rowley wrote: > (OK, it is possible to > distribute some code packages quite widely to people who have access > to a reasonable compiler and expect it to get configured, compiled, > installed etc reasonably easily). There is nothing in my experience > of the Linux world which is anything like any of this at all; what am > I missing? RPM ? [RedHat's system for distributing packages.] -- Timothy Murphy e-mail: tim@maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland 11-Nov-1998 17:51:11-GMT,2684;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA01383 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 10:51:06 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA00299; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 18:32:03 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 407992 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 18:32:00 +0100 Received: from sarah.albany.edu (sarah.albany.edu [169.226.1.103]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id SAA00271 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 18:31:58 +0100 (MET) Received: from hilbert.math.albany.edu (hilbert.math.albany.edu [169.226.23.52]) by sarah.albany.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA19825 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:31:47 -0500 (EST) Received: (from hammond@localhost) by hilbert.math.albany.edu (8.8.4/8.8.3) id MAA10898 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:31:46 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <199811111731.MAA10898@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:31:46 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "William F. Hammond" Subject: Re: XML (was quotes, a very long time ago) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Robin Fairbains writes: > let's not lose sight of what we're discussing, though: we need to know > if the xml-related efforts can provide us with models of what we want > to do within latex, or whether it's too restrictive for the full > generality of what latex does for people today. My guess is that most of LaTeX admits rational translations to XML but not fully regular ones, a metaphorical illusion to some pre-20th century mathematics that is not always well understood. For example, consider the problem of birationally mapping P^2 ---> P^1 X P^1 (where you know what P^N = N-dimensional projective space is, right?) I claim that we need to follow something like this procedure with markup. I do not have a proof. But I think that with successive approximations one will find that the LaTeX we know and love is a complicated categorical limit of XML's. -- Bill 11-Nov-1998 18:12:14-GMT,2544;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA01970 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 11:12:08 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA01678; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 18:46:59 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408027 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 18:46:57 +0100 Received: from salmon.maths.tcd.ie (mmdf@salmon.maths.tcd.ie [134.226.81.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA01667 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 18:46:55 +0100 (MET) Received: from turing.maths.tcd.ie by salmon.maths.tcd.ie with SMTP id ; 11 Nov 98 17:46:55 +0000 (GMT) Received: (from tim@localhost) by turing.maths.tcd.ie (8.8.7/8.8.5) id RAA31025 for LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 17:46:55 GMT References: <199811111705.MAA10552@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.93.2i Message-ID: <19981111174655.I30536@maths.tcd.ie> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 17:46:55 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Timothy Murphy Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811111705.MAA10552@hilbert.math.albany.edu>; from William F. Hammond on Wed, Nov 11, 1998 at 12:05:53PM -0500 On Wed, Nov 11, 1998 at 12:05:53PM -0500, William F. Hammond wrote: > Phillip Helbig writes: > > > There are a lot of very good cathedral products out there which are > > very good and chugging away and are very successful but one never > > hears anything about them. > > I do not doubt this point. In fact, there is one, a computer > algebra system, that I use. I'm surprised no-one in this somewhat philosophical discussion has mentioned one very eminent "cathedral product", namely tex itself. No bazaar for DK. -- Timothy Murphy e-mail: tim@maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland 11-Nov-1998 18:28:21-GMT,3059;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA02363 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 11:28:15 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA04199; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 19:10:56 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408059 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 19:10:54 +0100 Received: from dcdrjh.fnal.gov (dcdrjh.fnal.gov [131.225.103.66]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA04189 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 19:10:52 +0100 (MET) Received: (from herber@localhost) by dcdrjh.fnal.gov (8.9.0/8.9.0) id MAA10158; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:10:51 -0600 (CST) References: <98111018050396@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: <199811111810.MAA10158@dcdrjh.fnal.gov> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:10:51 -0600 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "Randolph J. Herber" Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L The following header lines retained to affect attribution: |Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 17:08:21 +0000 |Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project |From: Timothy Murphy |Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX |To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L |On Tue, Nov 10, 1998 at 06:05:04PM +0000, Phillip Helbig wrote: |> The casual user suffers if a colleague uses some non-core stuff which is |> not at his installation. The only solution is a canonical installation |> which includes almost everything. |I must say I would prefer the exact opposite -- |a system where one could automatically retrieve anything needed -- |fonts or packages -- over the net. |I mean a TeX system which regarded the CTANs as part of the system, |so kpathsea (or whatever) looked first on the local system, |and then further afield if necessary. |Timothy Murphy |e-mail: tim@maths.tcd.ie |tel: +353-1-2842366 |s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland Deliberately overstating my response for effect: if I ever detect LaTeX doing that without obtaining my approval first or without stating exactly from where it is obtaining the material, that is end of that version of LaTeX on any of my systems. That is one of my major objections to WWW browsers. Randolph J. Herber, herber@dcdrjh.fnal.gov, +1 630 840 2966, CD/CDFTF PK-149F, Mail Stop 318, Fermilab, Kirk & Pine Rds., PO Box 500, Batavia, IL 60510-0500, USA. (Speaking for myself and not for US, US DOE, FNAL nor URA.) (Product, trade, or service marks herein belong to their respective owners.) 11-Nov-1998 18:31:30-GMT,2277;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA02332 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 11:26:59 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA02495; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 18:55:59 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408041 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 18:55:56 +0100 Received: from nag.co.uk (openmath.nag.co.uk [192.156.217.16]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id SAA02475 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 18:55:54 +0100 (MET) Received: (from davidc@localhost) by nag.co.uk (AIX4.2/UCB 8.7/8.7) id RAA27344; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 17:55:27 GMT References: <199811111705.MAA10552@hilbert.math.albany.edu> <19981111174655.I30536@maths.tcd.ie> Message-ID: <199811111755.RAA27344@nag.co.uk> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 17:55:27 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: David Carlisle Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <19981111174655.I30536@maths.tcd.ie> (message from Timothy Murphy on Wed, 11 Nov 1998 17:46:55 +0000) > has mentioned one very eminent "cathedral product", > namely tex itself. TeX is more ``tablets of stone handed down'', rather than something ``centrally maintained in a Cathedral''. The question is how best to let latex develop. TeXs model of no development at all, and don't fix any bugs if you can conceivably get away with calling them a feature is not one that really appeals. That is not to criticise DEK (much:-) he has after all a book or two to write, and does encourage the developments of non-texs like pdftex. David PS > Of course Linus is much kinder than Them. so how often has Linus given you a lift to the airport? 11-Nov-1998 19:08:38-GMT,5623;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA03282 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:08:17 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA06514; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 19:40:43 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408083 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 19:40:40 +0100 Received: from ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.2]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA06494 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 19:40:38 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 19:40:25 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 19:40:15 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 19:39:48 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN2 in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 19:40:19 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13897.54299.17382.707190@fell.o] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: XML (was ... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <009CF091.2D3DA080.184@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR>, <13897.33070.82784.22548@srahtz> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13897.54299.17382.707190@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 19:40:19 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: XML (was quotes, a very long time ago) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13897.33070.82784.22548@srahtz> Sebastian Rahtz wrote -- > Chris Rowley writes: > > Only in the "real soon now" world; I would say that, even with the > > mega-bucks behind it, it still needs to be `real-world tested'. > > > an awful lot of people have their shirts on XML. its extremely widely > deployed. are you still waiting for Java to be real-world tested too? Me, I am not waiting for anything. I have laready wittered on too long about the differences betwen a computer programming langauge and a document description language so I will just say that this is irrelevant. > some people are still waiting for everything except FORTRAN to be > real-world tested. Not me, but XML is nothing if it is not both usable and used in a wide variety of contexts. I hope it will be but mega-shirst are not the only thing needed to make this happebn. > > > MathML and Sebastian's ideas of semantic mark-up cater very well for > > the ideal of what Physicists and Computer Scientists (ie people who > > designed Mathematica and Maple) think maths and maths notation is. > leaving me out of it, since I have no views, That never stopped you expressing them, did it? > why is your math more > "real" than their math? your view comes over as awfully elitist and > snobbish :-} Did I say it was more or less real? All I said was that their philosophy of and hence (probably) their use of notation is different, no quantitative assessment was given. Maybe to a publisher maths is maths is maths, but not to those who have to try and teach it to a vast range of people. An interesting example of a major difference between different uses of math notation, in countries that use Cyrillic script, was brought to my attention recently and may be of interest to some: amongst the more classical users of maths, such as physicists, mathematicians, etc, only occasional, specialised use is made of Cyrrilic letters within math notation; however, within subjects such as economics, it is common for the basic variables such as x, y to be replaced by Cyrillic letters, and for operators such as min, max, sin, cos etc etc to also be replaced by the local name in Cyrrilc script. > > > level). It's use of notation and its relation to the semantics are > > very complex and probably;y not well-understood (they are more like > > the relationship of natural language to the real world than like the > fine. you carry on with presentation mathml. no-one forces you to use > content mathml. i dont see any conflict Neither do I, but them I am not trying to generate or look for conflict, maybe you are? Your opinion is interestingly different to Dr Carlisle's: he said I need to go the other the way, beyond content MathML to OpenMath. But what I do is neither here nor there: I am not interested in any particular constituency, publishers, academics, Ms users, etc, etc. So let us depersonalise and depoliticise this and broaden the discussion beyond your commercial, anti-academic, anti-elitist, spin-doctored, text-bites:-)? > presumably you would agree, then, that one possibility is a new LaTeX > (presentation) math markup learning the lessons of MathML? I always agree with you, don't I? It's just that you never agree with me:-). chris 11-Nov-1998 19:10:10-GMT,3143;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA03304 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:09:45 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA06763; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 19:44:04 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408092 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 19:44:02 +0100 Received: from ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.2]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA06742 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 19:44:00 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 19:43:54 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 19:43:44 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 19:43:18 +0100 X400-Received: by mta open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 19:43:17 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN2 in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 19:43:45 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13897.55814.531649.793222@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: XML (was ... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <009CF091.2D3DA080.184@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR>, <199811111222.MAA14610@nag.co.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13897.55814.531649.793222@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 19:43:45 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: XML (was quotes, a very long time ago) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13897.34231.184172.75776@srahtz> > > it was explained that this meant basically starting school until first > > year University. Ie almost no 20th century mathematics. Not > > you and Chris sound like Simon Rattle saying that "if you listen to > enough Luciano Berio, I do, I do! Liked it the first time. > Dallapiccola, he'll have you on the edge of your seats" Mmm, maybe I should try harder on that one. > > [1] no, Chris, no! I am NOT proud of my ignorance! > That leads me into my sordid commercial bit: as Sebastian well knows, I have a lot to offer to put him out of his ignorance....I'll have our marketing people contact you. chris 11-Nov-1998 19:37:59-GMT,2842;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA03989 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 12:37:54 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id UAA08607; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 20:12:08 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408100 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 20:12:06 +0100 Received: from ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.1]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id UAA08595 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 20:12:03 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 20:11:57 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 20:11:48 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 20:11:21 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN2 in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 20:11:52 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13897.57406.627974.229852@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: XML (was ... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <199811111731.MAA10898@hilbert.math.albany.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13897.57406.627974.229852@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 20:11:52 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: XML (was quotes, a very long time ago) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811111731.MAA10898@hilbert.math.albany.edu> > > But I think that with successive approximations one will find that the > LaTeX we know and love is a complicated categorical limit of XML's. An elitist writes --- A beautiful result: apply immeditaly to the NSF for a research grant to prove it! A cynic writes --- Well, the above research is much more likely to get funded than any more useful research in this area, eg: high quality, multiple-use formatting of complex structured documents. chris 11-Nov-1998 20:33:26-GMT,2427;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id NAA05398 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 13:33:18 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA01380; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 18:42:07 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408011 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 18:42:04 +0100 Received: from salmon.maths.tcd.ie (mmdf@salmon.maths.tcd.ie [134.226.81.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA01358 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 18:42:02 +0100 (MET) Received: from turing.maths.tcd.ie by salmon.maths.tcd.ie with SMTP id ; 11 Nov 98 17:41:57 +0000 (GMT) Received: (from tim@localhost) by turing.maths.tcd.ie (8.8.7/8.8.5) id RAA31009 for LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 17:41:57 GMT References: <199811111651.LAA10405@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.93.2i Message-ID: <19981111174157.H30536@maths.tcd.ie> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 17:41:57 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Timothy Murphy Subject: Re: XML (was quotes, a very long time ago) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811111651.LAA10405@hilbert.math.albany.edu>; from William F. Hammond on Wed, Nov 11, 1998 at 11:51:14AM -0500 On Wed, Nov 11, 1998 at 11:51:14AM -0500, William F. Hammond wrote: > DVI processors usually seek, as I recall. (But probably not Geoffrey > Tobin's "dv2dt".) That means that DVI is not browser ready. I don't see how what _most_ DVI processors do can possibly have any bearing on the suitability of DVI for anything. A DVI processor does not _have_ to seek (as shown by dvitype). -- Timothy Murphy e-mail: tim@maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland 11-Nov-1998 21:05:38-GMT,1644;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id OAA06092 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 14:05:24 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id VAA13022; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 21:39:21 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408136 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 21:39:19 +0100 Received: from ROSE.IPM.AC.IR (vax.ipm.ac.ir [194.225.70.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id VAA12997 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 21:39:03 +0100 (MET) Received: by ROSE.IPM.AC.IR (MX V4.1 VAX) id 244; Thu, 12 Nov 1998 00:07:21 +0330 Message-ID: <009CF158.E0DC1C80.244@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 00:07:19 +0330 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Roozbeh Pournader Subject: That dear VMS To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Dear friends, due to a problem in my VMS mailbox, I have lost my newmails. But I have found that there were 33 from LATEX-L unread :( Does anyone make a copy, or is there any archive you know, so I can read them? (I specially need responses to my messages.) --Roozbeh 11-Nov-1998 21:21:53-GMT,2493;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id OAA06462 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 14:21:48 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id VAA13874; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 21:56:24 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408183 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 21:56:22 +0100 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id VAA13860 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 21:56:19 +0100 (MET) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98111120454573@man.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 20:45:45 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: Re: That dear VMS To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L > due to a problem in my VMS mailbox, I have lost my newmails. But I have found > that there were 33 from LATEX-L unread :( Does anyone make a copy, or is there > any archive you know, so I can read them? (I specially need responses to > my messages.) I PURGE my mail folder (REALLY getting rid of deleted messages) just before I log out at the end of each day---5 minutes ago! Too late. Otherwise, they would have been there. VMS MAIL (and others) who don't REALLY delete things right away and are still online (in the States?) might be able to help you. Maybe someone keeps all as a matter of course. I don't know if there is an archive. I suggest SET NOAUTO_PURGE in VMS MAIL. -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ My opinions are not necessarily those of NRAL or the University of Manchester. 11-Nov-1998 21:23:23-GMT,2833;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id OAA06511 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 14:23:21 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id WAA14256; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 22:02:43 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408214 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 22:02:41 +0100 Received: from gate.eds.de (gate.eds.de [205.191.194.5]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id WAA14246 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 22:02:39 +0100 (MET) Received: from nsru2.tse.de.eds.com by gate.eds.de with SMTP id AA18214 (InterLock SMTP Gateway 3.0 for ); Wed, 11 Nov 1998 21:02:39 GMT Received: from ew160061.nets.de.eds.com (ew160061.nets.de.eds.com [134.46.6.36]) by nsru2.tse.de.eds.com (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id VAA03701 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 21:02:38 GMT Received: from n15ux24.nets.de.eds.com (n15ux24.nets.de.eds.com [206.122.103.15]) by ew160061.nets.de.eds.com (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id VAA15294 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 21:02:37 GMT Received: by n15ux24.nets.de.eds.com (1.37.109.16/16.2) id AA150488157; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 22:02:37 +0100 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <009CF158.E0DC1C80.244@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> X-Mailer: VM 6.62 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13897.64364.727892.793475@n15ux24.nets.de.eds.com> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 22:02:36 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Frank Mittelbach Subject: Re: That dear VMS To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <009CF158.E0DC1C80.244@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> Roozbeh Pournader writes: > Dear friends, > due to a problem in my VMS mailbox, I have lost my newmails. But I have found > that there were 33 from LATEX-L unread :( Does anyone make a copy, or is there > any archive you know, so I can read them? (I specially need responses to > my messages.) they are achieved somewhere but i don't know where and how. anway i will send you all messages on this topic (i will not send them to this list i only replied here so that not everybody else is doing the same) cheers frank 11-Nov-1998 22:08:26-GMT,1498;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id PAA07694 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 15:08:20 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id WAA15512; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 22:33:56 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408251 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 22:33:55 +0100 Received: from ROSE.IPM.AC.IR (vax.ipm.ac.ir [194.225.70.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id WAA15501 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 22:33:38 +0100 (MET) Received: by ROSE.IPM.AC.IR (MX V4.1 VAX) id 266; Thu, 12 Nov 1998 01:02:18 +0330 Message-ID: <009CF160.8E004880.266@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 01:02:16 +0330 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Roozbeh Pournader Subject: Re: That dear VMS To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Thanks to frank, I have the "base LaTeX" stuff now. Does anyone have the "XML" stuff? --Thanks in advance, Roozbeh. 12-Nov-1998 1:02:36-GMT,5981;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id SAA11841 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 18:02:30 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id VAA13979; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 21:58:19 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408192 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 21:58:16 +0100 Received: from gate.eds.de (gate.eds.de [205.191.194.5]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id VAA13963 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 21:58:12 +0100 (MET) Received: from nsru2.tse.de.eds.com by gate.eds.de with SMTP id AA18205 (InterLock SMTP Gateway 3.0 for ); Wed, 11 Nov 1998 20:58:12 GMT Received: from ew160061.nets.de.eds.com (ew160061.nets.de.eds.com [134.46.6.36]) by nsru2.tse.de.eds.com (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id UAA03677 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 20:58:11 GMT Received: from n15ux24.nets.de.eds.com (n15ux24.nets.de.eds.com [206.122.103.15]) by ew160061.nets.de.eds.com (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id UAA15284 for ; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 20:58:10 GMT Received: by n15ux24.nets.de.eds.com (1.37.109.16/16.2) id AA148857889; Wed, 11 Nov 1998 21:58:09 +0100 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <98111117095539@man.ac.uk> X-Mailer: VM 6.62 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13897.64097.298851.835853@n15ux24.nets.de.eds.com> Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 21:58:09 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Frank Mittelbach Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <98111117095539@man.ac.uk> Phillip Helbig writes: > > > I cannot speak for the others, but i would very much welcome an agreed > > > "recommended" level of packages above the base level, so that one can > > > stop saying to people "oh, sorry, you have XXXtex, they dont ship > > > package ZZZ" > > Yes, this is the problem. okay that's the problem, i think we all agree so far, but knowing this is unfortunately not a solution in itself > > I wonder if it would not be possible > > to lay down a fairly strict protocol > > governing "acceptable" packages, > > so that one could automate downloading? > > > > At present one actually has to read the README > > to find out what to do > > (eg put associated font files in the right place). > > Right. A pain. there is a possibility to define such a protocol but it needs to be defined! there have been tries in the past to get things normalised but they all died a natural one a possible scenario as far as installing into different directories is concerned is to make use of a docstrip feature that was added some time ago (docstrip can actually write to different directories which could be specified via variables, so one could have a systemwide docstrip configuration file and packages just have to tell that such and such files belong to the "inputsdir" and other to the xyzdir ...) > I think the solution is to put more stuff in the core part. One can > actually automatise updating the core quite easily. perhaps you should reread my message, this is neither simple nor something that should grow a lot over time, otherwise a core from 199x will not be able to process files written for core from 199x+1 > To sum up, get rid of contrib/supported. If it's supported, it should > go into the core. Perhaps one needs a filter here to avoid redundancy no! a) the word supported needs to be clearly defined. people have totally different opinion what they mean about they support their work b) i'm against enlarging the core step by step as this is against the portability rule outlined before > in the core and assure quality, but basically if it's good, someone has > taken the effort and is supporting it, after this filter why not put it > in the core. There is then core and everything else, which can be like > a trial area. Gradually core can grow. i'm much more in favor of a twofold approach: - a core that stays stable (perhaps larger than now, eg officially adding a certain set of packages to it if they get converted to a standard installation and maintenance procedure and have a clearly defined support structure) - a recommended package set which is allowed to grow and or change, ie package dropping out which is maintained by a volunteer group who looks after the fact that the package obey certain installation standards (like in the core) so that installation of package in that area is easy, have some maintenance and support. this group would also make decisions which packages are promoted to go into that group. in any case any such scheme should fullfil the requirements that i outlined in my previous mail possibly more frank ps RPM is not an option in my opinion; the installation process has to work on any TeX installation which essentially means on any platform, so unless somebody intends to write install-shields for each and every OS (and maintains them) the only program you could expect to be available everywhere is TeX itself. this is why we have chosen to have the installation fully based on docstrip which even if it is slow was in my opinion the right decision. (but as i said we had plans to make docstrip smarter and this is actually available even if it is not yet used) 12-Nov-1998 9:50:16-GMT,2571;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id CAA22326 for ; Thu, 12 Nov 1998 02:50:00 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA05926; Thu, 12 Nov 1998 10:35:00 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408574 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 12 Nov 1998 10:34:58 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA05867 for ; Thu, 12 Nov 1998 10:34:25 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id JAA01342; hop 0; Thu, 12 Nov 1998 09:26:06 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Thu, 12 Nov 1998 09:34:00 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199811111651.LAA10405@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Message-ID: <13898.42805.635549.474787@srahtz> Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 09:15:33 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: XML (was quotes, a very long time ago) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811111651.LAA10405@hilbert.math.albany.edu> William F. Hammond writes: > Oh! Eitan Gurari's stuff with Sebastian brings up the question > whether the MathML Cathedral Chapter understands that DVI, like the > new scalable vector graphics (SVG) proposal at W3C, is XML. > you want an XML representation of dvi, and then persuade a browser to render it? why not just get TeX to emit SVG? > And did Adobe understand this when they made PDF? Hmmm... > since they designed PDF about a decade ago, before XML was a glint in anyones eye, not sure what you could mean Sebastian 12-Nov-1998 9:59:41-GMT,2713;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id CAA22488 for ; Thu, 12 Nov 1998 02:59:35 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA05860; Thu, 12 Nov 1998 10:34:14 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408570 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 12 Nov 1998 10:34:11 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA05845 for ; Thu, 12 Nov 1998 10:34:10 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id JAA01339; hop 0; Thu, 12 Nov 1998 09:26:06 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Thu, 12 Nov 1998 09:33:57 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <98110912272255@man.ac.uk> <199811101228.MAA14652@nag.co.uk> <13896.14781.711560.872729@srahtz> <19981111162952.B30536@maths.tcd.ie> Message-ID: <13898.42586.749539.995192@srahtz> Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1998 09:11:54 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <19981111162952.B30536@maths.tcd.ie> Timothy Murphy writes: > I wonder if it would not be possible > to lay down a fairly strict protocol > governing "acceptable" packages, > so that one could automate downloading? > very much so. our friend Joachim Schrod was once specifying this, but it never got off the ground. my rules would be: - general applicability ( :-} ) - no duplication of functionality - works with any or all of other packages in collection (within reason) - uses fixed directory structure and file names to allow automated updating - comes with documentation and test file (if possible) Sebastian 12-Nov-1998 22:43:01-GMT,2811;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id PAA10086 for ; Thu, 12 Nov 1998 15:42:46 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id XAA13934; Thu, 12 Nov 1998 23:18:39 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 409412 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 12 Nov 1998 23:18:37 +0100 Received: from abacus.maths.uq.edu.au (abacus.maths.uq.edu.au [130.102.160.6]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id XAA13920 for ; Thu, 12 Nov 1998 23:18:22 +0100 (MET) Received: from jemima.maths.uq.edu.au (jemima.maths.uq.edu.au [130.102.160.24]) by abacus.maths.uq.edu.au (8.9.0/8.9.0) with ESMTP id IAA07756 for ; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 08:18:14 +1000 (EST) Received: (from kgs@localhost) by jemima.maths.uq.edu.au (8.8.6/0.0.0) id IAA06808 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 08:18:14 +1000 (EST) Message-ID: <199811122218.IAA06808@jemima.maths.uq.edu.au> Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 08:18:14 +1000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Ken Smith Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Phillip Helbig wrote on Wed, 11 Nov 1998 17:09:55 GMT (inter alia) > I think the solution is to put more stuff in the core part. One can > actually automatise updating the core quite easily. > Of course, stuff in core must be guaranteed to work with other stuff in > the core etc. On the other hand, it's nice to have contrib stuff `use > at your own risk' at some official (CTAN) site. > To sum up, get rid of contrib/supported. If it's supported, it should ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > go into the core. Perhaps one needs a filter here to avoid redundancy ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > in the core and assure quality, but basically if it's good, someone has > taken the effort and is supporting it, after this filter why not put it > in the core. There is then core and everything else, which can be like > a trial area. Gradually core can grow. Would someone like to estimate how large this would make the core? I have in mind people installing from scratch on a new machine. Ken Smith kgs@maths.uq.edu.au 13-Nov-1998 9:55:31-GMT,2818;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id CAA24187 for ; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 02:50:56 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA01970; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 10:07:59 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408448 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 10:07:57 +0100 Received: from heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk (exim@heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk [128.232.32.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA01954 for ; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 10:07:55 +0100 (MET) Received: from dorceus.cl.cam.ac.uk (cl.cam.ac.uk) [128.232.1.34] (rf) by heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 1.82 #1) id 0zeFCo-0001ua-00; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 09:07:50 +0000 Message-ID: Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 09:07:47 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Robin Fairbairns Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 13 Nov 1998 08:18:14 +1000." <199811122218.IAA06808@jemima.maths.uq.edu.au> ken smith (in response to philip helbig's suggestion that `supported' stuff should go into the `core' of latex) wrote: > Would someone like to estimate how large this would make the core? > I have in mind people installing from scratch on a new machine. the problem, as i see it, is that nobody knows what of the stuff in latex is supported and what isn't. the fact that things are in contrib/supported is no real indication at all -- people ask for their stuff to go there, and then disappear (for example, the author of booktabs, an excellent package, is uncontactable), people put stuff there and with the idea in mind that it's straightforward enough that anyone could maintain it, and so on. and all that's apart from the situation where people put stuff in `other' since they can't be bothered to package it up in a way that makes sense for the `supported' tree's directory-per-submission arrangement. if _i_ don't know what is the state of what we have on ctan, who does? the best we can do is the sort of thing sebastian does with live -- provide a sort of gradation. damned difficult to achieve, imho (sebastian does a good job, but it's not perfect). r 13-Nov-1998 10:44:01-GMT,3864;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id DAA25065 for ; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 03:43:12 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id LAA07065; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 11:03:26 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408485 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 11:03:19 +0100 Received: from nag.co.uk (openmath.nag.co.uk [192.156.217.16]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA07016 for ; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 11:03:16 +0100 (MET) Received: (from davidc@localhost) by nag.co.uk (AIX4.2/UCB 8.7/8.7) id KAA27264; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 10:02:45 GMT References: Message-ID: <199811131002.KAA27264@nag.co.uk> Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 10:02:45 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: David Carlisle Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: (message from Robin Fairbairns on Fri, 13 Nov 1998 09:07:47 +0000) > the fact that things are in contrib/supported is no real indication at > all -- people ask for their stuff to go there, and then disappear (for > example, the author of booktabs, an excellent package, is uncontactable), The original idea of the supported area (and described in a document of Joachim's which I am not sure was ever really public) was that there would be some kind of `robot' sitting at ctan that a) checked that the package would unpack and produce own documentation 2) would mail the author every six months with a `are you there' message If the author didn't reply within a certain timescale the package would automatically be ejected from `supported' back to `other'. There was some resistance amongst package authors to the suggestion of getting automatic mail. Also there are some problems with the idea of automatic demotion. If a distribution just has the `supported' stuff this means that from year to year you never know which packages are going to get thrown out, and so which of your documents will break. This latter fear tends to mean that distributions tend to just get larger without ever throwing out stuff. This means that they will inevitably end up with packages written by someone who used tex for a while while writing up a thesis several years before and is now uncontactable (at least via the student email address in the file). You either just freeze the package and leave it in unchanged, for ever. or you throw it out and break any documents that have used it. Or perhaps you take a `pragmatic' approach to any copyright and distribution notice on the file, and let some new user who wants to develop or fix the package take up control. None of these options is necessarily desirable or legal. Phillip said > To sum up, get rid of contrib/supported. If it's supported, it should > go into the core. No, there must always be a distinction between the core latex distribution as coming from the latex project, and contributed stuff. Even if contrib is split between a `must have' minimal base latex distribution and an `optional extra' contributed package section. If stuff is in the core then people can mail latex-bugs@mainz and moan if it doesn't work, and then I (or Frank or Chris) is supposed to fix it. David 13-Nov-1998 12:10:09-GMT,3356;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA26486 for ; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 05:10:03 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id MAA15786; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 12:41:44 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408517 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 12:41:42 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA15770 for ; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 12:41:40 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.135] (sl109.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.135]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id MAA24536 for ; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 12:40:46 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: (message from Robin Fairbairns on Fri, 13 Nov 1998 09:07:47 +0000) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 12:38:49 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811131002.KAA27264@nag.co.uk> The "core" should be the core which other packages are designed around. The "supported" features are those that are guaranteed to work with the current (latest) version. The "contrib" is then becomes the other packages. One may discuss ways to let the user to know that a package is up to date: Apart from indicating which LaTeX version the package was developed for, one could indicate which version is verified working with. For example, if the package was developed for the LaTeX version with date X, it may work for an earlier LaTeX package of date Y, and when the new LaTeX version of date Z arrives, the package may be verified by the package writer that it works. Then the package could be updated to have all the variables X, Y, Z. If the date Z does not change anymore, it can be a sign of that the package is not updated anymore. The idea above is loosely based on my experience with MacOS software over one and a half decade: The software tells which OS version it was developed for. It may then still work with older OS's, but one could not count on it. So sometimes, the developer have checked this, indicating "requires OS version or later". However, some software is not updated anymore. One can get an indication of it when the developing date becomes to old. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 13-Nov-1998 20:38:11-GMT,3871;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id NAA08851 for ; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 13:38:04 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id UAA22246; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 20:10:04 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 409172 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 20:10:01 +0100 Received: from na.uni-tuebingen.de (root@na.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de [134.2.161.64]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id UAA22227 for ; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 20:09:59 +0100 (MET) Received: from na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de (na6 [134.2.161.170]) by na.uni-tuebingen.de (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) with ESMTP id UAA11809 for ; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 20:09:55 +0100 (MET) Received: from na.uni-tuebingen.de (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) with ESMTP id UAA20085 for ; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 20:09:53 +0100 (MET) X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (X11; I; SunOS 5.6 sun4m) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 References: <36487293.A2ECE3B9@na.uni-tuebingen.de> <199811101724.RAA16684@nag.co.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <364C8401.B2F10673@na.uni-tuebingen.de> Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 20:09:53 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Marcel Oliver Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L David Carlisle wrote: > > Marcel > > > The question is only: > > > > What packages are necessary for author-author and author-publisher > > document exchange > > I think this is a very good point. > > > and UNLESS IT IS WELL DOCUMENTED, which, as > > far as the practical problems go, is problem number one > > Documented, and agreed. If you (for example:-) were to volunteer to > draw up a list of `must have' packages, and wrap them all in some > consistent installation and documentation format, and document how this > is the minimum required latex installation for document interchange. > > Then this will be a lot of work (thanks for volunteering!) but it will > only help the user who is trying to submit his article if you also > pursuade the publisher to accept such documents. For example last I > heard were still > recommending their authors use latex 2.09, so getting (some) publishers > to move may take as much effort as producing the list in the first place. > > Of course this is a chicken and egg situation. You can't really expect > that publishers accept such a list until it exists. (Although as I just > pointed out, essentially the tex live CDs provide such a list already). > > David -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Marcel Oliver http://www.math.uci.edu/~moliver Mathematisches Institut oliver@na.uni-tuebingen.de Universitaet Tuebingen oliver@member.ams.org Auf der Morgenstelle 10 Fax: +49-7071-294322 72076 Tuebingen, Germany Phone: +49-7071-2972932 --------------------------------------------------------------------- 13-Nov-1998 21:53:58-GMT,2831;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id OAA10868 for ; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 14:53:52 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id WAA27424; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 22:24:25 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 409210 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 22:24:23 +0100 Received: from blaubaer.kn-bremen.de (root@blaubaer.kn-bremen.de [194.94.232.249]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id WAA27414 for ; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 22:24:21 +0100 (MET) Received: from dream.kn-bremen.de (uucp@localhost) by blaubaer.kn-bremen.de (8.9.1/8.9.1) with UUCP id WAA31085 for latex-l@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 22:01:27 +0100 Received: by dream.kn-bremen.de (1.65/waf) via UUCP; Fri, 13 Nov 98 21:53:57 CET for latex-l@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de References: <199811131002.KAA27264@nag.co.uk> X-Mailer: Helldiver 1.08 (Waffle 1.65) Lines: 26 Message-ID: Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 21:53:56 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Martin Schroeder Organization: The Dreaming Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In <199811131002.KAA27264@nag.co.uk> David Carlisle writes: >You either just freeze the package and leave it in unchanged, for ever. >or you throw it out and break any documents that have used it. Or >perhaps you take a `pragmatic' approach to any copyright and >distribution notice on the file, and let some new user who wants to >develop or fix the package take up control. None of these options is >necessarily desirable or legal. Or you require the packages to have the GPL. That way changes can be made when needed by those who need them. [...] >section. If stuff is in the core then people can mail latex-bugs@mainz >and moan if it doesn't work, and then I (or Frank or Chris) is supposed >to fix it. And I'm supposed to guard you... :-) Best regards Martin -- Martin Schr"oder, MS@Dream.KN-Bremen.DE People who live in windowed environments shouldn't cast pointers. (Anu Gnarg) 13-Nov-1998 23:36:08-GMT,2224;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id QAA13766 for ; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 16:36:05 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id AAA00273; Sat, 14 Nov 1998 00:00:23 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408363 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 14 Nov 1998 00:00:22 +0100 Received: from nag.co.uk (andover.nag.co.uk [192.156.217.113]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id XAA00194 for ; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 23:59:05 +0100 (MET) Received: (from davidc@localhost) by nag.co.uk (8.8.7/8.8.7) id XAA01382; Fri, 13 Nov 1998 23:03:36 GMT References: <199811131002.KAA27264@nag.co.uk> Message-ID: <199811132303.XAA01382@nag.co.uk> Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 23:03:36 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: David Carlisle Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: (message from Martin Schroeder on Fri, 13 Nov 1998 21:53:56 +0100) > Or you require the packages to have the GPL. That way changes can be > made when needed by those who need them. have a look at latex/1600 (a number I still have burned in to my brain all these years later:-) GPL is a good model for an implementation, but a very poor model for something that is defining a user level language (as is a package, usually) a GPL'ed longtable.sty would allow anyone to issue an `improved' that is to say, incompatible, longtable.sty at any time, with the same name. So no documents would be portable, anywhere. David 14-Nov-1998 23:21:03-GMT,12052;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id QAA09200 for ; Sat, 14 Nov 1998 16:21:02 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id AAA03685; Sun, 15 Nov 1998 00:02:55 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408363 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sun, 15 Nov 1998 00:02:53 +0100 Received: from na.uni-tuebingen.de (root@na.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de [134.2.161.64]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id AAA03675 for ; Sun, 15 Nov 1998 00:02:51 +0100 (MET) Received: from na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de (na6 [134.2.161.170]) by na.uni-tuebingen.de (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) with ESMTP id AAA17172; Sun, 15 Nov 1998 00:02:44 +0100 (MET) Received: (from oliver@localhost) by na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) id AAA24385; Sun, 15 Nov 1998 00:02:43 +0100 (MET) X-Authentication-Warning: na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de: oliver set sender to oliver@na.uni-tuebingen.de using -f Message-ID: <199811142302.AAA24385@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> Date: Sun, 15 Nov 1998 00:02:43 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Marcel Oliver Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L I'd like to refocus the discussion to what I think is one the key issues: author-author and author-publisher communication. First, I think that the distribution problem should not be a concern of LaTeX development. TeX/LaTeX will increasingly be distributed through distributions like teTeX as opposed to users downloading the core packages individually; those distributions will define which packages are available to the average users, as well as provide update facilities which will depend heavily on the upgrade procedures which are common to the target platform (e.g. rpm). While I agree that it is extremely important to have well-maintained distributions, this issue is external to LaTeX. So the question remains what packages as well as coding conventions (!) should I use if my goal is to maximize the exchangeablility of my documents. This includes: - The ability to easily recycle snippets of my documents by myself as well as current or future collaborators. - Increase the chance that my documents will run on future versions of LaTeX. - Make it easy for my co-authors not only to run my documents, but also to change them or add their contributions without creating a big mess. - Be sure that a document that I prepare will be accepted by a reasonable publisher in my field for direct electronic submission, and will not be retyped or otherwise mangled in unpredictable ways. - Allow my documents to be translated into other formats (HTML, XML or whatever else may come along) with the least amount of losses. This is a whole different question from what should be distributed as LaTeX: There are many things that I would like to do in certain types of documents (think of letter classes) where the above issues are not really first priority. However, one of the main advantages of LaTeX, when properly used and maybe improved, is that it has the potential to achieve achieve very good document exchangeablility as defined above. David Carlisle wrote: > > and UNLESS IT IS WELL DOCUMENTED, which, as > > far as the practical problems go, is problem number one > > Documented, and agreed. If you (for example:-) were to volunteer to > draw up a list of `must have' packages, and wrap them all in some > consistent installation and documentation format, and document how this > is the minimum required latex installation for document interchange. I'll try to start this list from my point of view, I'd be willing to collect everybody's answer to the question "In my professional writing, which tools are indispensable, and which ones do I prefer to use when alternatives are available". Please send them by private mail (this list is getting too noisy), maybe I'll also ask on c.t.t. I'd also like to know from the publishers on this list what they think about these issues. For Mathematics, at least the areas that I work in, the needs are rather modest: - The AMS packages are absolutely indispensable, as is the AMS font collection. Comments: this may seem rather trivial, but other than the AMS I haven't seen a publisher who didn't screw up on vanilla amsmath stuff (this includes Elsevier a couple of years ago, I suspect this may have improved by now) and even this year one publisher (not the big one with the yellow books) seemed to use the 2.09 based version, with easy to imagine problems that had to be corrected in the page proofs. SIAM implements functionality like subequations in a slightly different way in their author classes (apart from the issue that such stuff IMHO shouldn't really go into a class file), and I have seen many things which should be really standard but which are not (theorems, for example). In many cases the core functionality of LaTeX is either broken (equarray) or insufficient (theorems), so that the extension packages are needed for basically ANY work in the field. Thus, the basic LaTeX provisions should be removed from all documentation (personally I also think that stuff like equarray should produce a warning "You are using a broken command"). Summary: Here I think it's mainly a documentation problem which prevents that very necessary and useful packages are not always used. - graphics/graphicx for inclusion of illustration. - some good bibliography package (natbib)? (I have to admit that I never got round to starting a bibliography database, and I haven't missed it much. For some people this seems to be quite important. Also, I guess I would really start using natbib, for example, if publishers were to tell me "if you start using this very good bibliography package, we won't screw up your references any longer," in other words, if natbib would be elevated to be a standard publishing tool.) - Some frontmatter package which is at least equivalent to the functionality that the AMS classes provide. (We've started this discussion, some more comments on frontmatter below.) Physics: Here I am not so sure what the main issues are, but I'd guess that for a lot of stuff the above applies, too. I guess some provision should be made for the consistent mark-up of units (I have seen publisher's packages which provide for this, but again, this is not really be addressed unilaterally by a publisher) as well as a different set of special symbols. Apparently the frontmatter is more tricky as sometimes papers are written by lots of people. Anything else? Computer Science: The math stuff probably applies here, too. Some standardized mark-up for program listings? Humanities? Maybe this is not so critical here as few publishers would consider accepting LaTeX anyway? Anything different for Astronomy? I should stress here that I do not want subject specific standards. In my opinion, an updated RevTeX is not a desirable goal. What we need is a collection of standard packages (like amsmath) which can be loaded for certain purposes, complemented by a set of rules which specify what a portable document may contain, so that ANY publisher can process the document with only header changes with their production class. Of course it would be nice if they would make their classes public... This raises the issue about what should be admissible in a portable LaTeX document. E.g., should things like \enlargethispage be legal in such documents? The answer is not clear to me. One could either explicitly discourage people to use them, or to expect any production class to ignore any visual mark-up and provide the functionality with different macros. Then there are red herrings like \beq and \eeq that some people place all over, the general question of what macros one may define in portable LaTeX documents etc. Probably publishers know better what problems may come up, but the important thing is that this does not belong documented in a publisher's instruction file but into the most basic LaTeX reference book (meaning Lamport's reference, with all due respect to Lamport, should be banned). Other issues may be: - Output to PDF, thus disqualifying fonts which are not also available in Postscript Type 1. - Mark-up of tables (I think this is an area where LaTeX is really deficient, both in functionality and in the necessity of visual mark-up even for many trivial tables). - Guidelines for including graphics (psfrag???) I am sure this list could be much longer. Anyway, most of these problems mostly require adequate documentation from an authoritative source (cathedral style, if you want to call it like this), apart from the problem of defining and implementing a universal frontmatter interface. Frank Mittelbach wrote: > this stability is extremely important in the latex community, even > upward compatible changes are considered bad by the majority of the > users as we often had to find out because any such change means that > some document only works if everybody uses version xyz dated... so > portability goes down the drain. the need to be up-to-date if > extensions are part of the game is far more accepted (ie getting a new > package) but to be forced to change "the latex installation" is > unfortunately something most people think is an unnecessary luxury > since after all it does work. In the context of frontmatter I believe that the benefits by far outweigh the disadvantages. The problem is already there: If I want to publish in journal X, I have to download journal X's preprint class plus documentation (assuming journal X is nice enough to provide one), possibly change my document so that x.cls runs it. All of my co-authors will have to do the same if they want to be able to process the file. So if it is possible to, once and for all, provide all the means necessary in the base of LaTeX so that individual author classes become obsolete, even on the expense of compatibility problems with old installations, this would make a lot of peoples' lifes much easier. In any case, I feel there are people who are much more competent than I am to address the frontmatter issue, but I would be happy to contribute to the discussion, or write some hacks or documentation if some consensus about the best way to approach this can be reached. On a final note, the motivations of the publishing trade are still mysterious to me: Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > > ultimately incompatible. I really know SGML/XML (Sebastian, what do > > you hope to get out of the LaTeX3 project that you think you cannot > > get out of SGML?), > I want a reliable batch-oriented page makeup system, no more, no > less. I want to store my text in XML, and have LaTeX produce beautiful > pages when I give it a style sheet Are you speaking for yourself, or for Elsevier? While I could see that XML/MathML may make sense for me in certain circumstances, because I may want to reuse the logical structure, I don't see why this should matter for a publisher whose job it is to get the thing on paper, and possibly into an online repository (PDF?). There does not seem to be a widely available user interface for XML, so currently, it also does not seem realistic to expect authors to submit XML. So what's the problem with LaTeX (apart from the ones that we discussed, and seem very much fixable)? It should be much preferable to, say, Word's .doc format or rtf??? Marcel 17-Nov-1998 18:08:07-GMT,4957;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA28805 for ; Tue, 17 Nov 1998 11:08:04 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA06350; Tue, 17 Nov 1998 18:15:56 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 408481 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 17 Nov 1998 18:15:54 +0100 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA06334 for ; Tue, 17 Nov 1998 18:15:52 +0100 (MET) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98111717053815@man.ac.uk> Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1998 17:05:38 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L > > the fact that things are in contrib/supported is no real indication at > > all -- people ask for their stuff to go there, and then disappear (for > > example, the author of booktabs, an excellent package, is uncontactable), > > The original idea of the supported area (and described in a document of > Joachim's which I am not sure was ever really public) was that there > would be some kind of `robot' sitting at ctan that > a) checked that the package would unpack and produce own documentation > 2) would mail the author every six months with a `are you there' message > If the author didn't reply within a certain timescale the package > would automatically be ejected from `supported' back to `other'. > Phillip said > > > To sum up, get rid of contrib/supported. If it's supported, it should > > go into the core. > > No, there must always be a distinction between the core latex > distribution as coming from the latex project, and contributed > stuff. Even if contrib is split between a `must have' minimal > base latex distribution and an `optional extra' contributed package > section. If stuff is in the core then people can mail latex-bugs@mainz > and moan if it doesn't work, and then I (or Frank or Chris) is supposed > to fix it. OK, a new suggestion. Basic functionality, reasonably complete, is in the core. Perhaps some stuff like natbib should be moved into the core, presumably in cooperation with Patrick. It is more essential than, say, graphics, at least for many people. The supported/contrib distinction is still there. Stuff in the supported part conforms to packaging and documentation guidelines, is compatible with everything else in the core and supported place and the author is contactable. I think supported means SOMEONE, either the original author or someone else, supports it. Perhaps people should be contacted every six months if they want their stuff in the supported section. Contrib is basically as it is now. There should be a new category, `frozen', for stuff which was formerly supported but is no longer. This implies that it is no longer supported and will not change. The fact that it was once supported implies some basic quality, and the fact that it is frozen might even be attractive since it implies that it will not change. Isn't BibTeX supposed to be frozen at 1.0 when it comes out (like TeX, in essence---only bug fixes in the future)? Of course, some frozen and contrib stuff, as much as possible, should be moved to the core. The `frozen' category keeps things from being demoted. This is the way many software packages work. There's the main stuff from the main vendor (core) and layered products (contrib) which can always be expected to work in combination with each other and with the core. There are then retired (frozen) products which used to be part of the core or contrib (basic stuff or layered products) and can still be expected to work in the future (new stuff won't break them) but nothing new is to be expected. Then there is all the use-at-your-own-risk third party stuff. In summary, I think we need o frozen as a new category o moving essential stuff to the core o making the distinctions clear to all -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ 20-Nov-1998 5:24:14-GMT,3628;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id WAA17046 for ; Thu, 19 Nov 1998 22:24:12 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id GAA09489; Fri, 20 Nov 1998 06:09:49 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 409126 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 20 Nov 1998 06:09:47 +0100 Received: from mail.omnilink.net (mail.omnilink.net [194.64.25.6]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id GAA09482 for ; Fri, 20 Nov 1998 06:09:45 +0100 (MET) Received: from gazette.omnilink.net (gazette.omnilink.net [194.64.25.22]) by mail.omnilink.net (8.9.1a/8.9.1) with ESMTP id GAA28019 for ; Fri, 20 Nov 1998 06:09:07 +0100 (MET) Received: (from uucp@localhost) by gazette.omnilink.net (8.8.7/8.8.7) with UUCP id GAA25538 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 20 Nov 1998 06:09:06 +0100 (MET) (envelope-from schrod@npc.de) Received: from baghira.npc.de (baghira.npc.de [195.20.66.162]) by npc.de (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id WAA22455 for ; Thu, 19 Nov 1998 22:23:40 +0100 Received: (from schrod@localhost) by baghira.npc.de (8.9.1/8.9.1) id WAA02377; Thu, 19 Nov 1998 22:23:39 +0100 (MET) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199811131002.KAA27264@nag.co.uk> X-Mailer: VM 6.32 under 19.15p5 XEmacs Lucid Message-ID: <199811192123.WAA02377@baghira.npc.de> Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1998 22:23:39 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Joachim Schrod Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811131002.KAA27264@nag.co.uk> >>>>> "DC" == David Carlisle writes: >> the fact that things are in contrib/supported is no real indication at >> all -- people ask for their stuff to go there, and then disappear (for >> example, the author of booktabs, an excellent package, is uncontactable), DC> The original idea of the supported area (and described in a document of DC> Joachim's which I am not sure was ever really public) I never intended to keep it private. And I always thought it's on CTAN -- but when I checked it now, I couldn't find it. It was not really appreciated by the developper community at that time. Reactions were not unfriendly -- more uninterested... For those still interested: http://ftp.dante.de/~schrod/ holds it. Today, one might want to think about using RDF for that task, see http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-rdf-syntax/. The Open Software Description Format (OSD, http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-OSD.html) doesn't seem to be appropriate for our realm. Cheers, Joachim -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Joachim Schrod Email: jschrod@acm.org Net & Publication Consultance GmbH Tel.: +49-6074-861530 Roedermark, Germany Fax: +49-6074-861531 20-Nov-1998 14:08:27-GMT,3492;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA26797 for ; Fri, 20 Nov 1998 07:07:57 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA12064; Fri, 20 Nov 1998 14:33:28 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 409558 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 20 Nov 1998 14:33:25 +0100 Received: from heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk (exim@heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk [128.232.32.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA12043 for ; Fri, 20 Nov 1998 14:33:23 +0100 (MET) Received: from dorceus.cl.cam.ac.uk (cl.cam.ac.uk) [128.232.1.34] (rf) by heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 1.82 #1) id 0zgqgc-000437-00; Fri, 20 Nov 1998 13:33:22 +0000 Message-ID: Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1998 13:33:21 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Robin Fairbairns Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 17 Nov 1998 17:05:38 GMT." <98111717053815@man.ac.uk> phillip helbig writes: > This is the way many software packages work. There's the main stuff > from the main vendor (core) and layered products (contrib) which can > always be expected to work in combination with each other and with the > core. There are then retired (frozen) products which used to be part of > the core or contrib (basic stuff or layered products) and can still be > expected to work in the future (new stuff won't break them) but nothing > new is to be expected. Then there is all the use-at-your-own-risk third > party stuff. the difference with tex is that diversity has taken hold to such an enormous extent that even defining a useful core (such as the latex team did 5 years ago) was a huge undertaking. as things stand, we have 237 contrib/supported directories, 64 contrib/other (one of which is a `misc' directory). i regularly find myself installing new `supported' directories, with but the smallest inspection of what has been submitted -- there just isn't the time to do things like that. occasionally, i find myself installaing an `other' directory, which seems to me to cry out for installation in the `supported' set ... but life's too short for me to do other than i do -- i spend too much time on ctan as it is. > In summary, I think we need > > o frozen as a new category > > o moving essential stuff to the core > > o making the distinctions clear to all this, you perhaps (by now at least) realise, is an enormous set of tasks. ctan runs entirely on the voluntary effort of people who are paid to do other things; the latex team likewise -- i can't imagine where the effort to do it all would come from. if i could find a way to fund myself to sit at this desk for another 6 months, say, i guess i might make reasonable inroads into such a programme. [this is essentially impossible, in fact.] robin 20-Nov-1998 14:21:23-GMT,2517;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA27125 for ; Fri, 20 Nov 1998 07:21:20 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA12636; Fri, 20 Nov 1998 14:42:19 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 409562 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 20 Nov 1998 14:42:17 +0100 Received: from heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk (exim@heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk [128.232.32.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA12624 for ; Fri, 20 Nov 1998 14:42:15 +0100 (MET) Received: from dorceus.cl.cam.ac.uk (cl.cam.ac.uk) [128.232.1.34] (rf) by heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 1.82 #1) id 0zgqpA-0003qx-00; Fri, 20 Nov 1998 13:42:12 +0000 Message-ID: Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1998 13:42:08 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Robin Fairbairns Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 19 Nov 1998 22:23:39 +0100." <199811192123.WAA02377@baghira.npc.de> > DC> The original idea of the supported area (and described in a document of > DC> Joachim's which I am not sure was ever really public) > > I never intended to keep it private. And I always thought it's on CTAN > -- but when I checked it now, I couldn't find it. there certainly was a torrent of ill-informed abuse about some such thing as this, around the time 2e was about to appear (or had just appeared). the sort of thing that tries to invoke fascism as an explanation of someone proposing to impose structure on something... > It was not really appreciated by the developper community at that > time. Reactions were not unfriendly -- more uninterested... > > For those still interested: http://ftp.dante.de/~schrod/ holds it. rings a bell, though i'm not sure i've seen it in quite this form before. would you like me to stuff it on ctan, for good measure? robin 23-Nov-1998 9:24:19-GMT,3276;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id CAA12974 for ; Mon, 23 Nov 1998 02:24:17 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id JAA11212; Mon, 23 Nov 1998 09:50:29 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 410776 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 23 Nov 1998 09:50:27 +0100 Received: from mr.tuwien.ac.at (mr.tuwien.ac.at [128.130.2.10]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id JAA11202 for ; Mon, 23 Nov 1998 09:50:25 +0100 (MET) Received: from pandora.tuwien.ac.at (pandora.tuwien.ac.at [128.130.57.27]) by mr.tuwien.ac.at (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id JAA05527 for ; Mon, 23 Nov 1998 09:49:53 +0100 (MET) Received: (from norbert@localhost) by pandora.tuwien.ac.at (8.8.8/8.8.8) id JAA12875 for LATEX-L@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de; Mon, 23 Nov 1998 09:49:23 +0100 Mail-Followup-To: LaTeX Mailing List Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/signed; protocol="application/pgp-signature"; micalg=pgp-md5; boundary=45Z9DzgjV8m4Oswq X-Mailer: Mutt 0.94.14i Message-ID: <19981123094923.A12859@pandora.tuwien.ac.at> Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1998 09:49:23 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Norbert Preining Subject: Marking as changed? To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L --45Z9DzgjV8m4Oswq Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Hi! I want to have two commands, say \beginnoteit and \endnoteit which mark all the paragraphs inbetween with a vertical bar (ore something more funny) that i can easily realize what has changed, maybe with some revision history (args to \beginnoteit are put into the margin). Is there a package for this which works for TeX and LaTeX (primary use is in LaTeX)? Thanks for the help --=20 ciao norb +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Norbert Preining http://www.logic.at/people/preining | | University of Technology Vienna, Austria preining@logic.at | | PGP fingerprint: BE 15 9D B2 99 05 03 06 D3 A1 56 CC 20 F1 4C 19 | | PGP public key: email me with Subject `get PGP-key' or keyservers | +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ --45Z9DzgjV8m4Oswq Content-Type: application/pgp-signature -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3i iQCVAwUBNlkhk7zcw0LPH6FlAQGYOQP/WNHI6JAKvW9s88nNZyk+DSagPlzHNIQP UohvaRJFZ6ZFOZ8koKku8kLFNTv+3TiDEMoPQkObdcpHXv7iUuC7pim4jIOmVSkt K6KkTjdJS6aEjJZ9q90PedzMMmhFpfUHifdtaRMK8PhRi2/5U7gTfoyBLxY7Vltn 9s5wSIfmf7U= =4OL2 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --45Z9DzgjV8m4Oswq-- 24-Nov-1998 10:49:49-GMT,5617;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id DAA16333 for ; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 03:49:34 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id LAA24204; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 11:21:38 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 410891 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 11:21:36 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA24184 for ; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 11:21:32 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id KAA26707; hop 0; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 10:12:43 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Tue, 24 Nov 1998 10:20:46 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199811142302.AAA24385@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> Message-ID: <13913.60537.514744.407614@srahtz> Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1998 23:15:05 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811142302.AAA24385@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> Marcel Oliver writes: > - Be sure that a document that I prepare will be accepted by a > reasonable publisher in my field for direct electronic submission, > and will not be retyped or otherwise mangled in unpredictable ways. > > - Allow my documents to be translated into other formats (HTML, XML or > whatever else may come along) with the least amount of losses. if you want to make publishers happy, why don't you *author* in XML? this publisher, at least, does not much want your LaTeX files, however clean... > Comments: this may seem rather trivial, but other than the AMS I > haven't seen a publisher who didn't screw up on vanilla amsmath stuff > (this includes Elsevier a couple of years ago, I suspect this may have > improved by now) and even this year one publisher (not the big one these days we'd have it retyped :-} > > Humanities? Maybe this is not so critical here as few publishers > would consider accepting LaTeX anyway? > grr. speaking as a humanities person, I deny the assertion! anyway, at the risk of repeating myself, you misunderstand what publishers are. the average publisher is NOT a typesetter, and does not give a damn how you prepare your MSS, since it'll be between you and some other agency. well, thats my observation of the trade, anyway > LaTeX document. E.g., should things like \enlargethispage be legal in > such documents? The answer is not clear to me. One could either > explicitly discourage people to use them, or to expect any production > class to ignore any visual mark-up and provide the functionality with > different macros. gracious. i'd be shocked at a production system which did not catch \enlargethispage... not that I understand why you, as an author, would ever use it.... > - Mark-up of tables (I think this is an area where LaTeX is really > deficient, both in functionality and in the necessity of visual > mark-up even for many trivial tables). hurrah! sound point > - Guidelines for including graphics (psfrag???) aaargh! and you expect me to translate your psfrag stuff to XML??? ... > Sebastian Rahtz wrote: .. > > I want a reliable batch-oriented page makeup system, no more, no > > less. I want to store my text in XML, and have LaTeX produce beautiful > > pages when I give it a style sheet > > Are you speaking for yourself, or for Elsevier? While I could see that not officially, but yes, for Elsevier > XML/MathML may make sense for me in certain circumstances, because I > may want to reuse the logical structure, I don't see why this should > matter for a publisher whose job it is to get the thing on paper, and > possibly into an online repository (PDF?). publishers who do not want to consider electronic publication of material are, IMHO, on the track to failure. publishers exist to sell your work, NOT get things on paper!!! > There does not seem to be a > widely available user interface for XML, so currently, it also does > not seem realistic to expect authors to submit XML. So what's the agreed. not quite yet. give it 6 months or a year. > problem with LaTeX (apart from the ones that we discussed, and seem > very much fixable)? It should be much preferable to, say, Word's .doc > format or rtf??? no. converting RTF to XML is a problem whose parameters you can determine in advance. ie, the authors markup will be about 50% useable, the rest you can junk. a LaTeX file is a converter's nightmare, since almost anything can happen. maybe it takes 5 minutes, maybe it takes 5 hours. you cannot run a business on those lines, IMO. sebastian 24-Nov-1998 12:29:06-GMT,10163;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA18149 for ; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 05:29:02 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id MAA04016; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 12:58:32 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411052 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 12:58:29 +0100 Received: from na.uni-tuebingen.de (root@na.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de [134.2.161.64]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA03957 for ; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 12:58:24 +0100 (MET) Received: from na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de (na6 [134.2.161.170]) by na.uni-tuebingen.de (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA09409 for ; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 12:58:16 +0100 (MET) Received: from na.uni-tuebingen.de (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA05826 for ; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 12:58:14 +0100 (MET) X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (X11; U; SunOS 5.6 sun4m) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 References: <199811142302.AAA24385@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> <13913.60537.514744.407614@srahtz> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <365A9F55.88C46733@na.uni-tuebingen.de> Date: Tue, 24 Nov 1998 12:58:13 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Marcel Oliver Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > Marcel Oliver writes: > > - Be sure that a document that I prepare will be accepted by a > > reasonable publisher in my field for direct electronic submission, > > and will not be retyped or otherwise mangled in unpredictable ways. > > > > - Allow my documents to be translated into other formats (HTML, XML or > > whatever else may come along) with the least amount of losses. > if you want to make publishers happy, why don't you *author* in XML? > this publisher, at least, does not much want your LaTeX files, however > clean... Sorry, I think the discussion is going in circles. What's the point then to improve LaTeX if I should author in XML? I don't give a damm what typesetting system I use, as long as it is widely available, at least as powerful as LaTeX is, and it doesn't cost me any more effort to author documents (after a reasonable initial learning period). So should we improve LaTeX? Just as a backend to an XML based system it wouldn't be worth doing anything more than removing a few quirks from the TeX engine. So what are we doing here??? > > Comments: this may seem rather trivial, but other than the AMS I > > haven't seen a publisher who didn't screw up on vanilla amsmath stuff > > (this includes Elsevier a couple of years ago, I suspect this may have > > improved by now) and even this year one publisher (not the big one > these days we'd have it retyped :-} Why can the AMS get my files on paper without retyping, and a huge big-budget operation like Elsevier can't? > > Humanities? Maybe this is not so critical here as few publishers > > would consider accepting LaTeX anyway? > > > grr. speaking as a humanities person, I deny the assertion! anyway, at > the risk of repeating myself, you misunderstand what publishers > are. the average publisher is NOT a typesetter, and does not give a > damn how you prepare your MSS, since it'll be between you and some > other agency. well, thats my observation of the trade, anyway > > > LaTeX document. E.g., should things like \enlargethispage be legal in > > such documents? The answer is not clear to me. One could either > > explicitly discourage people to use them, or to expect any production > > class to ignore any visual mark-up and provide the functionality with > > different macros. > gracious. i'd be shocked at a production system which did not catch > \enlargethispage... not that I understand why you, as an author, would > ever use it.... Because I produce production versions for personal use, too. Personally, I think the \enlargethispage stuff is a big pain, I try to avoid it, but I guess sometimes it just happens that a thing like this gets left in a file. > > - Mark-up of tables (I think this is an area where LaTeX is really > > deficient, both in functionality and in the necessity of visual > > mark-up even for many trivial tables). > hurrah! sound point > > > - Guidelines for including graphics (psfrag???) > aaargh! and you expect me to translate your psfrag stuff to XML??? Never used it, but I think from an author's perspective it may appear useful. So this is exactly what we need: Some classification of stuff that can be used and others that can't without severe portability problems. I don't think such problems are obvious to everyone, and should be documented. > ... > > Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > .. > > > I want a reliable batch-oriented page makeup system, no more, no > > > less. I want to store my text in XML, and have LaTeX produce beautiful > > > pages when I give it a style sheet > > > > Are you speaking for yourself, or for Elsevier? While I could see that > not officially, but yes, for Elsevier > > > XML/MathML may make sense for me in certain circumstances, because I > > may want to reuse the logical structure, I don't see why this should > > matter for a publisher whose job it is to get the thing on paper, and > > possibly into an online repository (PDF?). > publishers who do not want to consider electronic publication of > material are, IMHO, on the track to failure. publishers exist to sell > your work, NOT get things on paper!!! But paper is the only thing you can do better than I can. I can run a web-site with no problem and publish my stuff in whatever format I like. The only thing I cannot do is printing large quantities of paper and shipping them to every library in the world. > > There does not seem to be a > > widely available user interface for XML, so currently, it also does > > not seem realistic to expect authors to submit XML. So what's the > agreed. not quite yet. give it 6 months or a year. That would be great. I am looking forward to finding this on my next Redhat CD. > > problem with LaTeX (apart from the ones that we discussed, and seem > > very much fixable)? It should be much preferable to, say, Word's .doc > > format or rtf??? > no. converting RTF to XML is a problem whose parameters you can > determine in advance. ie, the authors markup will be about 50% > useable, the rest you can junk. a LaTeX file is a converter's > nightmare, since almost anything can happen. maybe it takes 5 minutes, > maybe it takes 5 hours. you cannot run a business on those lines, IMO. Why don't you make the converter free software? Then you can go and tell everyone to check first if a file is convertable before submitting it. You should get a much better quota than 50% this way. Or is this one of the cases where "big" companies prefer to use undocumented and proprietary formats just for their own monetary advantage? Also, I don't buy your argument about the impossibility of converting LaTeX into other formats. A clean LaTeX file (i.e. no TeX which is not explicitly part of LaTeX) and a conservative choice of packages (which is what this discussion is all about) should allow very close to 100% conversion. Also, I still don't understand either the current or the envisioned production process of your organization. To me it seems that (at least at some point in the past) either TeX or LaTeX has been the back-end (I may be wrong here, but some things looked very TeX-like). So what's the point of going via XML as an intermediate format? Why not let people submit in clean LaTeX for those who prefer to write clean LaTeX, and typesetting it directly, and let others submit their RTF or XML or whatever, and feed it to whatever backend? And, repeating myself here, I believe that a publisher cannot "add value" to papers in my field (applied analysis) by storing or distributing publications in any format which is much more explicitly marked up (I guess that's what XML is supposed to do) than LaTeX. This is simply due to the nature of the material, and no publisher's vision for the future can change this. Also, I have enough faith in my collegues that, should the need arise for strongly marked up electronic disemination of results, they will be much less conservative about using it (on their own web-sites!) than any of the large publishing houses. So the final question: Why do small publishing operations (professional societies and university presses) who are closer to the scientific community and whose journal subscriptions are usually cheaper, use LaTeX more readily than the large multinational presses? Can we conclude that LaTeX is doing the job pretty well after all? Marcel PS: Sorry Sebastian, as you are probably the only one connected to "big business" listening in here. I actually appreciate very much hearing your opinion on the matter. I am just not sure that even the goals for the LaTeX project from all the potentially interested sides are on the table to permit a sound technical discussion. I think it is in everybody's interest that whatever future typesetting system is acceptable both to authors and publishers. But if publishers are neither very forthcoming in what they need, nor really listening to the author's needs, then at some point one just has to say "screw them and let them find somebody cheap in the third world to retype all the manuscipts". 24-Nov-1998 13:37:33-GMT,8478;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA19325 for ; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 06:37:30 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA11413; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 14:05:56 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411158 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 14:05:54 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA11380 for ; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 14:05:45 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id MAA04279; hop 0; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 12:57:23 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Tue, 24 Nov 1998 13:05:27 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199811142302.AAA24385@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> <13913.60537.514744.407614@srahtz> <365A9F55.88C46733@na.uni-tuebingen.de> Message-ID: <13914.43859.281032.18501@srahtz> Date: Tue, 24 Nov 1998 12:49:23 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <365A9F55.88C46733@na.uni-tuebingen.de> Marcel Oliver writes: > Sorry, I think the discussion is going in circles. What's the point > then to improve LaTeX if I should author in XML? I don't give a damm what so that the typesetting is nicer > typesetting system I use, as long as it is widely available, at least > as powerful as LaTeX is, and it doesn't cost me any more effort to > author documents (after a reasonable initial learning period). how about separating typesetting from editing and manipulation? its not the only paradigm > So should we improve LaTeX? Just as a backend to an XML based system > it wouldn't be worth doing anything more than removing a few quirks from > the TeX engine. So what are we doing here??? do you think LaTeX does floats and multiple columns perfectly? I dont. I think it can improve a lot as a batch formatter > Why can the AMS get my files on paper without retyping, and a huge > big-budget operation like Elsevier can't? cos the AMS use TeX to typeset. why dont Elsevier's typesetters? why dont we watch Betamax videos? .... > But paper is the only thing you can do better than I can. I can run > a web-site with no problem and publish my stuff in whatever format I > like. indeed. if this is the world model you (the academics) want, go for it. i have no shares in publishers.... > > nightmare, since almost anything can happen. maybe it takes 5 minutes, > > maybe it takes 5 hours. you cannot run a business on those lines, IMO. > > Why don't you make the converter free software? Then you can go and > tell everyone to check first if a file is convertable before submitting > it. You should get a much better quota than 50% this way. three reasons: 1. if people cannot read Lamport and get the basic markup right, you think they'll bother to test my converter? 2. at present, our converter is slightly complex to install, and we cannot afford to `support' it externally 3. we *are* a business. we dont want to hand solutions out to other companies _quite_ so easily but i take the point that said, the principles of the conversion are explained publicly, and you can (these days) write a better one using TeX4ht or Omega (IMHO. next years project.) > Or is this one of the cases where "big" companies prefer to use > undocumented and proprietary formats just for their own monetary > advantage? in this case, no. argument 2. is the real one - we could not possibly respond to thousands of authors saying "remind me how to install a Perl extension, what is ngsmls, i dont have a copy of flex" etc etc anyone who really wants this animal is very welcome to ask. i dont guarentee getting permission, but i'll ask. > Also, I don't buy your argument about the impossibility of converting > LaTeX into other formats. A clean LaTeX file (i.e. no TeX which is > not explicitly part of LaTeX) and a conservative choice of packages > (which is what this discussion is all about) should allow very close > to 100% conversion. yes. our program will do/does do a 100% conversion. one seldom sees such files outside the testbed, however. > production process of your organization. To me it seems that (at least > at some point in the past) either TeX or LaTeX has been the back-end > (I may be wrong here, but some things looked very TeX-like). some processes and typesettters have used TeX, yes > the point of going via XML as an intermediate format? Why not let > people submit in clean LaTeX for those who prefer to write clean LaTeX, > and typesetting it directly, and let others submit their RTF or XML or > whatever, and feed it to whatever backend? because we want a stable archival form, which has to be XML/SGML. for instance, we absolutely must get HTML out there for all articles, and the production flow from archival format must be _smooth_ and _uniform_. we are talking about 100s of 1000s of articles. we cannot afford to have 5-10% of the articles done with a rogue system like latex2html. > And, repeating myself here, I believe that a publisher cannot "add > value" to papers in my field (applied analysis) by storing or distributing > publications in any format which is much more explicitly marked up > (I guess that's what XML is supposed to do) than LaTeX. oh, i agree. good LaTeX is very good. no argument. > So the final question: Why do small publishing operations (professional > societies and university presses) who are closer to the scientific > community and whose journal subscriptions are usually cheaper, use > LaTeX more readily than the large multinational presses? Can we because they serve the academic communities who use LaTeX? because they dont maintain long-term archives? re-use data for large Web databases like Science Direct? > conclude that LaTeX is doing the job pretty well after all? LaTeX is fine, great. like the C language is fine. but do we believe that large software engineering projects should use C, or a language like Java or Smalltalk? > technical discussion. I think it is in everybody's interest that > whatever future typesetting system is acceptable both to authors > and publishers. But if publishers are neither very forthcoming in what let me reiterate, publishers do not typeset! typesetters do that. publishers are *agents*, like bankers, shifting stuff back and forth and taking a cut. > they need, nor really listening to the author's needs, then at some > point one just has to say "screw them and let them find somebody > cheap in the third world to retype all the manuscipts". and then what will you do with them? put them in the monastery library? i feel a bit awkward here. i do get paid by a large, very commercial, publisher, and i feel obliged to explain their viewpoint. equally, i can see that a future world might have no place for us, if everything exists only on tiny individual web servers. who knows? i do have one last (trite) remark - why are you (the academic authors reading this) spending so much time on arguing about typesetting and publishing? why don't you spend my tax money on doing research into your subject......? what do i care. if Marcel's institution dumps big publishers and sets up its own business, they'll have to employ people to do the work, so i hope i'll get a job until i retire. then Marcel will be the evil money-making employer (you watch). sebastian 24-Nov-1998 14:57:04-GMT,5122;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA20908 for ; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 07:56:38 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA18538; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 15:20:02 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411196 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 15:19:59 +0100 Received: from ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.1]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA18522 for ; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 15:19:57 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 15:19:15 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 15:15:05 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 15:14:31 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN2 in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 15:19:04 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13914.46799.156940.839436@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: What is (... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <199811142302.AAA24385@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de>, <365A9F55.88C46733@na.uni-tuebingen.de> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13914.46799.156940.839436@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Tue, 24 Nov 1998 15:19:04 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13914.43859.281032.18501@srahtz> Sebastian does seem a little less comprehensible than usual these days: maybe XML/XSL has this affect on people? I guess that I, above all, must comment on his concerns since I am both a major beneficiary of his, no doubt, enormous contributions to the collection plate at St Albion's, and also a major sinner according to his fundamentalist theological stance (an opinion which he has recently stated far more forcefully and personally in another context). > i do have one last (trite) remark - why are you (the academic authors > reading this) spending so much time on arguing about typesetting and > publishing? why don't you spend my tax money on doing research into > your subject......? There has always (I suspect) been, and continues to be, a very close relationship between the producers of complex mathematical manu/compuscripts and the providers of the technology to make it easily available to others. I can (not quite from memory:-) trace this back at least 40 years to when very famous, high-quality, publicly-funded UK mathematicians worked closely with Monotype and CUP in developing the 5-line math system, and the fonts to go with it. I am sure that something similar happened in the US. Knuth's efforts were to a large extent motivated by his interest in maths (he has a very high reputation as a research mathematician). The recent large amount of activity in the math fonts area has also been driven largely by concerned mathematicians, either directly or via learned societies such as the AMS. I could go on ... I hope that it is clear why we research mathematicians feel it is necessary and useful to spend time on this. If not, I shall explain in detail. I have one illustration of this in the front of my mind since in the last two weeks I have spent a large amount of time instructing the copy-editor of a research maths book with my name on it. The publisher, who, as is always the case with things produced by me and my colleagues, is also the typesetter, is small but has a very high reputation in modern mathematics publishing. The copy-editor was, however, new to the company and the subject; he therfore turned the very literate mathematics of myself and co-authors into even more literate prose in which the mathematical meaning was lost or, in some case, completely altered. This is not quite on the level of typesetting technology but the principle is the same: the tradition of knowing what is needed resides almost entirely within the mathematical community, so we must be involved whatever the tax-payers think. chris PS: And I shall arrange a small personal refund to Sebastian to cover the minute proportion of my time that I spend on this kind of thing. 24-Nov-1998 16:17:59-GMT,3319;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA22731 for ; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 09:17:57 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA29524; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 16:56:30 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411380 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 16:56:27 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA29508 for ; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 16:56:25 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id PAA12085; hop 0; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 15:48:04 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Tue, 24 Nov 1998 15:56:03 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199811142302.AAA24385@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> <365A9F55.88C46733@na.uni-tuebingen.de> <13914.46799.156940.839436@fell.open.ac.uk> Message-ID: <13914.54306.568153.29148@srahtz> Date: Tue, 24 Nov 1998 15:43:30 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13914.46799.156940.839436@fell.open.ac.uk> Chris Rowley writes: > There has always (I suspect) been, and continues to be, a very close > relationship between the producers of complex mathematical > manu/compuscripts and the providers of the technology to make it > easily available to others. in maths, sure, i accept this. but not in many other fields > The recent large amount of activity in the math fonts area has also been > driven largely by concerned mathematicians, either directly or via > learned societies such as the AMS. i bet they wished they did not have to work on it! > This is not quite on the level of typesetting technology but the > principle is the same: the tradition of knowing what is needed resides > almost entirely within the mathematical community, so we must be involved > whatever the tax-payers think. hmm. why do mathematicians always present themselves as a special case? > PS: And I shall arrange a small personal refund to Sebastian to cover > the minute proportion of my time that I spend on this kind of you choose to make typesetting your research area, so you are covered :-} anyway, you are (and you know it!) deliberately misrepresenting my basic view point.... sebastian 24-Nov-1998 16:21:41-GMT,2770;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA22835 for ; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 09:21:39 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA00133; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 17:02:50 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411401 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 17:02:48 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA00086 for ; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 17:02:33 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.134] (sl73.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.99]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id RAA23613 for ; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 17:02:28 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Tue, 24 Nov 1998 17:02:32 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Summing it up: One will probably need to see better computer languages for authoring/typesetting that better separates authoring, typesetting styles and graphic output than those available now. As for XML, that is probably great as a YAML (yet another markup language), but has one thing common with all other computer languages in existence: A corny syntax, making it wholly unsuitable for such things as becoming a tool for mathematical notation: Mathematics has a much closer relation between notation and notions than a text associated with markup can provide. Add an integrated Yacc and Lex, and it might become something of all YAML's. As for LaTeX and TeX, those will be used until something better de facto has arrived and can be used as a replacement. TeX has several different successors that need to be unified. LaTeX needs to be improved as a toll for scientific publishing in the absence of a good replacement. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 24-Nov-1998 16:28:25-GMT,2668;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA23018 for ; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 09:28:20 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA00112; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 17:02:42 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411397 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 17:02:39 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA00090 for ; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 17:02:37 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.134] (sl73.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.99]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id RAA23609 for ; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 17:02:26 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <365A9F55.88C46733@na.uni-tuebingen.de> <199811142302.AAA24385@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> <13913.60537.514744.407614@srahtz> <365A9F55.88C46733@na.uni-tuebingen.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Tue, 24 Nov 1998 16:51:50 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13914.43859.281032.18501@srahtz> At 12:49 +0000 1998/11/24, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: >i do have one last (trite) remark - why are you (the academic authors >reading this) spending so much time on arguing about typesetting and >publishing? why don't you spend my tax money on doing research into >your subject......? I find this a much better way to answer Sebastian, turning his statement around: I do have one last (trite) remark - why are you (the publishers reading this) spending so much time on arguing about typesetting and publishing? Why don't you spend my money on publishing......? Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 24-Nov-1998 16:57:05-GMT,3504;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA23850 for ; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 09:57:01 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA02690; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 17:34:07 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411425 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 17:34:04 +0100 Received: from heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk (exim@heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk [128.232.32.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA02675 for ; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 17:34:03 +0100 (MET) Received: from dorceus.cl.cam.ac.uk (cl.cam.ac.uk) [128.232.1.34] (rf) by heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 1.82 #1) id 0ziLPd-0000Xg-00; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 16:34:01 +0000 Message-ID: Date: Tue, 24 Nov 1998 16:33:59 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Robin Fairbairns Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 24 Nov 1998 15:43:30 GMT." <13914.54306.568153.29148@srahtz> sebastian writes (of chris rowley) > anyway, you are (and you know it!) deliberately misrepresenting my > basic view point.... i don't think he was, too much. you suggested it was improper for researchers to pay attention to the niceties of typesetting, and he provided good reasons that he would need to (even if he didn't have this latex hat he wears). my head of department sighs, from time to time, that typesetting is a genie it's now effectively impossible to stuff back into its bottle. he (effectively a mathematician, but practising as a theoretical computer scientist) would far rather be able to hand the typesetting of his handwritten manuscripts to some `expert', in the way he used to. but no, his publishers tell him to do it the latex way... the reason i have got away with as much latex-ery as i have, over the years, is that it's been useful to have a repository of last resort of answers to people's questions around here. i regularly get asked for help by people all over the department, occasionally by people in other parts of the university. sometimes, latex is unavoidable; and latex isn't so well documented that everyone can trivially do every sensible thing they might want. i don't believe there's a real solution to this problem, in the short term. whether a meta-language (`designers' interface') will help isn't clear to me. whether the xml bandwaggon, or whatever is tomorrow's buzz-word takes out latex altogether, i can't possibly guess (though the evidence of the sgml takeover doesn't inspire me to assume that xml will do all that much better). but even if xml _does_ take over, there are going to be people wanting advice on how to use xml tools to produce an acceptable visual result. these things _won't_ be well-enough documented (at least, the versions the researchers can afford), any more than latex is now. robin 24-Nov-1998 17:03:44-GMT,2290;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA24007 for ; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 10:03:42 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA03117; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 17:38:44 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411431 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 17:38:43 +0100 Received: from heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk (exim@heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk [128.232.32.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA03107 for ; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 17:38:41 +0100 (MET) Received: from dorceus.cl.cam.ac.uk (cl.cam.ac.uk) [128.232.1.34] (rf) by heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 1.82 #1) id 0ziLU9-0000cC-00; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 16:38:41 +0000 Message-ID: Date: Tue, 24 Nov 1998 16:38:40 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Robin Fairbairns Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 24 Nov 1998 16:51:50 +0100." hans aberg writes (in response to sebastian): > I do have one last (trite) remark - why are you (the publishers > reading this) spending so much time on arguing about typesetting and > publishing? Why don't you spend my money on publishing......? sebastian's presence as a publisher's `representative' speaking on this list places him in a minority of one (with the possible exception of michael downes, whose exact status at the ams isn't clear to me). sebastian is trying to enlighten us all about the publishers' take on the future of typesetting. i, for one, can't fault his intentions, even if i disagree with some of his comments. robin 24-Nov-1998 18:10:16-GMT,3382;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA25797 for ; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 11:10:12 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA08541; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 18:47:08 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411461 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 18:47:04 +0100 Received: from sarah.albany.edu (sarah.albany.edu [169.226.1.103]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id SAA08509 for ; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 18:47:00 +0100 (MET) Received: from hilbert.math.albany.edu (hilbert.math.albany.edu [169.226.23.52]) by sarah.albany.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA04573 for ; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 12:46:54 -0500 (EST) Received: (from hammond@localhost) by hilbert.math.albany.edu (8.8.4/8.8.3) id MAA28717 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 24 Nov 1998 12:46:52 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <199811241746.MAA28717@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Date: Tue, 24 Nov 1998 12:46:52 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "William F. Hammond" Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Robin Fairbairns writes: : . . . whether the xml bandwaggon, or whatever is : tomorrow's buzz-word takes out latex altogether, i can't possibly : guess (though the evidence of the sgml takeover doesn't inspire me to : assume that xml will do all that much better). XML is a pseduo-subcategory of the pseudo-category of markup languages called SGML. If one wants to keep distinctions between "\phi" and "\Phi", i.e., if one likes the idea of a case-sensitive flexible command name space on authoring platforms, then one might not want to dismiss SGML in favor of XML for use on authoring platforms and in publishing houses. XML will, I think, mainly be useful as browser fodder. The matter of exchange formats is a separate issue. The matter of archiving is possibly different from that of exchange. I think it unclear whether XML or SGML will win in these arenas. (It's partly "policitical". Some existing exchange formats are simply dreadful.) It is also the case that much more succinct authoring notation is possible with SGML. So much so that one can even make some of these languages look like LaTeX even though they are not. This is what lies behind my idea of GELLMU. (As Sebastian said, LaTeX markup *can* be very good.) Moreover, the extensions of the core wanted by some that the LaTeX3 team does not wish to undertake may also for the most part be accomplished with SGML-based pre-processing. Free tools are available. (See "The SGML Web Page" by Robin Cover at the URL http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/ .) LaTeX will survive. -- Bill 25-Nov-1998 10:37:25-GMT,2489;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id DAA17646 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 03:37:20 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id LAA21717; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 11:15:06 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 410857 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 11:15:02 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA21648 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 11:14:55 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id KAA00938; hop 0; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 10:06:33 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Wed, 25 Nov 1998 10:14:33 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199811241746.MAA28717@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Message-ID: <13915.53007.982429.383308@srahtz> Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 09:34:07 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811241746.MAA28717@hilbert.math.albany.edu> William F. Hammond writes: > If one wants to keep distinctions between "\phi" and "\Phi", i.e., if > one likes the idea of a case-sensitive flexible command name space on > authoring platforms, then one might not want to dismiss SGML in favor > of XML for use on authoring platforms and in publishing houses.XML you dont really think XML is case-insensitive, do you? > will, I think, mainly be useful as browser fodder. ie, the vast majority of material Sebastian 25-Nov-1998 11:11:48-GMT,2517;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id EAA18254 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 04:11:41 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id LAA23981; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 11:34:46 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 410871 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 11:34:44 +0100 Received: from blaubaer.kn-bremen.de (root@blaubaer.kn-bremen.de [194.94.232.249]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA23969 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 11:34:42 +0100 (MET) Received: from dream.kn-bremen.de (uucp@localhost) by blaubaer.kn-bremen.de (8.9.1/8.9.1) with UUCP id LAA02913 for latex-l@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 11:14:46 +0100 Received: by dream.kn-bremen.de (1.65/waf) via UUCP; Wed, 25 Nov 98 10:40:39 CET for latex-l@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de References: <19981123094923.A12859@pandora.tuwien.ac.at> X-Mailer: Helldiver 1.08 (Waffle 1.65) Lines: 21 Message-ID: <3TCX2A2MBh108h@dream.kn-bremen.de> Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 10:40:39 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Martin Schroeder Organization: The Dreaming Subject: Re: Marking as changed? To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In <19981123094923.A12859@pandora.tuwien.ac.at> Norbert Preining writes: >I want to have two commands, say \beginnoteit and \endnoteit which >mark all the paragraphs inbetween with a vertical bar (ore something >more funny) that i can easily realize what has changed, maybe >with some revision history (args to \beginnoteit are put into the >margin). >Is there a package for this which works for TeX and LaTeX (primary >use is in LaTeX)? changebar Regards Martin P.S.: This is OT in LaTeX-L -- Martin Schr"oder, MS@Dream.KN-Bremen.DE It is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe. (Thomas Carlyle) 25-Nov-1998 11:42:53-GMT,3100;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id EAA18888 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 04:42:38 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id MAA27144; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 12:11:17 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 410904 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 12:11:16 +0100 Received: from mail-out-0.tiac.net (mail-out-0.tiac.net [199.0.65.247]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA26983 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 12:09:37 +0100 (MET) Received: from mail-out-3.tiac.net (mail-out-3.tiac.net [199.0.65.15]) by mail-out-0.tiac.net (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id GAA24490 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 06:09:36 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from support@YandY.com) Received: from DENALI (p68.tc1.state.MA.tiac.com [207.60.61.69]) by mail-out-3.tiac.net (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id GAA01308 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 06:09:35 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from support@YandY.com) X-Sender: yandy@pop.tiac.net X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.1 References: <13914.43859.281032.18501@srahtz> <365A9F55.88C46733@na.uni-tuebingen.de> <199811142302.AAA24385@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> <13913.60537.514744.407614@srahtz> <365A9F55.88C46733@na.uni-tuebingen.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: <4.1.19981125060354.01a693d0@pop.tiac.net> Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 06:09:16 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "Y&Y, Inc." Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: At 10:51 AM 98/11/24 , you wrote: >I do have one last (trite) remark - why are you (the publishers >reading this) spending so much time on arguing about typesetting and >publishing? Why don't you spend my money on publishing......? Have pity on Sebastian, please :-) He is telling it like it is, and you are repeating the litany of how you think things should be. Listen to him. He comes from the same religion, but has been exposed to the real world. It is only natural to gang up on him because he speaks against the one and only true faith. But its all too easy. Do we feel so threatened that everytime someone expresses an opinion that in the sightest way departs from the current dogma we have to send out a lynching crowd? Doesn't truth count for more than fervent belief? Regards, Berthold. 25-Nov-1998 11:48:11-GMT,3517;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id EAA18947 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 04:47:39 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id MAA28587; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 12:26:06 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 410933 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 12:26:04 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA28567 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 12:25:57 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.35] (sl15.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.35]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id MAA21838 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 12:11:47 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <199811241746.MAA28717@hilbert.math.albany.edu> <199811241746.MAA28717@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 12:11:02 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13915.53007.982429.383308@srahtz> William F. Hammond writes: > If one wants to keep distinctions between "\phi" and "\Phi", i.e., if > one likes the idea of a case-sensitive flexible command name space on > authoring platforms, then one might not want to dismiss SGML in favor > of XML for use on authoring platforms and in publishing houses.XML For those that do not already know, it's only HTML that is case insensitive. HTML must first be converted in order to be accepted by the more rigid XML syntax. For details on this, and other such general questions, see the XML FAQ > will, I think, mainly be useful as browser fodder. Sebastian Rahtz writes: >ie, the vast majority of material My guess is that the different electronic media will be increasingly integrated, until it finally will be difficult to define the borders between the different media. The WWW browsers will not have HTML quality in display, but PDF quality, in addition to the other multimedia capacities that printing on paper odes not have, ability to display sound and moving graphics, 3D images and so on. I think this will affect also scientific publishing: A lot of scientific results can be better presented using multimedia. Even in pure math, one can think of so called commutative diagrams to have a 3D (or higher D) representation by which the reader chooses a suitable 2D projection (unless a 3D screen is used). So as the electronic media is improving, it will be increasingly preferred over the paper media, in all fields. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 25-Nov-1998 12:01:54-GMT,2613;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA19204 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 05:01:52 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id MAA29571; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 12:37:56 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 410943 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 12:37:54 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA29556 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 12:37:50 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id LAA05396; hop 0; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 11:29:34 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Wed, 25 Nov 1998 11:37:33 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199811241746.MAA28717@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Message-ID: <13915.60412.897611.12622@srahtz> Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 11:37:32 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Hans Aberg writes: > between the different media. The WWW browsers will not have HTML quality in > display, but PDF quality, in addition to the other multimedia capacities > that printing on paper odes not have, ability to display sound and moving > graphics, 3D images and so on. indeed. and we are nearly there. for 2 1/2D graphics, Adobe and IBM have demonstrated good implemenations of PGML in browsers, and Microsoft have implemented VML. I would guess these become commodities pretty soon, since its clearly technically possible. sebastian 25-Nov-1998 13:16:31-GMT,4618;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA20500 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 06:15:59 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA05380; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 13:33:33 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 410988 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 13:33:31 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA05343 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 13:33:18 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.95] (sl69.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.95]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id NAA28468 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 13:33:07 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <13914.43859.281032.18501@srahtz> <365A9F55.88C46733@na.uni-tuebingen.de> <199811142302.AAA24385@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> <13913.60537.514744.407614@srahtz> <365A9F55.88C46733@na.uni-tuebingen.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 13:32:56 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <4.1.19981125060354.01a693d0@pop.tiac.net> At 06:09 -0500 1998/11/25, Y&Y, Inc. wrote: >>I do have one last (trite) remark - why are you (the publishers >>reading this) spending so much time on arguing about typesetting and >>publishing? Why don't you spend my money on publishing......? > >Have pity on Sebastian, please :-) He is telling it like it is, and you are >repeating the litany of how you think things should be. Listen to him. >He comes from the same religion, but has been exposed to the real >world. It is only natural to gang up on him because he speaks against >the one and only true faith. I thought it was the opposite, Sebastian speaking about the faith common among businesses, but knowing nothing about the real world that researchers experiences: It is like teaching students at an university which thinks that the main task at the university of their teacher is to teach students, which it is normally not, at least at US universities. One tends ending up with all kinds of duties one would prefer to not. If I should translate this into business, then it is like a person thinking that a business is only manufacturing a product and selling it, while in reality the business is be involved in activities such as administration, decision making, research, advertisements, donations, keeping contacts with other businesses, consumers and society, and so on. Returning to the original question, it is clear that mathematicians have a lot of specialty knowledge about what their papers should containing, including notation then, just as typesetters have special knowledge graphical matters. The difficulty with math notation is that it is developed in close interaction with the notions one wants to describe, and an interaction which can often be very intuitive and subtle. The best way out of this dilemma for publishers and typesetters is to having as little as possible with this semantic aspect of contents that the mathematician supplies, and only provide the things that has to do with the general graphical look: Anything else is going to be too expensive, and the interface between mathematician and proof-readers does not work anyhow. In order to support this, TeX was invented, and LaTeX was invented in order to support using TeX as an authoring tool, even though most mathematicians did not use LaTeX at least in the beginning as somehow LaTeX was able to forget about the styles that mathematicians use. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 25-Nov-1998 13:37:28-GMT,3848;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA20880 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 06:37:24 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA09438; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 14:07:19 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411021 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 14:07:16 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA09417 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 14:07:14 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id MAA08544; hop 0; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 12:58:57 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Wed, 25 Nov 1998 13:06:40 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <13914.43859.281032.18501@srahtz> <365A9F55.88C46733@na.uni-tuebingen.de> <199811142302.AAA24385@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> <13913.60537.514744.407614@srahtz> Message-ID: <13916.96.643934.277862@srahtz> Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 13:04:32 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Hans Aberg writes: > I thought it was the opposite, Sebastian speaking about the faith common > among businesses, but knowing nothing about the real world that researchers > experiences: It is like teaching students at an university which thinks well, to be fair to me, i have worked for 14 years in academia in various roles (including teaching CS) and only 4 in business :-} when i joined this company, I worked in TeX support, in a religious way; 4 years later, its plain as the nose on your face that TeX _as author/editor interface_ has lost the battle for market dominance. the Good Guys do not always win, historically [1] > The best way out of this dilemma for publishers and typesetters is to > having as little as possible with this semantic aspect of contents that the > mathematician supplies, and only provide the things that has to do with the > general graphical look: Anything else is going to be too expensive, and the > interface between mathematician and proof-readers does not work anyhow. sure. i might not argue with this > In order to support this, TeX was invented, and LaTeX was invented in order > to support using TeX as an authoring tool, even though most mathematicians and sadly, the mathematicians (led by the rather unusual Don Knuth) took a license to escape from the confines of $..$ and starting spending days and weeks formatting their bibliographies (an area which, you must admit, is NOT a special case for mathematicians) sebastian [1] sorry, you 20th century mathematicians, as an ex-archaeologist, now i am on _my_ territory. 25-Nov-1998 13:37:34-GMT,2760;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA20883 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 06:37:33 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA07471; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 13:51:21 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411007 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 13:51:19 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA07333 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 13:50:07 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.95] (sl108.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.134]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id NAA00070 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 13:49:36 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <199811241746.MAA28717@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 13:49:46 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13915.60412.897611.12622@srahtz> >for 2 1/2D graphics, >Adobe and IBM have demonstrated good >implemenations of PGML in browsers, and Microsoft have implemented >VML. I would guess these become commodities pretty soon, since its >clearly technically possible. I should point out that it is not only a question of all these ML variations, but via plugins one can integrate code from various computer languages: Java is well known, but Haskell is also possible, and so on. And Maple and MatLab are build up around a kernels which probably can be used for such plugins: We are then no longer speaking of documents in the traditional sense with a fixed graphical output, but the graphical output may depend on what the reader wants to view. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 25-Nov-1998 14:08:30-GMT,2455;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA21522 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 07:08:24 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA12252; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 14:35:24 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411034 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 14:35:22 +0100 Received: from life.ai.mit.edu (life.ai.mit.edu [128.52.32.80]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA12236 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 14:35:18 +0100 (MET) Received: from MAUI (maui.ai.mit.edu [128.52.37.105]) by life.ai.mit.edu (8.9.1/AI2.7/ai.master.life:2.2) with SMTP id IAA28019; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 08:34:44 -0500 (EST) X-Sender: yandy@tiac.net X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.1 References: <199811142302.AAA24385@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> <199811142302.AAA24385@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: <4.1.19981125083114.024e3020@tiac.net> Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 08:34:11 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "Y&Y, Inc." Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13913.60537.514744.407614@srahtz> At 23:15 1998-11-23 +0000, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > > - Guidelines for including graphics (psfrag???) >aaargh! and you expect me to translate your psfrag stuff to XML??? Indeed. You may need to get away from all such specialized hacks from the TeX world (and there are many when it comes to graphics) and focus on standard formats like EPS (for `vector graphics') and TIFF (for images). In the TeX world we have a habit of digging ourselves into holes from which it is hard to extricate ourselves. Not sure why, but the `not invented here' syndrome may play a role in it. Regards, Berthold. Y&Y, Inc. mailto:support@YandY.com http://www.YandY.com 25-Nov-1998 14:26:24-GMT,2913;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA23159 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 07:26:21 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA12914; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 14:41:42 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411040 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 14:41:40 +0100 Received: from life.ai.mit.edu (life.ai.mit.edu [128.52.32.80]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA12886 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 14:41:22 +0100 (MET) Received: from MAUI (maui.ai.mit.edu [128.52.37.105]) by life.ai.mit.edu (8.9.1/AI2.7/ai.master.life:2.2) with SMTP id IAA28229; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 08:41:22 -0500 (EST) X-Sender: yandy@tiac.net X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.1 References: <199811142302.AAA24385@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> <13913.60537.514744.407614@srahtz> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: <4.1.19981125083751.024e3730@tiac.net> Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 08:40:49 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "Y&Y, Inc." Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <365A9F55.88C46733@na.uni-tuebingen.de> At 12:58 1998-11-24 +0100, Marcel Oliver wrote: >> > XML/MathML may make sense for me in certain circumstances, because I >> > may want to reuse the logical structure, I don't see why this should >> > matter for a publisher whose job it is to get the thing on paper, and >> > possibly into an online repository (PDF?). >> publishers who do not want to consider electronic publication of >> material are, IMHO, on the track to failure. publishers exist to sell >> your work, NOT get things on paper!!! >But paper is the only thing you can do better than I can. I can run >a web-site with no problem and publish my stuff in whatever format I >like. >The only thing I cannot do is printing large quantities of paper >and shipping them to every library in the world. No. You can't review articles. You can't provide easy searching and access to all articles in an area. Etc. There *is* a role for publishers to play. Of course it is true that there have always been `self publishers'. But most people have better things to do with their time. Regards, Berthold. Y&Y, Inc. mailto:support@YandY.com http://www.YandY.com 25-Nov-1998 14:38:05-GMT,2804;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA23374 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 07:38:03 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA13913; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 14:50:45 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411051 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 14:50:43 +0100 Received: from heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk (exim@heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk [128.232.32.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA13903 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 14:50:40 +0100 (MET) Received: from dorceus.cl.cam.ac.uk (cl.cam.ac.uk) [128.232.1.34] (rf) by heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 1.82 #1) id 0zifKv-0007Ni-00; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 13:50:29 +0000 Message-ID: Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 13:50:28 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Robin Fairbairns Subject: Re: figures and images (was "base" LaTeX) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 25 Nov 1998 08:34:11 EST." <4.1.19981125083114.024e3020@tiac.net> > At 23:15 1998-11-23 +0000, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > > > > - Guidelines for including graphics (psfrag???) > > >aaargh! and you expect me to translate your psfrag stuff to XML??? > > Indeed. You may need to get away from all such specialized hacks from > the TeX world (and there are many when it comes to graphics) and > focus on standard formats like EPS (for `vector graphics') psfrag is an eps-patcher (allows you to match fonts between the figure and the surrounding body text). > and TIFF (for images). tiff isn't the only image standard, now that iso has put its stamp of approval on png... (there's also ipi/iif, but that's rather ott for simple image inclusion. and i don't know of any implementations...) > In the TeX world we have a habit of digging ourselves into > holes from which it is hard to extricate ourselves. Not sure why, but > the `not invented here' syndrome may play a role in it. i don't think that's really reasonable. some formats were designed for use with tex in the early years, but i find their use increasingly rare, now that more widely-available techniques have largely been integrated into tex. robin 25-Nov-1998 14:53:37-GMT,4080;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA23760 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 07:53:05 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA16388; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 15:15:52 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411071 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 15:15:47 +0100 Received: from life.ai.mit.edu (life.ai.mit.edu [128.52.32.80]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA16128 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 15:13:37 +0100 (MET) Received: from MAUI (maui.ai.mit.edu [128.52.37.105]) by life.ai.mit.edu (8.9.1/AI2.7/ai.master.life:2.2) with SMTP id JAA29497; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 09:13:33 -0500 (EST) X-Sender: yandy@tiac.net X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.1 References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: <4.1.19981125090616.024e03e0@tiac.net> Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 09:13:00 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "Y&Y, Inc." Subject: Re: figures and images (was "base" LaTeX) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: At 13:50 1998-11-25 +0000, Robin Fairbairns wrote: >> > > - Guidelines for including graphics (psfrag???) >> >aaargh! and you expect me to translate your psfrag stuff to XML??? >> Indeed. You may need to get away from all such specialized hacks from >> the TeX world (and there are many when it comes to graphics) and >> focus on standard formats like EPS (for `vector graphics') >psfrag is an eps-patcher (allows you to match fonts between the figure >and the surrounding body text). I know. Which is much better done by using the correct fonts when creating the EPS file in the first place. It is an example what I overheard Sebastian once call a `ghetto solution' (unless I misinterpreted what he meant by that). >> and TIFF (for images). >tiff isn't the only image standard, now that iso has put its stamp of >approval on png... (there's also ipi/iif, but that's rather ott for >simple image inclusion. and i don't know of any implementations...) I have a book that lists over a hundred formats, and I am sure there are more. But if you go to service bureaus, what you see is PS, and EPS and TIFF for figures. Those are widely supported. TIFF because it is a flexible powerful format for images while many others (like BMP, GIF, JPG etc.) only implement subsets of the capability. But actually my point was not TIFF versus PNG or whatever, but some widely used standard format versus PicTeX, PSFrag, PsTricks, MetaFont for images rather than fonts, MetaPost, etc. etc. Of course, you can finesse the issue to some extend by saying that your interface to the rest of the world is PDF (or PS) and they shouldn't care just how you produced that. But I think this runs counter to many applications for document material. >> In the TeX world we have a habit of digging ourselves into >> holes from which it is hard to extricate ourselves. Not sure why, but >> the `not invented here' syndrome may play a role in it. >i don't think that's really reasonable. some formats were designed >for use with tex in the early years, but i find their use increasingly >rare, now that more widely-available techniques have largely been >integrated into tex. Glad to hear it :-) Regards, Berthold. Y&Y, Inc. mailto:support@YandY.com http://www.YandY.com 25-Nov-1998 15:07:56-GMT,3324;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA24076 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 08:07:53 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA17317; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 15:25:24 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411082 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 15:25:21 +0100 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA17298 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 15:25:19 +0100 (MET) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98112514204991@man.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 14:20:50 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: Re: figures and images (was "base" LaTeX) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L > >> > > - Guidelines for including graphics (psfrag???) > > >> >aaargh! and you expect me to translate your psfrag stuff to XML??? > > >> Indeed. You may need to get away from all such specialized hacks from > >> the TeX world (and there are many when it comes to graphics) and > >> focus on standard formats like EPS (for `vector graphics') > > >psfrag is an eps-patcher (allows you to match fonts between the figure > >and the surrounding body text). > > I know. Which is much better done by using the correct fonts when creating > the EPS file in the first place. It is an example what I overheard Sebastian once > call a `ghetto solution' (unless I misinterpreted what he meant by that). I disagree here. The beauty of PSFRAG is that one can divorce the graphic from the .tex file. Often, graphics are made for overheads etc and later recycled in a .tex file. I might only then decide what font I want for the figure, or indeed the .cls might do it for me (perhaps redefining times from roman to default etc). It would be silly to recreate the plot, which in some cases might mean a lot of effort, every time I change fonts in my document!!!!!!! The whole beauty of TeX/LaTeX is macros; I don't want to hard-wire fonts into anything! Also, most plotting programs don't (and shouldn't?) have the power of LaTeX for labelling! With PSFRAG, I can also make text invisible if I want and so on. Or I might use a plot in one paper with one notation and the same plot, say for a semi-popular talk, with a different notation. Long live PSFRAG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ 25-Nov-1998 15:56:01-GMT,3815;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA25140 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 08:55:52 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA23401; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 16:24:30 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411145 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 16:24:28 +0100 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA23381 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 16:24:24 +0100 (MET) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98112515182973@man.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 15:18:29 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: Re: figures and images (was "base" LaTeX) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L > Phillip Helbig writes: > > I disagree here. The beauty of PSFRAG is that one can divorce the > > graphic from the .tex file. Often, graphics are made for overheads etc > > and later recycled in a .tex file. > i can sort of see this scenario, but it sounds weird. why dont you > generate the graphics in a high-level system if this is your need? I write a Fortran program, run it for several weeks on a computer, and it produces some output. To look at this output, show it to colleagues etc I plot it (again with a Fortran program, in my case, but it could be with anything). I can make an overhead for a talk etc. Depending on various factors, it might end up in a paper for journal A, journal B, a conference proceeding etc---all of which might have different font requirements. If the plot is involved, i.e. takes half an hour to make it (choose contour levels, label certain features, perhaps highlight a certain region, overlay it with another plot etc) I don't want to have to repeat that just to change the font! What does `high-level system' mean here? > > recreate the plot, which in some cases might mean a lot of effort, every > > time I change fonts in my document!!!!!!! The whole beauty of TeX/LaTeX > > is macros; I don't want to hard-wire fonts into anything! > i sympathize. and would use Metapost for my plots, obviating the > problem :-} (but then Berthold would hate me again) I admit not having looked into METAPOST yet. > psfrag is great, _if_ you live in a world of one formatter, and one page > description language. Big "if", if you ask me (which you didnt, before > anyone says so) In my world (astronomy), at least for now, LaTeX and PostScript are sort of standard and life is not that difficult. > i know i sound like an evangelist, but XML/MathML/SVG really *are* > designed to cover this sort of game. your SVG graphic will embed > MathML markup cleanly. Maybe I can change the Fortran code to make XML/MathML/SVG an output format option. :) (Now it does PostScript, Sixel graphics, Tektronix graphics etc). -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ 25-Nov-1998 15:57:41-GMT,3003;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA25173 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 08:57:29 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA22189; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 16:11:38 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411125 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 16:11:36 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA22167 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 16:11:30 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.70] (sl50.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.70]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id QAA14935 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 16:11:27 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <13914.43859.281032.18501@srahtz> <365A9F55.88C46733@na.uni-tuebingen.de> <199811142302.AAA24385@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> <13913.60537.514744.407614@srahtz> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 16:12:13 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13916.96.643934.277862@srahtz> At 13:04 +0000 1998/11/25, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: >which, you must admit, is NOT a special case for mathematicians) This is true, traditional mathematical papers do not contain many references; only recently has this changed, influenced by other fields. This is in fact a good example of where others may bring something to a mathematical typesetting system. It also explains why one should ideally develop things into components which can support each other: Nobody is an expert on the whole range of applications, but many might be user of the components developed by experts. Also, all those things that a classical mathematician does not use show up as weaknesses in TeX, and that may also become a problem for a more modern mathematician. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 25-Nov-1998 16:04:18-GMT,2801;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA25340 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 09:03:47 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA22840; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 16:18:20 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411131 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 16:18:15 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA22775 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 16:17:54 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.70] (sl65.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.91]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id QAA15586 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 16:17:49 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <365A9F55.88C46733@na.uni-tuebingen.de> <199811142302.AAA24385@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> <13913.60537.514744.407614@srahtz> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 16:17:53 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <4.1.19981125083751.024e3730@tiac.net> At 08:40 -0500 1998/11/25, Y&Y, Inc. wrote: >>But paper is the only thing you can do better than I can. I can run >>a web-site with no problem and publish my stuff in whatever format I >>like. >>The only thing I cannot do is printing large quantities of paper >>and shipping them to every library in the world. > >No. You can't review articles. You can't provide easy searching and access >to all articles in an area. Etc. There *is* a role for publishers to >play. Of course >it is true that there have always been `self publishers'. But most people >have better things to do with their time. On the whole, professionals can do better that amateurs: And this also concerns websites and such. So publishing will simply change nature. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 25-Nov-1998 16:22:14-GMT,2283;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA25795 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 09:19:19 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA23675; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 16:27:05 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411153 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 16:27:03 +0100 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA23660 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 16:27:01 +0100 (MET) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98112515250024@man.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 15:25:00 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L > On the whole, professionals can do better that amateurs: And this also > concerns websites and such. So publishing will simply change nature. I have to disagree here. Most `professional' websites I've seen are bells-and-whistles, machine-generated, java-overkill, visually formatted. Many amateur ones are clear and simple, hand-written, no unnecessary flashy stuff and concentrate on content not presentation. :) Also, many folks don't realise that accessing something from across the world is not as fast as doing it on their local machine. -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ 25-Nov-1998 16:23:48-GMT,3170;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA25867 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 09:21:26 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA20171; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 15:53:44 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411103 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 15:53:42 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA20149 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 15:53:38 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id OAA13013; hop 0; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 14:45:05 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Wed, 25 Nov 1998 14:52:50 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <98112514204991@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: <13916.6571.831755.492347@srahtz> Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 14:52:27 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: figures and images (was "base" LaTeX) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <98112514204991@man.ac.uk> Phillip Helbig writes: > I disagree here. The beauty of PSFRAG is that one can divorce the > graphic from the .tex file. Often, graphics are made for overheads etc > and later recycled in a .tex file. i can sort of see this scenario, but it sounds weird. why dont you generate the graphics in a high-level system if this is your need? > recreate the plot, which in some cases might mean a lot of effort, every > time I change fonts in my document!!!!!!! The whole beauty of TeX/LaTeX > is macros; I don't want to hard-wire fonts into anything! i sympathize. and would use Metapost for my plots, obviating the problem :-} (but then Berthold would hate me again) > Or I might use a plot in one paper with one notation and the same plot, > say for a semi-popular talk, with a different notation. > > Long live PSFRAG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! > psfrag is great, _if_ you live in a world of one formatter, and one page description language. Big "if", if you ask me (which you didnt, before anyone says so) i know i sound like an evangelist, but XML/MathML/SVG really *are* designed to cover this sort of game. your SVG graphic will embed MathML markup cleanly. Sebastian 25-Nov-1998 16:54:49-GMT,2990;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA26771 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 09:54:47 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA27902; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 17:06:31 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411189 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 17:06:30 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA27880 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 17:06:19 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.70] (sl98.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.124]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id RAA20605 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 17:06:13 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 17:06:28 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <98112515250024@man.ac.uk> At 15:25 +0000 1998/11/25, Phillip Helbig wrote: >> On the whole, professionals can do better that amateurs: And this also >> concerns websites and such. So publishing will simply change nature. > >I have to disagree here. Most `professional' websites I've seen are >bells-and-whistles, machine-generated, java-overkill, visually >formatted. Many amateur ones are clear and simple, hand-written, no >unnecessary flashy stuff and concentrate on content not presentation. :) I guess this is the difference between the professional stuff and the amateur stuff... :-) Turn this over, and you will understand: I have to disagree here. Most `professional' astronomy works I've seen are bells-and-whistles, machine-generated, satellite-overkill, computer analyzed. Many amateur ones are clear and simple, hand-produced, no unnecessary flashy stuff and concentrate on content not presentation. :) Another thing is that we today the use of a lot of things that may not be appropriate in the given context, but that is often the consequence of that the fellows doing it have not yet become truly professional. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 25-Nov-1998 17:36:51-GMT,3122;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA27899 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 10:36:17 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA27693; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 17:03:40 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411185 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 17:03:37 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA27675 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 17:03:34 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id PAA17436; hop 0; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 15:55:18 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Wed, 25 Nov 1998 16:02:36 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <98112515182973@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: <13916.10055.849299.396822@srahtz> Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 15:50:31 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: figures and images (was "base" LaTeX) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <98112515182973@man.ac.uk> Phillip Helbig writes: > requirements. If the plot is involved, i.e. takes half an hour to make > it (choose contour levels, label certain features, perhaps highlight a > certain region, overlay it with another plot etc) I don't want to have > to repeat that just to change the font! > > What does `high-level system' mean here? by which i mean, why doesnt the Fortran program have a -font switch? why all the hand work? > > psfrag is great, _if_ you live in a world of one formatter, and one page > > description language. Big "if", if you ask me (which you didnt, before > > anyone says so) > > In my world (astronomy), at least for now, LaTeX and PostScript are sort > of standard and life is not that difficult. which is fine, wonderful, great - but sadly astronomy is a minuscule niche market, and you cannot really expect to world to suit itself to fit. > Maybe I can change the Fortran code to make XML/MathML/SVG an output > format option. almost certainly. > (Now it does PostScript, Sixel graphics, Tektronix > graphics etc). gasp. Tektronix graphics. you take me back 15 years.... :-} sebastian 25-Nov-1998 17:46:11-GMT,2802;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA28140 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 10:46:04 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA02528; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 17:57:49 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411232 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 17:57:47 +0100 Received: from salmon.maths.tcd.ie (mmdf@salmon.maths.tcd.ie [134.226.81.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA02512 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 17:57:44 +0100 (MET) Received: from boole.maths.tcd.ie by salmon.maths.tcd.ie with SMTP id ; 25 Nov 98 16:57:42 +0000 (GMT) References: <13914.43859.281032.18501@srahtz> <365A9F55.88C46733@na.uni-tuebingen.de> <199811142302.AAA24385@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> <13913.60537.514744.407614@srahtz> <13916.96.643934.277862@srahtz> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.93.2i Message-ID: <19981125165741.D8854@maths.tcd.ie> Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 16:57:42 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Timothy Murphy Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13916.96.643934.277862@srahtz>; from Sebastian Rahtz on Wed, Nov 25, 1998 at 01:04:32PM +0000 On Wed, Nov 25, 1998 at 01:04:32PM +0000, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > when i joined this company, I worked in TeX support, in a religious > way; 4 years later, its plain as the nose on your face that TeX _as > author/editor interface_ has lost the battle for market dominance. the > Good Guys do not always win, historically [1] But surely not in the mathematical arena? I just looked at a random selection of 15 new books on the way to our research library, and as far as I could see they were all written in TeX/LaTeX. The publishers were fairly well distributed: Springer (5), Birkhauser (2), Soc Math de France (2), SIAM (2), CRC, CRM, AMS, CSLI. -- Timothy Murphy e-mail: tim@maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland 25-Nov-1998 17:48:49-GMT,2174;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA28178 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 10:48:34 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA02581; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 17:58:12 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411236 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 17:58:11 +0100 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA02562 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 17:58:08 +0100 (MET) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98112516561315@man.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 16:56:13 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: Re: figures and images (was "base" LaTeX) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L > > What does `high-level system' mean here? > > by which i mean, why doesnt the Fortran program have a -font switch? > why all the hand work? That's no problem, the problem is changing it later, which one can do with PSFRAG. Of course, it could be regenerated, but that's what I want to avoid, especially if it means reading in a lot of data etc. Also, perhaps someone else, who doesn't have the data, needs to use it. -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ 25-Nov-1998 19:04:35-GMT,3123;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA00099 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 11:59:10 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA08663; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:12:59 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411308 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:12:57 +0100 Received: from ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.1]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA08593 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:11:53 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:11:42 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:11:27 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:10:53 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN2 in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:11:34 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13916.18157.336583.120186@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: figures a... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <98112516561315@man.ac.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13916.18157.336583.120186@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:11:34 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: figures and images (was "base" LaTeX) To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <98112516561315@man.ac.uk> Phillip > > That's no problem, the problem is changing it later, which one can > do with PSFRAG. Of course, it could be regenerated, but that's what I > want to avoid, especially if it means reading in a lot of data etc. > Also, perhaps someone else, who doesn't have the data, needs to use it. That is a very important issue; thanks for clarifying it here. To meet such very real needs, any system for combining typesetting and graphics needs to make the distinction betwen them clear and preserve this distinction in the various user interfaces. Of course, there are cases, especially in teaching materials and adverts, where the local structure does mean that there is no clear distinction between the two, but there is also a large area where the distinction is clear. chris 25-Nov-1998 19:09:19-GMT,3396;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA00393 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 12:09:11 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA09505; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:24:25 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411323 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:24:23 +0100 Received: from ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.1]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA09489 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:24:21 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:24:08 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:21:21 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:20:48 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:24:02 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13916.18716.162722.15377@fell.o] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: What is (... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: , <365A9F55.88C46733@na.uni-tuebingen.de>, <13913.60537.514744.407614@srahtz>, <13916.96.643934.277862@srahtz> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13916.18716.162722.15377@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:24:02 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <19981125165741.D8854@maths.tcd.ie> Timothy Murphy wrote -- > On Wed, Nov 25, 1998 at 01:04:32PM +0000, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > > > when i joined this company, I worked in TeX support, in a religious > > way; 4 years later, its plain as the nose on your face that TeX _as > > author/editor interface_ has lost the battle for market dominance. the > > Good Guys do not always win, historically [1] > > But surely not in the mathematical arena? Where there is at present no "market". As Tim said, some people's reality right now is that there is barely time to breath between writing/editing/reading books in TeX/LaTeX (this does, here, not include Elsevier books as we cannot afford them ... maybe something to do with their understanding of "the market"?:-). How long this will continue for, I have no idea; but so far Don's and Leslie's predictions of "something ebetter in 10 years" certainly have not been reflected any reality whatsoever. chris 25-Nov-1998 19:15:15-GMT,3968;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA00559 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 12:14:43 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA10405; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:37:44 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411327 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:37:42 +0100 Received: from ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.1]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA10395 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:37:40 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:37:26 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:37:15 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:36:42 +0100 X400-Received: by mta open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:36:41 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN2 in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:37:19 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13916.19124.230604.70394@fell.o] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: What is (... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <199811142302.AAA24385@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de>, <365A9F55.88C46733@na.uni-tuebingen.de> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13916.19124.230604.70394@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:37:19 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <4.1.19981125083751.024e3730@tiac.net> > > No. You can't review articles. What???? We can, and do, all the time. You may really mean we cannot (without some cost) administer this process. > You can't provide easy searching and access > to all articles in an area. This is certainly something that should be provided a t a reasonable cost by the correct type of organisation. But in pure maths this has only ever been seriously attempted by Math Reviews and Zentralblatt; and both of these, although naturally having close connections with publishing, are clearly part of the mathematical community and employi at senior levels academic mathematicians rather than "publishers". I have no idea if this yet another way in which maths is "different" but that concept is not at all new to me; it is a daily part of my working life as I represent the species in an institution which necessarily (and very effectively) standardises anything that moves (or at least anything that costs money). I do know that maths is very different in the requirements it makes of intra-document search engines. This is one, of many, reasons why the idea of MathML came to fruition (NOTE: I am not claiming that MathML, as is, has delivered what is needed in this area). And again, here, it seems unlikely that, even given the right languages/tools, publishers will be able to provide useful added-value in this area without using specialised mathematicians to encode documents. chris 25-Nov-1998 19:27:49-GMT,3281;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA00897 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 12:27:45 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA11187; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:52:12 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411351 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:52:10 +0100 Received: from ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.2]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA11177 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:52:08 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:51:52 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:51:23 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:50:50 +0100 X400-Received: by mta open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:50:49 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:51:45 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13916.20473.80588.911696@fell.o] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: What is (... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <13914.54306.568153.29148@srahtz> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13916.20473.80588.911696@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:51:45 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Robin Fairbairns wrote -- > > but even if xml _does_ take over, there are going to be people wanting > advice on how to use xml tools to produce an acceptable visual > result. these things _won't_ be well-enough documented (at least, the > versions the researchers can afford), any more than latex is now. I shall refrain from commenting on the documentation issue:-). But I agree that, whatever the mark-up language and whether we do ever develop a usable language to specify complex formatting and support high-quality typography, the authors' questions are likely to remain very similar. But I would like to be able to improve what is available, in bothe lanaguages and, more usefully, improved software that fully supports them, so that the answer does not so often have to be, "well, don't do that then". chris 25-Nov-1998 19:38:27-GMT,2715;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA01178 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 12:38:26 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id UAA11589; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 20:00:06 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411361 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 20:00:04 +0100 Received: from ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.1]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id UAA11570 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 20:00:01 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:59:54 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:59:43 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:59:11 +0100 X400-Received: by mta open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:59:10 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN2 in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:59:46 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13916.21268.789715.870640@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: What is (... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <199811142302.AAA24385@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de>, <13914.46799.156940.839436@fell.open.ac.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13916.21268.789715.870640@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 19:59:46 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13914.54306.568153.29148@srahtz> Sebastian wrote -- > > anyway, you are (and you know it!) deliberately misrepresenting my > basic view point.... Who, me? No need, since you do that so well yourself:-). chris 25-Nov-1998 19:38:35-GMT,2894;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA01181 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 12:38:29 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id UAA12044; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 20:08:25 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411367 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 20:08:23 +0100 Received: from ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.2]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id UAA12027 for ; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 20:08:20 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 20:08:05 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 20:07:52 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 20:07:19 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN2 in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Wed, 25 Nov 1998 20:07:57 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13916.20943.841810.116237@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: What is (... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <199811142302.AAA24385@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de>, <13914.46799.156940.839436@fell.open.ac.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13916.20943.841810.116237@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 20:07:57 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13914.54306.568153.29148@srahtz> > i bet they wished they did not have to work on it! Maybe, but it has long been accepted in this profession, as no doubt in may others, that there are less pleasant things that nevertheless need to be done. Maybe here is another way in which mathematicians (and many other academics) are special? They are so grateful for being paid comparatively well to spend time doing things they enjoy that they are prepared to spend time helping out other professions for free!! chris 26-Nov-1998 10:05:49-GMT,2946;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id DAA20256 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 03:05:47 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA15678; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 10:41:55 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411284 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 10:41:53 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA15663 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 10:41:50 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id JAA06823; hop 0; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 09:33:21 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Thu, 26 Nov 1998 09:41:03 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <13914.43859.281032.18501@srahtz> <365A9F55.88C46733@na.uni-tuebingen.de> <199811142302.AAA24385@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> <13913.60537.514744.407614@srahtz> <13916.96.643934.277862@srahtz> <19981125165741.D8854@maths.tcd.ie> Message-ID: <13917.4472.820603.957391@srahtz> Date: Thu, 26 Nov 1998 08:29:44 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <19981125165741.D8854@maths.tcd.ie> Timothy Murphy writes: > > Good Guys do not always win, historically [1] > > But surely not in the mathematical arena? oh, _that_ tiny niche market :-} > I just looked at a random selection of 15 new books > on the way to our research library, > and as far as I could see they were all written in TeX/LaTeX. perhaps you'd care to tell us how you can tell, unless they explicitly say so, out of interest? it is, perhaps, an indictment of TeX is it always shows its traces... I'd like to think the books I have typeset using TeX (not mathematical, of course) could *not* be traced back. sebastian 26-Nov-1998 10:07:05-GMT,3128;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id DAA20294 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 03:06:59 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA15852; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 10:43:31 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411291 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 10:43:29 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA15842 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 10:43:28 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id JAA06941; hop 0; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 09:35:10 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Thu, 26 Nov 1998 09:42:42 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <365A9F55.88C46733@na.uni-tuebingen.de> <13913.60537.514744.407614@srahtz> <13916.96.643934.277862@srahtz> <13916.18716.162722.15377@fell.open.ac.uk> Message-ID: <13917.6450.829320.974075@srahtz> Date: Thu, 26 Nov 1998 09:02:42 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13916.18716.162722.15377@fell.open.ac.uk> Chris Rowley writes: > time to breath between writing/editing/reading books in TeX/LaTeX > (this does, here, not include Elsevier books as we cannot afford > them ... maybe something to do with their understanding of > "the market"?:-). Elsevier does not publish many books, thanks for the advert. we do indeed operate a in different marketplace, publishing journals and reference works across the board. you must remember that purchase of these things goes far beyond the confines of academia where most of this list seems to come from ... > How long this will continue for, I have no idea; but so far Don's and > Leslie's predictions of "something ebetter in 10 years" certainly have > not been reflected any reality whatsoever. the industry consortium for the world wide web, surely a major development of the last decade in anyone's book, takes math on board as one its requirements. dont you find that helpful? sebastian 26-Nov-1998 10:21:27-GMT,3769;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id DAA20526 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 03:21:25 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA15912; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 10:44:01 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411301 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 10:43:59 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA15897 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 10:43:57 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id JAA06975; hop 0; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 09:35:34 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Thu, 26 Nov 1998 09:43:05 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199811142302.AAA24385@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> <365A9F55.88C46733@na.uni-tuebingen.de> <13916.19124.230604.70394@fell.open.ac.uk> Message-ID: <13917.6753.476689.415054@srahtz> Date: Thu, 26 Nov 1998 09:07:45 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13916.19124.230604.70394@fell.open.ac.uk> Chris Rowley writes: > > No. You can't review articles. > > What???? We can, and do, all the time. You may really mean we cannot > (without some cost) administer this process. > > > You can't provide easy searching and access > > to all articles in an area. > > This is certainly something that should be provided a t a reasonable > cost by the correct type of organisation. it baffles me why academic mathematicians feel able to turn into economists at the drop of a \hat. you concede that the things you want done cost money, but then you blame publishers for providing the service and charging you. sadly, we dont live in a socialist world, so probably not worth shedding crocodile tears for an ideal world that we have *did* exist > close connections with publishing, are clearly part of the mathematical > community and employi at senior levels academic mathematicians rather > than "publishers". i am sure the senior publishers at places like this are happy to have their academic backgrounds dismissed so lightly > I do know that maths is very different in the requirements it makes of > intra-document search engines. This is one, of many, reasons why the in what are you different from chemists or physicists, to name but two obvious examples? > as is, has delivered what is needed in this area). And again, here, > it seems unlikely that, even given the right languages/tools, > publishers will be able to provide useful added-value in this area > without using specialised mathematicians to encode documents. > we have those "specialised mathematicians", thanks, they are called "authors" :-} sebastian 26-Nov-1998 13:16:50-GMT,8102;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA23691 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 06:16:18 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA01900; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 13:27:46 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411400 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 13:27:43 +0100 Received: from na.uni-tuebingen.de (root@na.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de [134.2.161.64]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA01876 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 13:27:41 +0100 (MET) Received: from na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de (na6 [134.2.161.170]) by na.uni-tuebingen.de (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA20817 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 13:27:37 +0100 (MET) Received: (from oliver@localhost) by na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) id NAA14424; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 13:27:32 +0100 (MET) X-Authentication-Warning: na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de: oliver set sender to oliver@na.uni-tuebingen.de using -f Message-ID: <199811261227.NAA14424@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> Date: Thu, 26 Nov 1998 13:27:32 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Marcel Oliver Subject: portable LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Let me try to summarize what I understand from this discussion: - LaTeX is not obsolete. Although there alternative formats with various advantages emerging, or used internally in the publishing business, it does not seem that they are ready for general use now, and it does not seem that likely that something to completely replace LaTeX as an authoring tool will be available in the near future. - Publishers do not necessarily use TeX throughout the production process, and would prefer to use other formats especially since publishers want to move into the archiving/database business for which LaTeX is clearly not the ideal format. - LaTeX to XXX converters should be easily in principle, but are tricky because authors mess up documents with all sorts of packages and nontrivial macros. So I conclude what I have been trying to say, maybe not so clearly, before: We need a standard for portable LaTeX which is necessarily a subset of the capabilities of native LaTeX. I think the strongest criterion should be that this standard does not assume that the file is processed through a TeX backend. Also, this seems more or less orthogonal to the goals of LaTeX3, because it is mainly a matter of convention, and not of fundamental hacking in the LaTeX the program. Some comments about things that came up in the discussion: Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > how about separating typesetting from editing and manipulation? its > not the only paradigm [...] > i do have one last (trite) remark - why are you (the academic authors > reading this) spending so much time on arguing about typesetting and > publishing? why don't you spend my tax money on doing research into > your subject......? It is important to keep in mind that most of the documents that we academics write don't go via a publisher. These are class notes, informal exchanges, short reports, grant proposals etc. Most of these are routine, but some are important and significant documents. Thus, the typesetting side is of crucial importance to everyday academic life; separating typesetting from authoring is therefore not an option in the majority of instances. Moreover, thanks to LaTeX, we can typeset even routine documents to a high standard (this is not to say that it's impossible to screw up badly). It is therefore frustrating to see that in many cases when the manuscript hits the publisher, and is copy-edited by a professional, things get worse rather than better. When manuscripts are retyped (and most publishers try their very best to do this carefully), it always introduces new typos. When publishers take the LaTeX file, some choke on vanilla amsmath (although it's explicitly allowed in their author instructions) and other problems. In short, the fact that most publishers cannot accept a carefully prepared LaTeX file causes hours of proofreading on a level which is below the standard of the submitted document. We have every interest to avoid that, and I think that's the same for the publishing professions... Hans Aberg wrote: > I think this will affect also scientific publishing: A lot of > scientific results can be better presented using multimedia. Even in > pure math, one True, but I think this is something that is very far from the areas where LaTeX is the optimal engine, and a unifying approach would be even more utopic, so I think this should not be of immediate concern here. "Y&Y, Inc." wrote: > No. You can't review articles. You can't provide easy searching and > access to all articles in an area. Etc. There *is* a role for > publishers to play. Of course it is true that there have always been In my experience most of the work in the review process is carried out in academic institutions. Very often papers that I review are sent by the editor who is naturally part of an academic institution through the mail system of this very institution, where only the letterhead refers to the non-academic publisher. Re: figures and images: Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > i know i sound like an evangelist, but XML/MathML/SVG really *are* > designed to cover this sort of game. your SVG graphic will embed > MathML markup cleanly. Again, are the necessary authoring tools available? Will it allow me to easily typeset (!) my personal documents? Thinking about psfrag, it seems that its use is not only problematic when portability of other formats is required, but psfrag also seems to be a potential problem within the LaTeX paradigm: Change of document classes, font size etc. may affect the embedded graphic badly (depending on the type of material). On the other hand, I do see the usefulness of the functionality that psfrag provides. Would it be hard to write a script which takes an eps file, runs it through LaTeX/psfrag, and converts the dvi output back into eps with the same bounding box (preferably not using bitmapped fonts and including only those fonts that are needed)? This way one could meet stricter portability requirements with little extra work for those cases where they are needed. Generally, such issues need to be addressed. Maybe even Elsevier would be more friendly towards accepting LaTeX as an exchange format if the success rate for conversion into XXX could be significantly improved. Maybe one could even try to implement the equivalent of -Wall into the LaTeX engine (or as a package) so that authors could check without pain if their documents could mess up non-TeX backends. (I guess that document conversion is not just an issue for submission of scientific articles, but also that almost everybody will at some point have to convert something into HTML, Word, etc.) If portability standards for LaTeX can be defined, maybe one can introduce a compliance tag into the package definition interface where the package signals whether it's non-TeX-backend-compliant (maybe with some gradation; this is vague, but I am not sure about all the issues potentially involved). If someone now says why not SGML then: The advantage of LaTeX from the author's point of view is that it is a single platform for authoring, typesetting and document exchange (where, I believe, the problems can in principle be minimized to ensure that LaTeX adequate for all practical purposes). Marcel 26-Nov-1998 13:32:41-GMT,2093;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA23977 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 06:32:40 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA04093; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 13:50:17 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411429 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 13:50:15 +0100 Received: from nag.co.uk (openmath.nag.co.uk [192.156.217.16]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA04079 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 13:50:09 +0100 (MET) Received: (from davidc@localhost) by nag.co.uk (AIX4.2/UCB 8.7/8.7) id MAA22392; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 12:49:41 GMT References: <199811261227.NAA14424@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> Message-ID: <199811261249.MAA22392@nag.co.uk> Date: Thu, 26 Nov 1998 12:49:41 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: David Carlisle Subject: Re: portable LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811261227.NAA14424@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> (message from Marcel Oliver on Thu, 26 Nov 1998 13:27:32 +0100) > Would it be hard to write a script which takes an eps file, runs it > through LaTeX/psfrag, and converts the dvi output back into eps. no, it's not hard (although I have only done it a few times by hand so don't actually have a script for it). Basically this is the same process (using dvips -E, that the latex->html converters do before making gif files). That's also what you _have_ to do to use psfrag with pdftex. (So you can distil the combined eps file to pdf). David 26-Nov-1998 13:39:51-GMT,5769;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA24092 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 06:39:49 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA05957; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 14:14:14 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411456 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 14:14:11 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA05944 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 14:14:09 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id NAA16506; hop 0; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 13:05:49 GMT Received: from screavie.elsevier.co.uk by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Thu, 26 Nov 1998 13:13:55 +0000 Received: from lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk (lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.7]) by screavie.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id NAA23652 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 13:13:42 GMT Received: (from srahtz@localhost) by lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) id NAA28971; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 13:13:49 GMT References: <199811261227.NAA14424@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> Message-ID: <199811261313.NAA28971@lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk> Date: Thu, 26 Nov 1998 13:13:49 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: portable LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811261227.NAA14424@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> Marcel Oliver writes: > So I conclude what I have been trying to say, maybe not so clearly, > before: We need a standard for portable LaTeX which is necessarily a > subset of the capabilities of native LaTeX. I think the strongest hmm. if you go this way, you may as well change the syntax, make it < and >, so that what you treat as LaTeX is in fact valid XML..... > is processed through a TeX backend. Also, this seems more or less > orthogonal to the goals of LaTeX3, because it is mainly a matter of > convention, and not of fundamental hacking in the LaTeX the program. now there i agree 100%, as I suspect They will too. > It is important to keep in mind that most of the documents that we > academics write don't go via a publisher. These are class notes, > informal exchanges, short reports, grant proposals etc. Most of these > are routine, but some are important and significant documents. Thus, my apologies. you ARE right about this. though I could and would argue that people who spend 3 days tarting up the look of their grant proposal don't deserve the grant :-} ........... > In short, the fact that most publishers cannot accept a carefully > prepared LaTeX file causes hours of proofreading on a level which is > below the standard of the submitted document. We have every interest > to avoid that, and I think that's the same for the publishing > professions... too right. i think the situation you describe is shocking, and I am ashamed of my profession. seriously. > > i know i sound like an evangelist, but XML/MathML/SVG really *are* > > designed to cover this sort of game. your SVG graphic will embed > > MathML markup cleanly. > > Again, are the necessary authoring tools available? Will it allow me > to easily typeset (!) my personal documents? have you actually *tried* Office 97 to compose your memos? Office 2000 will use VML, I understand. No, I dont use it either, but really, thats what most of the world `typeset' with. its not THAT bad quality. ..... > Would it be hard to write a script which takes an eps file, runs it > through LaTeX/psfrag, and converts the dvi output back into eps with > the same bounding box (preferably not using bitmapped fonts and > including only those fonts that are needed)? This way one could meet no. thats what i would do if i was asked to routinely handle psfragged documents. > Maybe one could even try to implement the equivalent of -Wall into the > LaTeX engine (or as a package) so that authors could check without ha. interesting idea. > If someone now says why not SGML then: The advantage of LaTeX from the > author's point of view is that it is a single platform for authoring, > typesetting and document exchange (where, I believe, the problems can ah, but see above. is it *so* much harder to type
Introduction
a+3 This is fun than the \ and {}? then you can run this through "LaTeX" as you do now, but it has the benefit of also being XML to validate against a DTD (if you wish). sure, you cannot use \catcode tricks, but you do already accept the idea of a subset dialect. No, you don't have to lose \def entirely. Doug Lovell's TeXML (see http://www.ibm.com/xml) might be of interest to people in this context. My point is that "strict LaTeX" and "XML" are barely inches apart, really. I know They will agree with this too.... Sebastian 26-Nov-1998 14:49:32-GMT,3513;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA25357 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 07:49:14 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA11246; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 15:14:05 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411540 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 15:14:03 +0100 Received: from mail-out-0.tiac.net (mail-out-0.tiac.net [199.0.65.247]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA11228 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 15:13:57 +0100 (MET) Received: from mail-out-4.tiac.net (mail-out-4.tiac.net [199.0.65.16]) by mail-out-0.tiac.net (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id JAA17275 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 09:13:41 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from support@YandY.com) Received: from DENALI (p39.tc2.metro.MA.tiac.com [209.61.75.168]) by mail-out-4.tiac.net (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id OAA14159 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 14:13:40 GMT (envelope-from support@YandY.com) X-Sender: yandy@pop.tiac.net X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.1 References: <19981125165741.D8854@maths.tcd.ie> <13914.43859.281032.18501@srahtz> <365A9F55.88C46733@na.uni-tuebingen.de> <199811142302.AAA24385@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> <13913.60537.514744.407614@srahtz> <13916.96.643934.277862@srahtz> <19981125165741.D8854@maths.tcd.ie> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: <4.1.19981126090908.03437f10@pop.tiac.net> Date: Thu, 26 Nov 1998 09:13:22 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "Y&Y, Inc." Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13917.4472.820603.957391@srahtz> At 03:29 AM 98/11/26 , you wrote: >Timothy Murphy writes: > > I just looked at a random selection of 15 new books > > on the way to our research library, > > and as far as I could see they were all written in TeX/LaTeX. >perhaps you'd care to tell us how you can tell, unless they explicitly >say so, out of interest? it is, perhaps, an indictment of TeX is it >always shows its traces... I'd like to think the books I have typeset >using TeX (not mathematical, of course) could *not* be traced back. I went around the MIT Coop the other day and in certain fields like Computer Science many books are indeed obviously done using LaTeX. How can I tell? (1) Computer Modern fonts, (2) `Idiosyncratic' (:-) layout of default LaTeX styles (I won't say classes because I doubt whether too many of these people know there even is a LaTeX 2e). Which is indeed sad, since one can do so much more with (La)TeX. The fact that the authors do the typesetting limits the design seriously (while saving the publisher a pile of money). Regards, Berthold Horn 26-Nov-1998 15:11:35-GMT,1997;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA25817 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 08:11:10 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA12819; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 15:33:00 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411569 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 15:32:58 +0100 Received: from multivac (multivac.jb.man.ac.uk [130.88.24.128]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA12809 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 15:32:56 +0100 (MET) X-VMS-To: SMTP%"LATEX-L@urz.uni-heidelberg.de" X-VMS-Cc: HELBIG Message-ID: <98112614321324@man.ac.uk> Date: Thu, 26 Nov 1998 14:32:13 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Phillip Helbig Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L > How can I tell? (1) Computer Modern fonts, (2) `Idiosyncratic' (:-) layout > of default LaTeX styles (I won't say classes because I doubt whether too > many of these people know there even is a LaTeX 2e). Some even say `typeset in TeX' on the copyright page. -- Phillip Helbig Email ......... p.helbig@jb.man.ac.uk Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories Tel. .... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 297) Jodrell Bank Fax ................ +44 1477 571 618 Macclesfield Telex ................ 36149 JODREL G UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/ 26-Nov-1998 15:23:02-GMT,2618;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA26056 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 08:23:00 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA14786; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 15:54:01 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411576 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 15:53:58 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA14771 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 15:53:56 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id OAA20624; hop 0; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 14:45:42 GMT Received: from screavie.elsevier.co.uk by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Thu, 26 Nov 1998 14:53:36 +0000 Received: from lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk (lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.7]) by screavie.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id OAA24975 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 14:53:17 GMT Received: (from srahtz@localhost) by lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) id OAA29508; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 14:53:25 GMT References: <98112614321324@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: <199811261453.OAA29508@lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk> Date: Thu, 26 Nov 1998 14:53:25 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <98112614321324@man.ac.uk> Phillip Helbig writes: > > How can I tell? (1) Computer Modern fonts, (2) `Idiosyncratic' (:-) layout > > of default LaTeX styles (I won't say classes because I doubt whether too > > many of these people know there even is a LaTeX 2e). > > Some even say `typeset in TeX' on the copyright page. > now I'd take that to mean it used a font called "TeX" :-} I bought a Frank Lloyd Wright font last week. Maybe we should have a Knuth one sebastian 26-Nov-1998 15:50:25-GMT,3635;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA26536 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 08:49:28 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA16023; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 16:05:22 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411607 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 16:05:20 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA15991 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 16:05:05 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.149] (sl123.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.149]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id QAA08961 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 16:05:02 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Thu, 26 Nov 1998 16:04:41 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: portable LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811261227.NAA14424@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> At 13:27 +0100 1998/11/26, Marcel Oliver wrote: >So I conclude what I have been trying to say, maybe not so clearly, >before: We need a standard for portable LaTeX which is necessarily a >subset of the capabilities of native LaTeX. I think the strongest >criterion should be that this standard does not assume that the file >is processed through a TeX backend. Also, this seems more or less >orthogonal to the goals of LaTeX3, because it is mainly a matter of >convention, and not of fundamental hacking in the LaTeX the program. I recall I suggested that LaTeX ought to have a well-defined syntax, in say EBNF like other computer languages. The problem is that there is no way within TeX to ensure that authors use that syntax. Further, TeX integrates authoring and typesetting in a way, making the task even more difficult. So it's not really an option within the current TeX: Add integrated Yacc and Lex to TeX, and it becomes possible. >Hans Aberg wrote: >> I think this will affect also scientific publishing: A lot of >> scientific results can be better presented using multimedia. Even in >> pure math, one > >True, but I think this is something that is very far from the areas >where LaTeX is the optimal engine, Not really, take a program like Maple where you want the output to be both notationally and mathematically correct: It is the need for pasting valid formulas into a document and them cut them and repaste them that drives this question. >and a unifying approach would be >even more utopic, so I think this should not be of immediate concern >here. It is another matter that it is not really possible to achieve this within the current LaTeX, because of the same reason as above, the failings of TeX. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 26-Nov-1998 18:48:05-GMT,7167;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA00007 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 11:47:57 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA20888; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 19:14:48 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 412598 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 19:14:40 +0100 Received: from sarah.albany.edu (sarah.albany.edu [169.226.1.103]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA20760 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 19:14:32 +0100 (MET) Received: from hilbert.math.albany.edu (hilbert.math.albany.edu [169.226.23.52]) by sarah.albany.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA24640 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 13:14:19 -0500 (EST) Received: (from hammond@localhost) by hilbert.math.albany.edu (8.8.4/8.8.3) id NAA16984 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 13:14:18 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <199811261814.NAA16984@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Date: Thu, 26 Nov 1998 13:14:18 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "William F. Hammond" Subject: Re: portable LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Sebastian writes: : my apologies. you ARE right about this. though I could and would argue : that people who spend 3 days tarting up the look of their grant : proposal don't deserve the grant :-} \ironic{Ummm... is Sebastian displeased with the current fad of PDF as an exchange format for grants? \quotestr{;-\} } : . . . : : > If someone now says why not SGML then: The advantage of LaTeX from the : > author's point of view is that it is a single platform for authoring, : > typesetting and document exchange (where, I believe, the problems can : ah, but see above. is it *so* much harder to type Now we come to what is, but for trivial transliteration, a matter of personal preference: : amsmath for this? ;-{ : :
Introduction
: a+3 : This is fun : This could as well be: \documenttype{article} \title{} % Isn't title formally required by "article" in sebastian.dtd? \begin{document} \section{Introduction} $a + \sqrt{3}$ % or ... This is \emph{fun} \end{document} If I run this markup through my elisp, I get the following sgml:
Introduction
a + 3 fun
If I run this sgml through my sgml processor for the target "Lamport LaTeX", I get the following, most of which is boiler plate based on personal preferences, some of which is unused in this instance: % LaTeX \documentclass{article} \setlength{\parindent}{6bp} \setlength{\topmargin}{0bp} \setlength{\headheight}{0bp} \setlength{\headsep}{0bp} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{0bp} \setlength{\evensidemargin}{0bp} \setlength{\textwidth}{468bp} \setlength{\textheight}{624bp} \setlength{\parskip}{6bp} \thispagestyle{empty} \title{} %cs0 \newcommand{\hsf}{\hspace*{\fill}} \newcommand{\tdbc}[1]{\hsf{\bf #1}\hsf} \newenvironment{menulist}{ \begin{list}{}{ \setlength{\topsep}{0bp} \setlength{\labelwidth}{0bp} \setlength{\leftmargin}{2\parindent} \setlength{\itemindent}{0bp} \setlength{\itemsep}{0bp} \setlength{\parsep}{0bp}} }{\end{list}} \newenvironment{citations}{ \begin{list}{}{ \setlength{\topsep}{0bp} \setlength{\labelwidth}{0bp} \setlength{\leftmargin}{24bp} \setlength{\labelsep}{0bp} \setlength{\itemindent}{-24bp} \setlength{\itemsep}{3bp} \setlength{\parsep}{0bp}} }{\end{list}} \begin{document} \begin{center}\LARGE\bf \end{center} \medskip \section{Introduction} \par{\(a + \sqrt{3}\) %cs0 This is \emph{fun} } \bigskip [Processed from GELLMU to \LaTeX{} on Thu Nov 26 12:16:37 EST 1998] \end{document} (The empty "center" is for an article title.) If I run the sgml through my sgml processor for the target "HTML", I get, again with personal boiler plate: A GELLMU Demonstration

1. Introduction

a + SQRT{3} This is fun

AUTHOR  |  COMMENT
 
[Processed from GELLMU to HTML: Thu Nov 26 12:16:35 EST 1998] (Under "gellmu.dtd" there is a "surtitle" that is translated here for HTML as the HTML "title" with a default value in my sgml processor that is shown above; a GELLMU "title" is translated by this processor for HTML as the first "H1" header.) (Yes, there is a control of front matter unless you don't want it.) The main idea is that this type of markup is amenable to robust processing toward *any* target once an sgml processor for that target is created. Creating such a processor can be as easy as writing a Perl function for each tag; that might even be easier than writing a "style". Note that this approach is different from that of James Clark's "jade" which "centralizes" style for all "backends" using a DSSSL stylesheet for each document type. In the example above there is only a single document type "article" at hand. (The issue between my approach and that of "jade" *may* be how fussy an author or publisher wishes to be. (What may be good enough for "government work" *may* not be good enough for "elitist work".) Note that one of the possible outputs for jade is another sgml. It might make sense in my view to go part of the way with jade and then from there split off for different targets. Many options exist.) It would be easy to write a processor to convert the sgml to xml. (Some may be already out there, but I have no present need for that.) (Would someone like to write a processor for (a) plain TeX? (b) Texinfo? (c) text/x-yahoo-catalog?) For a processor to render sanely to MathML without much guessing (some guessing may be more reasonable than other guessing) some clues about notational meaning will need to be entered. Has anybody read my drafty draft on "mathexpr" (cf. "regexp") at the url http://www.albany.edu/~hammond/gellmu/notation ? ? ? -- Bill 26-Nov-1998 23:32:31-GMT,4791;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id QAA05652 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 16:32:29 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id AAA05679; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 00:01:34 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411072 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 00:01:32 +0100 Received: from abacus.maths.uq.edu.au (abacus.maths.uq.edu.au [130.102.160.6]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id XAA05448 for ; Thu, 26 Nov 1998 23:54:45 +0100 (MET) Received: from bigted.maths.uq.edu.au (bigted.maths.uq.edu.au [130.102.160.22]) by abacus.maths.uq.edu.au (8.9.0/8.9.0) with ESMTP id IAA19310 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 08:54:22 +1000 (EST) Received: (from kgs@localhost) by bigted.maths.uq.edu.au (8.8.6/0.0.0) id IAA20689 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 08:54:22 +1000 (EST) Message-ID: <199811262254.IAA20689@bigted.maths.uq.edu.au> Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 08:54:22 +1000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Ken Smith Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L On Tue, 24 Nov 1998 16:33:59 +0000 Robin Fairbairns wrote (inter alia) > sebastian writes (of chris rowley) > > anyway, you are (and you know it!) deliberately misrepresenting my > > basic view point.... [deletions] > the reason i have got away with as much latex-ery as i have, over the > years, is that it's been useful to have a repository of last resort of > answers to people's questions around here. i regularly get asked for > help by people all over the department, occasionally by people in > other parts of the university. sometimes, latex is unavoidable; and > latex isn't so well documented that everyone can trivially do every > sensible thing they might want. I find myself in much the same position as Robin. I also find myself asked about installing TeX and friends on assorted platforms - Unix, Linux, DOS, OS/2, Win95 and WinNT so far. I find that even people who have been using TeX and LaTeX for years can come up with some obscure bit of code which interacts in an unusual way with some of the packages. I have managed to get (nearly) everybody to use \newcommand instead of \def, but even then some publishers packages can do funny things. The latest was a staff member putting a book together. He had used \newtheorem{example]{Example}[section] and got a most obscure error message. I tracked it down to part of the publisher's class file, which also defined an "example" environment. But even if we eventually get away from TeX/LaTeX into something else, we will still have the problem of interactions between different macro (or whatever they may be called) definitions. And doing any sort of extensive writing in mathematics *without* some sort of macro facility is just too awful to contemplate. Has anyone ever tried to write something in *raw* TeX > i don't believe there's a real solution to this problem, in the short > term. whether a meta-language (`designers' interface') will help > isn't clear to me. whether the xml bandwaggon, or whatever is > tomorrow's buzz-word takes out latex altogether, i can't possibly > guess (though the evidence of the sgml takeover doesn't inspire me to > assume that xml will do all that much better). > > but even if xml _does_ take over, there are going to be people wanting > advice on how to use xml tools to produce an acceptable visual > result. these things _won't_ be well-enough documented (at least, the > versions the researchers can afford), any more than latex is now. I wholeheartedly agree with the last two paragraphs. One problem with visual display is the very limited resolution, compared with the printed page. This can be overcome, for small bits of a page, by zooming, but this gets horribly tedious even in xdvi And I am quite sure that a certain person in charge of a large company in USA would be rather unwilling to commit the required amount of money into adding a zoom facility to the internet viewer just to satisfy the wishes of a (relatively) small mathematics community. > robin Ken Smith kgs@maths.uq.edu.au 27-Nov-1998 12:30:29-GMT,5294;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA19486 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 05:29:57 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id MAA08231; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 12:56:06 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411438 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 12:56:03 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA08197 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 12:55:57 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.53] (sl33.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.53]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id MAA04765 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 12:55:24 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 12:54:55 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811262254.IAA20689@bigted.maths.uq.edu.au> At 08:54 +1000 1998/11/27, Ken Smith wrote: >I have managed to get (nearly) everybody to use \newcommand instead of >\def, but even then some publishers packages can do funny things. > >The latest was a staff member putting a book together. >He had used \newtheorem{example]{Example}[section] >and got a most obscure error message. >I tracked it down to part of the publisher's class file, which also >defined an "example" environment. Of course, such problems can be solved by the use of modules, which either separates the names so that they do not clash or reports such clashes when they do occur. In the example above, either \newtheorem defines a new entity environment/example, and if it already exists it reports an error, or it defines an entity theorem/example, or environment/theorem/example which enables one to switch between different examples environments within the same paper, by locally adding the proper name extension (theorem/ or environment/theorem/). It is another question whether this implements well in TeX. >But even if we eventually get away from TeX/LaTeX into something else, >we will still have the problem of interactions between different macro >(or whatever they may be called) definitions. So this is in fact not true: There are techniques that can solve the problems at hand, but these solutions may not be solvable or feasible within TeX. >And doing any sort of extensive writing in mathematics *without* some >sort of macro facility is just too awful to contemplate. >Has anyone ever tried to write something in *raw* TeX Using raw TeX (with macros) is of course what many pure mathematicians did and do because of the past problems with LaTeX. But the point is that, sure, one needs something that is at least as effective to the author as macros: I suggest something that has a capacity similar to programs like Yacc and Lex. It is then possible to get a much closer relationship between the written code and the mathematical notation, while on the same time increasing the prospects for other tools handling it. (The code is not then merely macro expanded, but parsed according to well defined parsing rules, which is easier to deal with.) >I wholeheartedly agree with the last two paragraphs. >One problem with visual display is the very limited resolution, >compared with the printed page. This can be overcome, for small bits >of a page, by zooming, but this gets horribly tedious even in xdvi >And I am quite sure that a certain person in charge of a large company >in USA would be rather unwilling to commit the required amount of >money into adding a zoom facility to the internet viewer just to >satisfy the wishes of a (relatively) small mathematics community. Whereas the low computer screen resolution of today is a problem, it is just a limitation of the screens of today and rather unrelated to the other problems: If the code expands into a format such as PDF (or DVI, PS ..), then the problems with zooming becomes independent of the programs (TeX, LaTeX, YAML etc), that produces the typesetting description. In addition, screen resolution is increasing, although very slowly: They used to have about 75 dots/inch, but these days they are likely to have something closer to 100 dots/inch. Eventually one will see screen with typesetting resolution of 1200 dots/inch, even though that seems far away the things look right now. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 27-Nov-1998 12:41:54-GMT,3128;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA19684 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 05:41:44 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA09110; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 13:05:04 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411445 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 13:05:02 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA09076 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 13:04:54 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id LAA16925; hop 0; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 11:56:38 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Fri, 27 Nov 1998 12:04:02 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199811261814.NAA16984@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Message-ID: <13918.35217.61736.372419@srahtz> Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 11:14:25 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: portable LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811261814.NAA16984@hilbert.math.albany.edu> William F. Hammond writes: > This could as well be: > > \documenttype{article} which is not valid XML, so whats the point? > If I run this markup through my elisp, I get the following sgml: but i want the *source* be to useable, not a result munged by some script!!! >
> >
Introduction
> > a + 3 This is fun > >
not valid XML either :-} ... > The main idea is that this type of markup is amenable to robust > processing toward *any* target once an sgml processor for that target but it goes through you (inevitably flaky) elisp. thats the flaw. if you *started* with valid *ML markup, wouldnt it be even easier? > Note that this approach is different from that of James Clark's "jade" > which "centralizes" style for all "backends" using a DSSSL stylesheet please don't blame James Clark in person for the fundamental concepts of DSSSL, an ISO standard developed after a decade of work... Sebastian 27-Nov-1998 13:41:12-GMT,3013;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA20613 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 06:40:51 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA16120; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 14:02:29 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411552 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 14:02:27 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA16096 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 14:02:18 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id MAA19536; hop 0; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 12:53:56 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Fri, 27 Nov 1998 13:01:32 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199811262254.IAA20689@bigted.maths.uq.edu.au> Message-ID: <13918.39374.95531.209114@srahtz> Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 12:23:42 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Hans Aberg writes: > Using raw TeX (with macros) is of course what many pure mathematicians did ^^^^ presumbly the applied ones are lesser mortals? > and do because of the past problems with LaTeX. in what sense is LaTeX something over than "raw TeX with macros"??? oh, you mean where you write all the macros? i am interested to hear that you don't use such commonplaces as \alpha and \sqrt. > Whereas the low computer screen resolution of today is a problem, it is its amazing how the tens of millions of Web users out there happily use this inferior technology, isn't it. of course, many are not 20th century mathematicians... if you want a document to read on the screen, why not design for the screen? of course, if you work towards an A4 page with 1 inch margins and 10 pt Computer Modern math, and display it in PDF with the full page, it looks like a set of bird tracks. sebastian 27-Nov-1998 14:22:01-GMT,2643;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA21309 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 07:21:52 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA19919; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 14:40:19 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411579 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 14:40:16 +0100 Received: from mail-out-0.tiac.net (mail-out-0.tiac.net [199.0.65.247]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA19908 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 14:40:14 +0100 (MET) Received: from mail-out-2.tiac.net (mail-out-2.tiac.net [199.0.65.13]) by mail-out-0.tiac.net (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id IAA08709 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 08:39:41 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from support@YandY.com) Received: from DENALI (p41.tc1.metro.MA.tiac.com [209.61.75.42]) by mail-out-2.tiac.net (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id DAA03532; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 03:39:48 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from support@YandY.com) X-Sender: yandy@pop.tiac.net X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.1 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: <4.1.19981127083748.00a473d0@pop.tiac.net> Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 08:39:22 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "Y&Y, Inc." Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811262254.IAA20689@bigted.maths.uq.edu.au> At 05:54 PM 98/11/26 , Ken Smith wrote: >I wholeheartedly agree with the last two paragraphs. >One problem with visual display is the very limited resolution, >compared with the printed page. This can be overcome, for small bits >of a page, by zooming, but this gets horribly tedious even in xdvi >And I am quite sure that a certain person in charge of a large company >in USA would be rather unwilling to commit the required amount of >money into adding a zoom facility to the internet viewer just to >satisfy the wishes of a (relatively) small mathematics community. Just use Acrobat PDF :-) See e.g. http://www.YandY.com/resources.htm#pdf Louis 27-Nov-1998 14:25:10-GMT,2117;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA21372 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 07:24:56 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA20441; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 14:45:37 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411583 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 14:45:34 +0100 Received: from heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk (exim@heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk [128.232.32.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA20423 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 14:45:32 +0100 (MET) Received: from dorceus.cl.cam.ac.uk (cl.cam.ac.uk) [128.232.1.34] (rf) by heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 1.82 #1) id 0zjODE-0000ya-00; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 13:45:32 +0000 Message-ID: Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 13:45:30 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Robin Fairbairns Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 27 Nov 1998 08:39:22 EST." <4.1.19981127083748.00a473d0@pop.tiac.net> pdf isn't, it seems, good enough for mathematicians. at least for one of them in this university ;-) in a thread about putting maths on the web (in an internal newsgroup) i've today been told that "converting whole documents to pdf is entirely the wrong idea". the imaging model is fine; there are those who don't think the hypertextual model is good enough, it seems. who am i to gainsay them? (i haven't been a `mathematician' since 1967, so i hardly count...) robin 27-Nov-1998 14:42:03-GMT,2823;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA21627 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 07:40:56 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA23543; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:14:21 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411600 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:14:19 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA23531 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:14:17 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id OAA22149; hop 0; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 14:05:57 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Fri, 27 Nov 1998 14:13:29 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <4.1.19981127083748.00a473d0@pop.tiac.net> Message-ID: <13918.45409.395265.753693@srahtz> Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 14:04:17 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Robin Fairbairns writes: > i've today been told that "converting whole documents to pdf is > entirely the wrong idea". do they think Pinochet should be sent home too? > the imaging model is fine; there are those who don't think the > hypertextual model is good enough, it seems. who am i to gainsay > them? (i haven't been a `mathematician' since 1967, so i hardly i'm slightly bemused to hear that mathematicians now require special _hypertext_ as well as everything else. but I'd point out that a link embedded in a PDF document should be able to be expressed in XPointer syntax perfectly well, which helps a little. I'd agree that internally the PDF model is simplistic - but then who *has* implemented anything better in mainstream software? sebastian 27-Nov-1998 14:57:57-GMT,3703;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA21879 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 07:57:53 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA24600; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:25:55 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411619 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:25:52 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA24586 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:25:46 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.82] (sl62.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.82]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id PAA19654 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:25:39 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <199811262254.IAA20689@bigted.maths.uq.edu.au> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:25:47 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13918.39374.95531.209114@srahtz> At 12:23 +0000 1998/11/27, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: >Hans Aberg writes: > > Using raw TeX (with macros) is of course what many pure mathematicians did > ^^^^ >presumbly the applied ones are lesser mortals? Strictly speaking, the distinction between pure and applied mathematics is an older one increasingly less usable today. But pure mathematics is really the most complicated form, both graphically and logically, so that is why one tends to return to it. > > Whereas the low computer screen resolution of today is a problem, it is > >its amazing how the tens of millions of Web users out there happily >use this inferior technology, isn't it. of course, many are not 20th >century mathematicians... > >if you want a document to read on the screen, why not design for the >screen? of course, if you work towards an A4 page with 1 inch margins >and 10 pt Computer Modern math, and display it in PDF with the full >page, it looks like a set of bird tracks. You put in this word "happily" here again: I myself try to avoid printing out the (PS, DVI, PDF) documents I need to read because I do not know were to store them, but I do not think the words "happily" is correct here, since it is clearly cumbersome to read it on screen: Experimenting with laserprinting showed that 300 dpi is too low for displaying fonts correctly, so one needs at least 600 dpi for that. But to be on the sure side, laser probably want 1200 dpi. So, before that happens, it will not be possible to design documents to be read on the screen if that is to contain the (graphical) information we are used to on paper. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 27-Nov-1998 15:01:05-GMT,2988;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA21936 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 08:01:04 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA24157; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:20:09 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411615 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:20:07 +0100 Received: from heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk (exim@heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk [128.232.32.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA24144 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:20:05 +0100 (MET) Received: from dorceus.cl.cam.ac.uk (cl.cam.ac.uk) [128.232.1.34] (rf) by heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 1.82 #1) id 0zjOke-0002Ar-00; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 14:20:04 +0000 Message-ID: Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 14:20:02 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Robin Fairbairns Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 27 Nov 1998 14:04:17 GMT." <13918.45409.395265.753693@srahtz> > Robin Fairbairns writes: > > i've today been told that "converting whole documents to pdf is > > entirely the wrong idea". > do they think Pinochet should be sent home too? i dunno. when are they going to charge thatcher with war crimes, that's what i want to know? > > the imaging model is fine; there are those who don't think the > > hypertextual model is good enough, it seems. who am i to gainsay > > them? (i haven't been a `mathematician' since 1967, so i hardly > > i'm slightly bemused to hear that mathematicians now require special > _hypertext_ as well as everything else. but I'd point out that a link > embedded in a PDF document should be able to be expressed in XPointer > syntax perfectly well, which helps a little. I'd agree that internally > the PDF model is simplistic - but then who *has* implemented anything > better in mainstream software? i was merely relaying a comment i'd just read (and spent some time responding to). in essence, everyone wants everything, *now*. acting in a support role, the best one can hope to do is to tell them about the limited subset they can _have_ now; but the potential of the future offerings (mathml, and then something along the openmath lines later) is a nice thing to have to blind 'em with science when they carry on whinging. people ask me direct, i tell 'em "use pdf". r 27-Nov-1998 15:04:23-GMT,2822;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA21926 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 07:59:44 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA24638; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:26:14 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411623 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:26:12 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA24602 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:25:56 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.82] (sl62.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.82]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id PAA19657 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:25:42 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: Your message of "Fri, 27 Nov 1998 08:39:22 EST." <4.1.19981127083748.00a473d0@pop.tiac.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:24:42 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: At 13:45 +0000 1998/11/27, Robin Fairbairns wrote: >pdf isn't, it seems, good enough for mathematicians. at least for one >of them in this university ;-) > >in a thread about putting maths on the web (in an internal newsgroup) >i've today been told that "converting whole documents to pdf is >entirely the wrong idea". > >the imaging model is fine; there are those who don't think the >hypertextual model is good enough, it seems. who am i to gainsay >them? (i haven't been a `mathematician' since 1967, so i hardly >count...) When I mentioned it, I though wholly on the PDF imaging model, not as a tool for authoring: One should use something with a more advanced parsing than TeX's macro model, and use an imaging model at least as advanced as that of PDF. In other words, PDF is a new DVI, not a new TeX. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 27-Nov-1998 15:13:12-GMT,2977;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA22178 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 08:13:10 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA25921; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:42:07 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411629 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:42:03 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA25875 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:41:30 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.82] (sl56.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.76]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id PAA21264 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:41:24 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <4.1.19981127083748.00a473d0@pop.tiac.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:34:49 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13918.45409.395265.753693@srahtz> At 14:04 +0000 1998/11/27, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: >i'm slightly bemused to hear that mathematicians now require special >_hypertext_ as well as everything else. but I'd point out that a link >embedded in a PDF document should be able to be expressed in XPointer >syntax perfectly well, which helps a little. I'd agree that internally >the PDF model is simplistic - but then who *has* implemented anything >better in mainstream software? It depends on what one wants to do -- if one merely wants to display a document, then a format like PDF might be OK. But as soon something becomes electronic, there are a lot of other things one wants to do: Reuse the information in various way. Then in a PDF format, that information is lost. So all points to that formats like PDF are great as new DVI formats, but is wholly unsuitable to lead the way into the future with respect to all the other things one want to do with a computer. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 27-Nov-1998 15:16:54-GMT,2399;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA22241 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 08:16:52 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA25958; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:42:20 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411633 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:42:17 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA25905 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:42:02 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.82] (sl56.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.76]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id PAA21280 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:41:28 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: Your message of "Fri, 27 Nov 1998 14:04:17 GMT." <13918.45409.395265.753693@srahtz> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:41:34 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: At 14:04 +0000 1998/11/27, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: >do they think Pinochet should be sent home too? At 14:20 +0000 1998/11/27, Robin Fairbairns wrote: >i dunno. when are they going to charge thatcher with war crimes, >that's what i want to know? Note: Conducting war or making a coup d'etat are not war crimes. Widespread torture, bombing civilian targets, and genocide and such are war crimes. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 27-Nov-1998 15:19:32-GMT,3076;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA22276 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 08:19:30 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA26471; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:47:58 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411649 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:47:56 +0100 Received: from mail-out-0.tiac.net (mail-out-0.tiac.net [199.0.65.247]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA26448 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:47:49 +0100 (MET) Received: from mail-out-4.tiac.net (mail-out-4.tiac.net [199.0.65.16]) by mail-out-0.tiac.net (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id JAA32151 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 09:47:36 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from support@YandY.com) Received: from DENALI (p41.tc1.metro.MA.tiac.com [209.61.75.42]) by mail-out-4.tiac.net (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id OAA05264; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 14:47:34 GMT (envelope-from support@YandY.com) X-Sender: yandy@pop.tiac.net X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.1 References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: <4.1.19981127094131.03e1bf10@pop.tiac.net> Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 09:47:17 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "Y&Y, Inc." Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: At 08:45 AM 98/11/27 , Robin Fairbairns wrote: >pdf isn't, it seems, good enough for mathematicians. at least for one >of them in this university ;-) >in a thread about putting maths on the web (in an internal newsgroup) >i've today been told that "converting whole documents to pdf is >entirely the wrong idea". Translation: Duh! What is PDF? >the imaging model is fine; there are those who don't think the >hypertextual model is good enough, it seems. Translation: I barely know how to do it one way, so don't confuse me with facts. Or perhaps: ghee, I didn't know PDF supports hypertext, does it? There is indeed much such pigheadedness around. Spouting dogma is the standard way to counter good suggestions that people don't want to have to deal with. Has this person seen the examples at http://www.math.uakron.edu/~dpstory/acrotex.html or others listed at http://www.YandY.com/resources.htm#pdf ? Or looked on news://comp.text.pdf ? Regards, Berthold. 27-Nov-1998 15:24:36-GMT,3521;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA22391 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 08:24:20 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA27501; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:58:44 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411672 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:58:42 +0100 Received: from mail-out-0.tiac.net (mail-out-0.tiac.net [199.0.65.247]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA27157 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:55:19 +0100 (MET) Received: from mail-out-2.tiac.net (mail-out-2.tiac.net [199.0.65.13]) by mail-out-0.tiac.net (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id JAA15856 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 09:54:53 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from support@YandY.com) Received: from DENALI (p41.tc1.metro.MA.tiac.com [209.61.75.42]) by mail-out-2.tiac.net (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id EAA05447; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 04:55:01 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from support@YandY.com) X-Sender: yandy@pop.tiac.net X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.1 References: <13918.39374.95531.209114@srahtz> <199811262254.IAA20689@bigted.maths.uq.edu.au> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: <4.1.19981127094908.03e19740@pop.tiac.net> Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 09:54:34 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "Y&Y, Inc." Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: At 09:25 AM 98/11/27 , Hans Aberg wrote: >Experimenting with laserprinting showed that 300 dpi is too low for >displaying fonts correctly, so one needs at least 600 dpi for that. But to >be on the sure side, laser probably want 1200 dpi. When we were young we had to walk barefoot in the freezing cold and had to read all our output from 300 dpi laser printers :-) How spoilt we have become. For many years 300 dpi laser was the standard. Of course 600 dpi is better, but as for `readable', 300 dpi is perfectly adequate. I would be happy if my screen supported 300 dpi instead of 120 dpi. But then my screen supports multi-level gray tones, when the printer only has binary, so the difference isn't *that* big. Of course a 1600 x 1200 CRT costs a bit of money, just like a decent printer. One thing that helps is that I always use quality fonts with ATM --- which despite complaints from R&R makes for great looking displays on screen, unlike what you get with PS rasterizers... >So, before that happens, it will not be possible to design documents to be >read on the screen if that is to contain the (graphical) information we are >used to on paper. Yes, just as your transparencies for a talk are not made by copying the paper you are talking about. Ideally the design should fit the medium. Regards Berthold. 27-Nov-1998 15:25:34-GMT,3157;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA22404 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 08:25:28 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA27796; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:00:08 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411677 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:00:06 +0100 Received: from mail-out-0.tiac.net (mail-out-0.tiac.net [199.0.65.247]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA27745 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:59:55 +0100 (MET) Received: from mail-out-4.tiac.net (mail-out-4.tiac.net [199.0.65.16]) by mail-out-0.tiac.net (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id JAA15074 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 09:59:35 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from support@YandY.com) Received: from DENALI (p41.tc1.metro.MA.tiac.com [209.61.75.42]) by mail-out-4.tiac.net (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id OAA06131; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 14:59:34 GMT (envelope-from support@YandY.com) X-Sender: yandy@pop.tiac.net X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.1 References: <13918.45409.395265.753693@srahtz> <4.1.19981127083748.00a473d0@pop.tiac.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: <4.1.19981127095613.03e148a0@pop.tiac.net> Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 09:59:16 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "Y&Y, Inc." Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: At 09:34 AM 98/11/27 , Hans Aberg wrote: >It depends on what one wants to do -- if one merely wants to display a >document, then a format like PDF might be OK. Who suggested anything else (other than hypertext links, and such clever things as what Donald Story does). You may have created this straw man. >But as soon something becomes electronic, there are a lot of other things >one wants to do: Reuse the information in various way. Then in a PDF >format, that information is lost. Right, PDF is largely an output format, like PS or DVI and unlike TeX source code say. In fact service bureaus are migrating from PS to PDF as the medium of choice for submissions. >So all points to that formats like PDF are great as new DVI formats, but is >wholly unsuitable to lead the way into the future with respect to all the >other things one want to do with a computer. Which is fine. Do you want people to easily edit and change your papers and pass around modified copies? 27-Nov-1998 15:26:58-GMT,2805;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA22429 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 08:26:56 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA28053; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:02:00 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411683 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:01:57 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA28041 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:01:53 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id OAA24444; hop 0; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 14:53:24 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:00:25 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199811262254.IAA20689@bigted.maths.uq.edu.au> Message-ID: <13918.48084.843833.165507@srahtz> Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 14:48:52 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Hans Aberg writes: > Experimenting with laserprinting showed that 300 dpi is too low for > displaying fonts correctly, so one needs at least 600 dpi for that. But to > be on the sure side, laser probably want 1200 dpi. > i swear to you, i was _happy_ with 300 dpi for at least 7 years. its nonsensical, IMHO, to say that 300 dpi cannot display fonts correctly. *some* fonts come out badly, most don't > So, before that happens, it will not be possible to design documents to be > read on the screen if that is to contain the (graphical) information we are > used to on paper. how does this follow at all? are you telling me you cannot read 24pt Lucida New Math on screen? sebastian 27-Nov-1998 15:28:19-GMT,2689;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA22447 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 08:28:17 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA28635; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:07:39 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411693 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:07:37 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA28614 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:07:30 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id OAA24728; hop 0; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 14:59:10 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:06:57 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <4.1.19981127083748.00a473d0@pop.tiac.net> Message-ID: <13918.49059.779885.204883@srahtz> Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:05:07 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Hans Aberg writes: > It depends on what one wants to do -- if one merely wants to display a > document, then a format like PDF might be OK. > > But as soon something becomes electronic, there are a lot of other things > one wants to do: Reuse the information in various way. Then in a PDF > format, that information is lost. oh lord, who said anything about PDF as a format for re-use? its a display format. go back to the *ML source if you want to re-purpose. i dont see the issue. I *do* say that PDF has not a good enough linking model to support XLink, mind. Sebastian 27-Nov-1998 15:41:51-GMT,3065;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA22674 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 08:41:50 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA28969; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:11:30 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411702 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:11:28 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA28943 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:11:22 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.82] (sl56.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.76]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id QAA24438 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:11:15 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <13918.45409.395265.753693@srahtz> <4.1.19981127083748.00a473d0@pop.tiac.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:10:57 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <4.1.19981127095613.03e148a0@pop.tiac.net> At 09:59 -0500 1998/11/27, Y&Y, Inc. wrote: >>So all points to that formats like PDF are great as new DVI formats, but is >>wholly unsuitable to lead the way into the future with respect to all the >>other things one want to do with a computer. > >Which is fine. Do you want people to easily edit and change your papers >and pass around modified copies? This is a discussion conducted at various places, for example the XXX eprint archive , where people want to submit in non-TeX formats just in order to prevent others doing such modifications: But with a highly structured format, is in fact easier to see who stole what. So, in fact, those issues on how to protect the originator is rather independent of this other aspect, developing more highly structured formats: One can use several different techniques of protecting the originator, depending of what is suitable in each case. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 27-Nov-1998 15:42:29-GMT,6543;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA22695 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 08:42:24 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA29220; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:15:02 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411706 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:14:59 +0100 Received: from sarah.albany.edu (sarah.albany.edu [169.226.1.103]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA29188 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:14:38 +0100 (MET) Received: from hilbert.math.albany.edu (hilbert.math.albany.edu [169.226.23.52]) by sarah.albany.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA21577 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 10:14:22 -0500 (EST) Received: (from hammond@localhost) by hilbert.math.albany.edu (8.8.4/8.8.3) id KAA22026 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 10:14:22 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <199811271514.KAA22026@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 10:14:22 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "William F. Hammond" Subject: Re: portable LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Sebastian Rahtz writes: : William F. Hammond writes: : > This could as well be: : > : > \documenttype{article} : which is not valid XML, so whats the point? But haven't I been saying here for several weeks that I think it more sensible to use the additional strength of sgml relative to xml while working on an authoring platform? It is, upon transliteration -- but certainly not char-by-char transliteration -- valid sgml under the didactic gellmu dtd, which is subordinate to a non-reference sgml declaration. (Because I've been using different declarations I can become confused about what is legal when, which is why I made the slip about case sensitivity that Sebastian kindly pointed out several days ago.) And didn't I say that it could trivially be processed to xml? And we understand, don't we, when xml made from my sgml dialect is *parsed*, the parse stream looks just like the parse stream from the sgml. (Well, one needs to do something about "eqnarray*" if that name is used.) : > If I run this markup through my elisp, I get the following sgml: : but i want the *source* be to useable, not a result munged by some : script!!! We do understand, don't we, that elisp under GNU Emacs is not just a scripting language but rather a full lisp that can be run either interactively in Emacs or else in batch mode. We're NOT talking about clever merging of "sh", "sed" and "gawk". And we have, moreover, the possibility of layered error diagnosis with the elisp finding low level syntax mistakes and the parser finding structural mistakes. Then, if, for example, validation fails for an output sgml or xml, it's most likely a problem with the sgml processor for that output. Or if LaTeX yells, it's most likely a problem with the sgml processor for that target. (I do, however, as I write new things, still find a few authoring mistakes at that stage.) Wasn't it previously agreed that good LaTeX is just inches away from something usable? If so, then I expect that something usable when coded for *personal* convenience to look like LaTeX is also usable. Of course, if one is happy writing verbose xml, then one does that. It's just that since I have this persistent LaTeX habit and find this a convenient way to write sgml that can be robustly translated to xml, I thought that others might also find this to be a personal convenience. (Of course, if I were designing a wysiwyg interface, then I expect that I would go for the xml.) Finally, there are four things for authors: (1) editing format. (2) exchange format. (3) private archiving format. (4) public archiving format. There is also the issue for any format that is a printable plain text format whether it is sane for *backup to paper* with recovery by optical scanning. These formats do not all have the same purpose. What is optimal for one purpose may not be optimal for another. The question then always is: starting at X can I safely get to Y? : but it goes through you (inevitably flaky) elisp. thats the flaw. : : if you *started* with valid *ML markup, wouldnt it be even easier? But I *am* starting with valid sgml markup. That's why it is called gellmu and not called LaTeX. It only looks like LaTeX. I must have my DTD in mind while writing. My elisp may be flaky if applied to arbitary LaTeX documents. I did not design it primarily for legacy documents but rather for being able to use LaTeX-like markup to create sgml documents. For example, inasmuch as "frac12" is a legal name in sgml, my elisp regards it as a legal name. If I want to use something obfuscated like "\frac12" as a synonym for "\frac{1}{2}", then I must have that name in my DTD and my processors must know about it. (I choose not to go there, but one could.) I did say that my choice to use LaTeX-like markup to create sgml is a personal matter. On the other hand, it staves off my symptoms of "withdrawal" from editing real LaTeX (which I still very much shall continue to use to get to paper). And when I come across a good legacy document such as the LaTeX3 prospectus (part of the LaTeX2E distribution) by Mittelbach and Rowley, it is not that much work to make it legal sgml via the transliterator. From that sgml an equivalent latex document may be re-constructed. Or a good html version may be made. If I am editing for the transliterator, I do need to be minimally aware that I am writing sgml. : > Note that this approach is different from that of James Clark's "jade" : > which "centralizes" style for all "backends" using a DSSSL stylesheet : please don't blame James Clark in person for the fundamental concepts : of DSSSL, an ISO standard developed after a decade of work... Blame? There was no blame from me. I am a fan. -- Bill 27-Nov-1998 15:53:43-GMT,2785;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA22869 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 08:53:37 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA00297; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:27:09 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411734 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:27:06 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA00274 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:27:04 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.82] (sl07.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.27]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id QAA25983 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:26:58 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <4.1.19981127083748.00a473d0@pop.tiac.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:27:02 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13918.49059.779885.204883@srahtz> At 15:05 +0000 1998/11/27, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: >oh lord, who said anything about PDF as a format for re-use? its a >display format. go back to the *ML source if you want to re-purpose. i >dont see the issue. I *do* say that PDF has not a good enough linking >model to support XLink, mind. I think that one should be able to integrate a format PDF with the authoring languages, so that the browser produces the output on the fly. In terms of Java, an extended PDF format would serve as the byte code of a corresponding JVM (Java Virtual Machine): It then gives the producer of the document the opportunity to decide what to put out on the WWW and how much security that is wanted. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 27-Nov-1998 15:57:17-GMT,3224;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA22908 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 08:57:04 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA00322; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:27:20 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411738 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:27:17 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA00272 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:27:00 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.82] (sl07.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.27]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id QAA25975 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:26:55 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <199811262254.IAA20689@bigted.maths.uq.edu.au> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:22:50 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13918.48084.843833.165507@srahtz> At 14:48 +0000 1998/11/27, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: >Hans Aberg writes: > > Experimenting with laserprinting showed that 300 dpi is too low for > > displaying fonts correctly, so one needs at least 600 dpi for that. But to > > be on the sure side, laser probably want 1200 dpi. > > >i swear to you, i was _happy_ with 300 dpi for at least 7 years. its >nonsensical, IMHO, to say that 300 dpi cannot display fonts >correctly. *some* fonts come out badly, most don't Well, that's what I meant: For hyperfine fonts and such, one must have 600 dpi. > > So, before that happens, it will not be possible to design documents to be > > read on the screen if that is to contain the (graphical) information we are > > used to on paper. >how does this follow at all? are you telling me you cannot read 24pt >Lucida New Math on screen? Believe it or not, 24pt Lucida New Math is not convenient for displaying math formulas: One should use 10 pt, and regardless how you magnify it to see the details, necessary in math as a tiny dot usually means something different than something quite close to a dot, it is not very convenient. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 27-Nov-1998 16:07:11-GMT,3387;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA23095 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 09:06:46 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA01211; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:36:23 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411750 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:36:21 +0100 Received: from nag.co.uk (openmath.nag.co.uk [192.156.217.16]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA01184 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:36:08 +0100 (MET) Received: (from davidc@localhost) by nag.co.uk (AIX4.2/UCB 8.7/8.7) id PAA22400; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:35:20 GMT References: <199811271514.KAA22026@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Message-ID: <199811271535.PAA22400@nag.co.uk> Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:35:20 GMT Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: David Carlisle Subject: Re: portable LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811271514.KAA22026@hilbert.math.albany.edu> (hammond@CSC.ALBANY.EDU) > But haven't I been saying here for several weeks that I think it more > sensible to use the additional strength of sgml relative to xml while > working on an authoring platform? I think the problem is is that SGML has been around since whenever it was, about the same vintage as TeX (older if you count GML), and with that power it had essentially zero impact on mainstream applications. (Although of course it was used in house in many larger companies.) XML is basically SGML with all the author minimisation and concrete syntax changes thrown out. and suddenly XML is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and about to take over the world (Chris' doubts not withstanding). So it seems to be the case that the `SGML experience' says that as soon as you want to move the document anywhere then it should be in a standard concrete syntax, with all minimisation normalised. ie be XML. Of course how one personally authors the document is up to the author, it might be gellmu, or you might use latex and then tex4ht or omega-mml or frame+SGML or MSOffice2000 or whatever you want. If however you expect to allow people to edit the transmitted document and send you back the changed version (eg a co author, or a journal editor) it makes sense to use a system that really uses the transmitted XML form of the document, rather than a gellmu or latex->*ml style translation where it is not necessarily easy to go back. Within the tex world it makes sense to pass tex documents, but I do not think it makes sense now to be passing SGML documents that make essential use of a non standard SGML declaration, and SGML minimisation features. The number of XML applications appearing increases at a ridiculous rate, the number of applications that can actually handle minimised SGML documents is small and static, I fear. David 27-Nov-1998 16:08:00-GMT,4002;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA23130 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 09:07:58 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA02093; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:45:37 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411761 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:45:35 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA02079 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:45:29 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id PAA26487; hop 0; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:37:13 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:45:01 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199811271514.KAA22026@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Message-ID: <13918.51341.592903.793574@srahtz> Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:43:09 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: portable LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811271514.KAA22026@hilbert.math.albany.edu> William F. Hammond writes: > But haven't I been saying here for several weeks that I think it more > sensible to use the additional strength of sgml relative to xml while > working on an authoring platform? It is, upon transliteration -- but what you proposed is not valid SGML either, unless you have an amazing document declaration > certainly not char-by-char transliteration -- valid sgml under the > didactic gellmu dtd, which is subordinate to a non-reference sgml > declaration. maybe i should look again if that really is valid... if so, apologies. > And we understand, don't we, when xml made from my sgml dialect is > *parsed*, the parse stream looks just like the parse stream from the > sgml. sorry, i dont recognize the concept of an SGML "dialect". if it conforms to the ISO standard, its SGML, otherwise its not. > We do understand, don't we, that elisp under GNU Emacs is not just > a scripting language but rather a full lisp that can be run either > interactively in Emacs or else in batch mode. We're NOT talking about > clever merging of "sh", "sed" and "gawk". And we have, moreover, the so? i fail to see the relevance. elisp is a great language, i am sure. > Of course, if one is happy writing verbose xml, then one does that. > It's just that since I have this persistent LaTeX habit and find this > a convenient way to write sgml that can be robustly translated to xml, > I thought that others might also find this to be a personal > convenience. assuming, for the sake of argument that your \documenttype{article} is valid SGML, how many software tools support it as such? after all, how many _fully_ compliant SGML parsers were ever written? 2 or 3 at most? > And when I come across a good legacy document such as the LaTeX3 > prospectus (part of the LaTeX2E distribution) by Mittelbach and > Rowley, it is not that much work to make it legal sgml via the > transliterator. confused again. so you *dont* write valid SGML? Sebastian 27-Nov-1998 16:13:59-GMT,2595;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA23257 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 09:13:57 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA02351; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:49:35 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411765 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:49:32 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA02318 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:49:18 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id PAA26651; hop 0; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:41:01 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:48:55 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 I); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199811262254.IAA20689@bigted.maths.uq.edu.au> Message-ID: <13918.51671.471599.718308@srahtz> Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:48:39 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Hans Aberg writes: > Believe it or not, 24pt Lucida New Math is not convenient for displaying > math formulas: One should use 10 pt, and regardless how you magnify it to amazing. now I have seen it all. "One should use 10 pt". I'll get on the phone to all the typographers and designers I have ever met, and tell them. I'll see if its too late to cancel some of the journal issues coming out of Elsevier this week. sebastian 27-Nov-1998 16:32:55-GMT,3551;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA23597 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 09:32:52 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA02960; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:54:15 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411769 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:54:12 +0100 Received: from mail-out-0.tiac.net (mail-out-0.tiac.net [199.0.65.247]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA02934 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:54:09 +0100 (MET) Received: from mail-out-2.tiac.net (mail-out-2.tiac.net [199.0.65.13]) by mail-out-0.tiac.net (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA28637 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 10:54:09 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from support@YandY.com) Received: from DENALI (p41.tc1.metro.MA.tiac.com [209.61.75.42]) by mail-out-2.tiac.net (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id FAA07534; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 05:54:16 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from support@YandY.com) X-Sender: yandy@pop.tiac.net X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.1 References: <13918.48084.843833.165507@srahtz> <199811262254.IAA20689@bigted.maths.uq.edu.au> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: <4.1.19981127104934.03e184f0@pop.tiac.net> Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 10:53:49 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "Y&Y, Inc." Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: At 10:22 AM 98/11/27 , Hans Aberg wrote: >>i swear to you, i was _happy_ with 300 dpi for at least 7 years. its >>nonsensical, IMHO, to say that 300 dpi cannot display fonts >>correctly. *some* fonts come out badly, most don't >Well, that's what I meant: For hyperfine fonts and such, one must have 600 dpi. Then don't use them for this purpose. Lucida was the first font family designed exactly to address the issue of readability in a digital world. In any case, people used CM (which is thin) happily for many years on 300 dpi printers. And properly hinted `hyper fine' fonts don't have a problem at low res either... >>how does this follow at all? are you telling me you cannot read 24pt >>Lucida New Math on screen? >Believe it or not, 24pt Lucida New Math is not convenient for displaying >math formulas: One should use 10 pt, and regardless how you magnify it to >see the details, necessary in math as a tiny dot usually means something >different than something quite close to a dot, it is not very convenient. I am not sure what you are saying here, but you may be caught in the straight- jacket of browsers (which cannot magnify). Acrobat Reader provides for on screen magnification. Sebastian's example of 24pt LNM -- in my reading --- stands for 10pt LNM zoomed to 240% on screen. 27-Nov-1998 17:36:25-GMT,2901;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA24689 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 10:31:54 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA10398; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 18:03:52 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411936 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 18:03:50 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id SAA10375 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 18:03:48 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.82] (sl111.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.137]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id SAA04082 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 18:03:37 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <199811262254.IAA20689@bigted.maths.uq.edu.au> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 18:03:31 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13918.51671.471599.718308@srahtz> At 15:48 +0000 1998/11/27, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > > Believe it or not, 24pt Lucida New Math is not convenient for displaying > > math formulas: One should use 10 pt, and regardless how you magnify it to > >amazing. now I have seen it all. "One should use 10 pt". I'll get on >the phone to all the typographers and designers I have ever met, and >tell them. I'll see if its too late to cancel some of the journal >issues coming out of Elsevier this week. One alternative would be that you learn to not always read things too literally but try to see the intention as well (it might save you some work :-) ): My guess is that I had in my mind writing One should use 10 pt or something, and regardless how you magnify it to or something. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 27-Nov-1998 17:40:29-GMT,4508;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA24882 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 10:40:27 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA11817; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 18:20:29 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411955 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 18:20:27 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id SAA11800 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 18:20:25 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.82] (sl63.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.83]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id SAA05256 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 18:20:21 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <13918.48084.843833.165507@srahtz> <199811262254.IAA20689@bigted.maths.uq.edu.au> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 18:20:33 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <4.1.19981127104934.03e184f0@pop.tiac.net> At 10:53 -0500 1998/11/27, Y&Y, Inc. wrote: >Then don't use them for this purpose. Lucida was the first font family >designed exactly to address the issue of readability in a digital world. >In any case, people used CM (which is thin) happily for many years on >300 dpi printers. And properly hinted `hyper fine' fonts don't have a >problem at low res either... My guess is that this is when the audio CD was introduced, and some claimed that the old analog vinyl sounded better, wheas most other people found it hard to ever lkisten at the vinyl anymopre due to the poor sound quality. >>>how does this follow at all? are you telling me you cannot read 24pt >>>Lucida New Math on screen? > >>Believe it or not, 24pt Lucida New Math is not convenient for displaying >>math formulas: One should use 10 pt, and regardless how you magnify it to >>see the details, necessary in math as a tiny dot usually means something >>different than something quite close to a dot, it is not very convenient. > >I am not sure what you are saying here, but you may be caught in the straight- >jacket of browsers (which cannot magnify). Acrobat Reader provides for >on screen magnification. Sebastian's example of 24pt LNM -- in my reading >stands for 10pt LNM zoomed to 240% on screen. I think that Sebastian Rahtz claimed that better computer screens was wholly unnecessary because one simply typesets them in 24 pt instead. To me it sounds as though he never has tried to read a math manuscript: If the formulas are typeset in 24 pt, so shall the text too, of course, otherwise the graphics get out of proportions. But then one can just typeset it in say 10 pt and magnify it 240% when reading, which gives the same effect. However, this is not very convenient when trying to read those manuscripts, even though it is workable. One needs to also take into account that people tend to have a fixed reading distance (of about 20-25 cm, I think), so a magnified (or larger sized) font is not read the same as a non-magnified font. Besides, one may wander what formulas Sebatsian thinks can be displayed in its completeness at 24 pt on say a 14" powerbook screen -- probably not a very large one. So screens should really be improved before one can properly display math formulas in a WWW manuscript. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 27-Nov-1998 21:26:27-GMT,3827;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id OAA02809 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 14:26:25 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id VAA21330; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 21:54:47 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 412136 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 21:54:45 +0100 Received: from salmon.maths.tcd.ie (mmdf@salmon.maths.tcd.ie [134.226.81.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id VAA21313 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 21:54:43 +0100 (MET) Received: from boole.maths.tcd.ie by salmon.maths.tcd.ie with SMTP id ; 27 Nov 98 20:54:42 +0000 (GMT) References: <13914.43859.281032.18501@srahtz> <365A9F55.88C46733@na.uni-tuebingen.de> <199811142302.AAA24385@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> <13913.60537.514744.407614@srahtz> <13916.96.643934.277862@srahtz> <19981125165741.D8854@maths.tcd.ie> <13917.4472.820603.957391@srahtz> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.93.2i Message-ID: <19981127205441.A5643@maths.tcd.ie> Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 20:54:41 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Timothy Murphy Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13917.4472.820603.957391@srahtz>; from Sebastian Rahtz on Thu, Nov 26, 1998 at 08:29:44AM +0000 On Thu, Nov 26, 1998 at 08:29:44AM +0000, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > > I just looked at a random selection of 15 new books > > on the way to our research library, > > and as far as I could see they were all written in TeX/LaTeX. > perhaps you'd care to tell us how you can tell, unless they explicitly > say so, out of interest? I did say "as far as I could see", ie I was guessing. However, I think there is a fairly obvious feel to TeX maths, perhaps due to spacing, distance of suffixes above and below letters, etc. [I'm not saying it is good, just recognizable.] I am just looking at a very well printed old book (Hardy & Wright, 1954), and while I like the printing almost as much, it is not quite as consistent as TeX (or probably other computer printing) would be today. In any case, it is easily recognisable as _not_ TeX. For one thing, they do things which would be difficult (for me) in LaTeX, eg Theorem 6: with a displayed formula on the same line. Also the spacing of displayed formulae is much tighter, there is more space on either side of "=", and the "=" sign is almost twice as long as the TeX standard. (I actually prefer that.) Letters in fractions are the same size as elsewhere. Etc, etc. I think it would be quite odd for a mathematician today _not_ to write a book in TeX. What would he use? It should be said that Hardy & Wright is an exception for its period. Most of the research maths books of that vintage were appallingly badly "printed" (usually typed). TeX has been responsible for an immense increase in the average printing quality of maths books. -- Timothy Murphy e-mail: tim@maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland 27-Nov-1998 21:46:51-GMT,2431;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id OAA03206 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 14:46:49 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id WAA22305; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 22:17:45 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 412144 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 22:17:43 +0100 Received: from salmon.maths.tcd.ie (mmdf@salmon.maths.tcd.ie [134.226.81.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id WAA22294 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 22:17:41 +0100 (MET) Received: from boole.maths.tcd.ie by salmon.maths.tcd.ie with SMTP id ; 27 Nov 98 21:17:41 +0000 (GMT) References: <199811262254.IAA20689@bigted.maths.uq.edu.au> <13918.39374.95531.209114@srahtz> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.93.2i Message-ID: <19981127211740.B5643@maths.tcd.ie> Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 21:17:40 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Timothy Murphy Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13918.39374.95531.209114@srahtz>; from Sebastian Rahtz on Fri, Nov 27, 1998 at 12:23:42PM +0000 On Fri, Nov 27, 1998 at 12:23:42PM +0000, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > if you want a document to read on the screen, why not design for the > screen? of course, if you work towards an A4 page with 1 inch margins > and 10 pt Computer Modern math, and display it in PDF with the full > page, it looks like a set of bird tracks. I quite like maths in PDF with Type 1 CM fonts. What exactly is your complaint? [I'd use 12pt, as most people seem to, but surely that's of no significance.] -- Timothy Murphy e-mail: tim@maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland 27-Nov-1998 22:01:04-GMT,2748;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id PAA03545 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:00:54 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id WAA22609; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 22:26:37 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 412150 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 22:26:35 +0100 Received: from salmon.maths.tcd.ie (mmdf@salmon.maths.tcd.ie [134.226.81.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id WAA22599 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 22:26:33 +0100 (MET) Received: from boole.maths.tcd.ie by salmon.maths.tcd.ie with SMTP id ; 27 Nov 98 21:26:33 +0000 (GMT) References: <4.1.19981127083748.00a473d0@pop.tiac.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.93.2i Message-ID: <19981127212632.D5643@maths.tcd.ie> Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 21:26:32 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Timothy Murphy Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: ; from Robin Fairbairns on Fri, Nov 27, 1998 at 01:45:30PM +0000 On Fri, Nov 27, 1998 at 01:45:30PM +0000, Robin Fairbairns wrote: > > the imaging model is fine; there are those who don't think the > hypertextual model is good enough, it seems. who am i to gainsay > them? I find that a little hard to follow. The only PDF documents I've seen with useful hypertext are pdflatex ones presumably generated using hyperref. Eg I was just looking at an enormous on-line Java manual by Eckel, which is said to be very good, and found the complete lack of links between table-of-contents (and index) and contents very frustrating. Incidentally, has something happened to pdflatex-hypertex links, or am I doing something stupid? I no longer seem to get the links eg to the bibliography which I used to. [It surely isn't just because I disagree with Them. I know They are mean, but surely They are not malicious?] -- Timothy Murphy e-mail: tim@maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland 27-Nov-1998 22:06:53-GMT,2906;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id PAA03664 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 15:06:47 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id WAA23063; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 22:39:21 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 412158 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 22:39:19 +0100 Received: from mail-out-0.tiac.net (mail-out-0.tiac.net [199.0.65.247]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id WAA23053 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 22:39:17 +0100 (MET) Received: from mail-out-4.tiac.net (mail-out-4.tiac.net [199.0.65.16]) by mail-out-0.tiac.net (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA07322 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:39:15 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from support@YandY.com) Received: from DENALI (p116.tc8.metro.MA.tiac.com [209.61.76.245]) by mail-out-4.tiac.net (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id VAA26460; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 21:39:14 GMT (envelope-from support@YandY.com) X-Sender: yandy@pop.tiac.net X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.1 References: <4.1.19981127083748.00a473d0@pop.tiac.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: <4.1.19981127163551.034eb8c0@pop.tiac.net> Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:38:56 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "Y&Y, Inc." Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <19981127212632.D5643@maths.tcd.ie> At 04:26 PM 98/11/27 , Timothy Murphy wrote: >I find that a little hard to follow. >The only PDF documents I've seen with useful hypertext >are pdflatex ones presumably generated using hyperref. Or, in material predating hyperref, by using \special{...} directly, as in http://www.YandY.com/download/pdf_from.pdf This is a situation where DVI viewer supported hyper-text links were automatically translated to pdfmark for Distiller. >Eg I was just looking at an enormous on-line Java manual by Eckel, >which is said to be very good, and found the complete lack of links >between table-of-contents (and index) and contents >very frustrating. How was it prepared? Using TeX? You can't really blame PDF for the author's lack of sophistication in using the tool properly. 27-Nov-1998 23:00:14-GMT,2344;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id QAA04622 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 16:00:08 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id XAA24711; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 23:30:41 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 412203 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 23:30:40 +0100 Received: from kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE (Ufrank@kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE [134.93.8.158]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id XAA24701 for ; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 23:30:38 +0100 (MET) Received: (from Ufrank@localhost) by kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE (8.8.8/8.8.8) id XAA12021 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 23:30:37 +0100 (MET) X-Authentication-Warning: kralle.zdv.Uni-Mainz.DE: Ufrank set sender to latex3 using -f Received: (from latex3@localhost) by frank.zdv.uni-mainz.de (8.6.9/8.6.9) id XAA14361; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 23:22:36 +0100 References: <4.1.19981127083748.00a473d0@pop.tiac.net> <19981127212632.D5643@maths.tcd.ie> Message-ID: <199811272222.XAA14361@frank.zdv.uni-mainz.de> Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 23:22:36 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Frank Mittelbach Subject: Re: THEM To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <19981127212632.D5643@maths.tcd.ie> Timothy Murphy writes: > Incidentally, has something happened to pdflatex-hypertex links, > or am I doing something stupid? who knows? > [It surely isn't just because I disagree with Them. > I know They are mean, but surely They are not malicious?] THEY might be both (though i doubt to you so far) but not if bibliographies are concerned. why are THEY mean, by the way? frank 28-Nov-1998 7:31:06-GMT,6561;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id AAA15200 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 00:31:05 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id IAA08105; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 08:21:07 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411153 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 08:21:04 +0100 Received: from ROSE.IPM.AC.IR (vax.ipm.ac.ir [194.225.70.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id IAA08086 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 08:20:40 +0100 (MET) Received: by ROSE.IPM.AC.IR (MX V4.1 VAX) id 665; Fri, 27 Nov 1998 13:46:47 +0330 Message-ID: <009CFD94.D68FD580.665@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> Date: Fri, 27 Nov 1998 13:46:46 +0330 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Roozbeh Pournader Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Marcel Oliver wrote: > In many cases the core functionality of LaTeX is either > broken (equarray) or insufficient (theorems), so that the extension > packages are needed for basically ANY work in the field. Thus, the > basic LaTeX provisions should be removed from all documentation > (personally I also think that stuff like equarray should produce a > warning "You are using a broken command"). I agree very much. Authors are continuing using eqnarray and friends for their works, since Lamport say's it's ok. Why not make it a little better (by at least making the spaces right), and prevent them from preparing ugly papers? This is also the case with some amsmath users, because they look at amsmath only as a symbol-and-font-providing package. I think we should somehow forget about backward compatiblity for the line/page breaks, (at least when LaTeX3 comes into existance), in favor of great improvements. If you look more exactly, this is the case: beginners use LaTeX's facilities by default, and create ugly papers; experts use a lot of packages and nag. What about considering every core LaTeX feature and rethink about moving them to tools or taking them from there? E.g., many agree that picture should go there (since it's used less and less), and array should come from there. > Computer Science: The math stuff probably applies here, too. Some > standardized mark-up for program listings? Yes, yes. We really need it. I think a customizable program/algorithm/etc. should be available in tools. Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > these days we'd have it retyped :-} So what about authors' full control of line/page breaks? Forget it? > cos the AMS use TeX to typeset. why dont Elsevier's typesetters? What is the Elsevier's typesetting engine? > oh, i agree. good LaTeX is very good. no argument. And I can't forget the really good documentation in TeXLive CD in many formats which I could not believe. It seems so clean (well, except for some little cases) so that I thought it has been prepared from scratch for each format... (don't believe :). Chris Rowly wrote: > Sebastian does seem a little less comprehensible than usual these > days: maybe XML/XSL has this affect on people? He made me study XML specifications carefully before any other message to this list. But my viewpoint is different. It is good, and has a good future, but it will be misused by Microsoft or other companies, and come into non-portablity problems (just like HTML). I think LaTeX's idea of non-profit developement has helped remaining somehow portable (really?). Hans Aberg wrote: > LaTeX needs to be improved as a tool > for scientific publishing in the absence of a good replacement. OK, why not all accept this and concentrate on technical stuff? Having sebastian's comments in mind, XML is taking the world, so why shouldn't we support XML ideas as soon as possible? Why not make LaTeX3 as robust, as simple, and as powerful as possible? Even as a XML publishing engine, LaTeX has a good future, and even if XML does not take the world, LaTeX is far from perfect. I think we must discuss more exact problems (like that frontmatter idea, table formatting problems, etc.). Robin Fairbairns wrote: > the reason i have got away with as much latex-ery as i have, over the > years, is that it's been useful to have a repository of last resort of > answers to people's questions around here. i regularly get asked for > help by people all over the department, occasionally by people in > other parts of the university. sometimes, latex is unavoidable; Very important! I have a strong position in our department, with almost a trivial reason. From time to time, someone needs LaTeX support. Joking, don't believe :) But I have seen that no academician cen resist not-using TeX, except those who don't write. > and latex isn't so well documented that everyone can trivially do every > sensible thing they might want. I am not sure. Sebastian says some authors even don't read Lamport. It's true. They say: ``We should read a book for typesetting a small paper?!'' I provide a small and very compact leaflet for our university use (about 40 pages), but some even don't read that small thing. I sometimes compare LaTeX to Microsoft Word. And I can't forget reading about how to cut and paste everywhere in the help. What do you exactly mean by documentation? > but even if xml _does_ take over, there are going to be people wanting > advice on how to use xml tools to produce an acceptable visual > result. Yes, yes. Dear Sebastian, this is very important. LaTeX has got somewhere in between, between visual markup and and a logical one. How do you think a math author trying to introduce a new notation can use generic MathML? And I write: Dear friends, Let's LaTeX grow. Let's take good ideas from SGML/XML/DSSSL. Let's take good features from Microsoft Word (!). And let the future select. You can't force him. I also think more document classes (standard ones) are needed. When we tell the users: ``Ok, use article for memos, leaflets, reports and ads,'' how can we stop them from tag misuse? We are instructing them to this kind of work indirectly. --Roozbeh 28-Nov-1998 11:17:51-GMT,2342;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id EAA19042 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 04:17:44 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id MAA13771; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 12:01:01 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411208 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 12:00:58 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA13759 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 12:00:52 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.114] (sl88.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.114]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id MAA27900 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 12:00:49 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Sat, 28 Nov 1998 11:57:06 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <009CFD94.D68FD580.665@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> At 13:46 +0330 1998/11/27, Roozbeh Pournader wrote: >But I have seen that no academician cen resist not-using TeX, except those >who don't write. This is of course not really true: Some mathematicians use WYSIWYG because they feel TeX is to slow for authoring. This is a weakness of both TeX and LaTeX: It takes too long to figure out those details. If one settles down in a well-defined style, it work OK, but when new to styles, it is a pain. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 28-Nov-1998 11:56:10-GMT,2560;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id EAA19633 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 04:56:09 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id MAA15334; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 12:43:13 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411228 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 12:43:12 +0100 Received: from ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.2]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA15324 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 12:43:09 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 12:43:04 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 12:42:55 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 12:42:19 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 12:43:01 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13919.57622.145781.34105@fell.o] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: portable ... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <199811261814.NAA16984@hilbert.math.albany.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13919.57622.145781.34105@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Sat, 28 Nov 1998 12:43:01 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: portable LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13918.35217.61736.372419@srahtz> Sebastian Rahtz wrote -- > DSSSL, an ISO standard developed after a decade of work... Now why does immediately bring to my mind the legendary Algol68 standard ... I must be getting (even more) old and cynical? chris 28-Nov-1998 12:19:27-GMT,2915;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA19959 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 05:19:25 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA16006; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:03:32 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411248 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:03:30 +0100 Received: from heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk (exim@heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk [128.232.32.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA15994 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:03:29 +0100 (MET) Received: from dorceus.cl.cam.ac.uk (cl.cam.ac.uk) [128.232.1.34] (rf) by heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 1.82 #1) id 0zjj61-0008LM-00; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 12:03:29 +0000 Message-ID: Date: Sat, 28 Nov 1998 12:03:27 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Robin Fairbairns Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 27 Nov 1998 13:46:46 +0330." <009CFD94.D68FD580.665@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> Roozbeh Pournader wrote (in response to my comment about documentation): > I sometimes compare LaTeX to Microsoft Word. And I can't forget reading > about how to cut and paste everywhere in the help. What do you exactly mean > by documentation? you're not the first who didn't quite `get' what i was meaning. i guess i had better be more explicit. to a large extent, i think latex is well-served for basic documentation: it's a bit scattered about (lamport/whoever and usrguide) and one or two things are missing (like some of the accent commands) but it's a solid foundation. however, for the user who needs more than the core can offer, we only have the latex companion (which is wildly out of date) and more recently the latex graphics companion. package writers tend _not_ to document their work well enough: it's a tricky job --- i find things needed in my biggest package's (footmisc) documentation every time i prepare a new release. a new edition of the companion, and a blitz on package documentation would be very useful indeed... note: i'm making no statement about the potential market, or who might be able to find the time to do the job. i merely state that life would become slightly easier if the documentation in this area were a bit better. robin 28-Nov-1998 12:19:52-GMT,4589;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA19976 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 05:19:48 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA16024; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:03:43 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411252 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:03:41 +0100 Received: from ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.1]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA16012 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:03:36 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:03:31 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:01:46 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:01:10 +0100 X400-Received: by mta open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:01:09 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:03:27 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13919.57916.952197.754236@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: What is (... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <199811262254.IAA20689@bigted.maths.uq.edu.au>, <13918.39374.95531.209114@srahtz> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13919.57916.952197.754236@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:03:27 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13918.39374.95531.209114@srahtz> Sebastian > its amazing how the tens of millions of Web users out there happily > use this inferior technology, isn't it. Indeed, it is so amazing that I simply do not believe it. The WEB has lots of potential uses, some of which are already excleent (instant typing correction is not one of them:-), but many of which need much better technology before people "should be happy" with them. Would you be happy to have to do all your Java course on-line, without a decent printer available? Happiness with tecnology is a funny thing: very, very many people are "very happy" with a 14in screen; but a lot of (not all) people who now have a 17in or 19in screen now realise that they "should not have been happy" with the 14in one. > of course, many are not 20th century mathematicians... And I am sure that the world is a better place for that:-)? Puts on statistical hat: I suspect that the proportion of this dying race that uses the web is very high compared with the whole of the great unwashed. > > if you want a document to read on the screen, why not design for the > screen? of course, if you work towards an A4 page with 1 inch margins > and 10 pt Computer Modern math, and display it in PDF with the full > page, it looks like a set of bird tracks. Mmm, interesting. I agree completely with Sebastian that we need good screen design but i am unsure if he agrees with me that a lot of basic ideas in design and in the technolgies to support it: the designs themselves will be different and the possibilities of on-screen documents (even static ones) are probably more diverse, but there is a lot of basic stuff in common. Thus in the context of this list, there is no need to make a large distinction but just to extend our idea of what a document is. Even more interesting: I think that PDF is an excellnet medium for viewing on screen, and printing if needed, a 10pt CM math document. And we happy breed of people, the 20C pure mathematicians, now do this a lot thanks to the efforts of our professional bodies (and maybe some publishers too;-). chris 28-Nov-1998 12:28:50-GMT,2753;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA20142 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 05:28:49 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA16447; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:15:01 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411261 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:14:59 +0100 Received: from heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk (exim@heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk [128.232.32.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA16429 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:14:57 +0100 (MET) Received: from dorceus.cl.cam.ac.uk (cl.cam.ac.uk) [128.232.1.34] (rf) by heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 1.82 #1) id 0zjjH8-0008D2-00; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 12:14:58 +0000 Message-ID: Date: Sat, 28 Nov 1998 12:14:56 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Robin Fairbairns Subject: Re: portable LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 28 Nov 1998 12:43:01 +0100." <13919.57622.145781.34105@fell.open.ac.uk> chris rowley wrote: > Sebastian Rahtz wrote -- > > > DSSSL, an ISO standard developed after a decade of work... > > Now why does immediately bring to my mind the legendary Algol68 > standard ... algol68 was fine; compiler technology at the time wasn't. almost all my mainframe programming from about 1970 on was in algol68, and i came to like it very well. but the compiler could only manage a subset of the language. dsssl is a different kettle of fish. i knew about the project pretty soon after i first started in standardisation, and didn't see even a dis until after my last ever iso meeting 5 years ago. i guess it was more than 10 years' work end to end. nowadays, such a project would have been chopped long before finishing, no question. i really don't understand how they got away with it even under the old dispensation. > I must be getting (even more) old and cynical? i'll agree with the first (don't we all? -- groan), but the second ... well, trying to keep latex3 going at all must have an (ahem) interesting effect on all your psyches. it's tim murphy's capital T that bothers me... r 28-Nov-1998 12:29:20-GMT,2651;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA20147 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 05:29:06 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA16502; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:15:56 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411267 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:15:54 +0100 Received: from ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.2]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA16492 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:15:52 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:15:47 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:15:40 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:15:04 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:15:42 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13919.59543.809258.201046@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: What is (... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <4.1.19981127083748.00a473d0@pop.tiac.net>, MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13919.59543.809258.201046@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:15:42 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Hans Aberg wrote -- > PDF is a new DVI Now that is a much more useful topic for discussion (not whether this statement is true but whatt could make PDF be even better that it now is as a DI language)... ... but probably not on this list. chris 28-Nov-1998 12:50:36-GMT,3259;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id FAA20474 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 05:50:34 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA17290; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:39:04 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411303 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:39:02 +0100 Received: from ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.1]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA17276 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:39:00 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:38:55 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:38:50 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:38:14 +0100 X400-Received: by mta open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:38:13 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:38:52 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13919.60666.812133.667024@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: What is (... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <13918.48084.843833.165507@srahtz>, , MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13919.60666.812133.667024@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:38:52 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <4.1.19981127104934.03e184f0@pop.tiac.net> > In any case, people used CM (which is thin) happily for many years on > 300 dpi printers. Another example: they may have been "happy" because they had (and for many of them) never seen anything so exquisite before. But for CM, it was (and maybe still is but I have now no way to find out) not feasible to produce anything at 300dpi about which they "should have remain happy" when 600+dpi is available. The wonderful irony about this is that if you look through modes.mf you will find, especially in the comments on ~1200dpi modes, things like. I tried .... but this looked a bit thin so I chnaged to ... ; now it looks as good as the 300dpi output. We like what we know! chris 28-Nov-1998 13:32:17-GMT,2778;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA21093 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 06:32:15 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA18775; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 14:19:53 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411337 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 14:19:52 +0100 Received: from ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.1]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA18763 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 14:19:50 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 14:19:45 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 14:19:36 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 14:19:00 +0100 X400-Received: by mta open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 14:18:59 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 14:19:42 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13919.63332.828325.388538@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: portable ... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <13919.57622.145781.34105@fell.open.ac.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13919.63332.828325.388538@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Sat, 28 Nov 1998 14:19:42 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: portable LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: Robin > > Now why does immediately bring to my mind the legendary Algol68 > > standard ... I knew that would wake you up:-). I should have said "the legend of" since I no so little about the detailed history. > it's tim murphy's capital T that bothers me... But are you concerned about tim or about Us? chris 28-Nov-1998 13:47:30-GMT,2705;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA21303 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 06:47:28 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id OAA19496; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 14:36:42 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411350 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 14:36:40 +0100 Received: from ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.2]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA19484 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 14:36:38 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 14:36:34 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 14:35:54 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 14:35:18 +0100 X400-Received: by mta open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 14:35:17 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN2 in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 14:35:58 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13919.64476.539851.43828@fell.o] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: What is (... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <13918.45409.395265.753693@srahtz>, MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13919.64476.539851.43828@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Sat, 28 Nov 1998 14:35:58 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: > > Note: Conducting war or making a coup d'etat are not war crimes. Widespread > torture, bombing civilian targets, and genocide and such are war crimes. What about milk-snatching? chris 28-Nov-1998 14:44:43-GMT,2377;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA22201 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 07:44:42 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA21660; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 15:29:45 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411377 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 15:29:43 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA21641 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 15:29:36 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.54] (sl34.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.54]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id PAA05380 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 15:29:33 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <13918.45409.395265.753693@srahtz>, Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Sat, 28 Nov 1998 15:21:31 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13919.64476.539851.43828@fell.open.ac.uk> At 14:35 +0100 1998/11/28, Chris Rowley wrote: >> >> Note: Conducting war or making a coup d'etat are not war crimes. Widespread >> torture, bombing civilian targets, and genocide and such are war crimes. > >What about milk-snatching? I can only quote Robin Fairbairns: >(completely off latex-topic, hence not on the list...) Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 28-Nov-1998 16:17:35-GMT,2457;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA23746 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 09:17:29 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA24630; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 16:59:35 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411406 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 16:59:32 +0100 Received: from salmon.maths.tcd.ie (mmdf@salmon.maths.tcd.ie [134.226.81.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA24611 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 16:59:30 +0100 (MET) Received: from boole.maths.tcd.ie by salmon.maths.tcd.ie with SMTP id ; 28 Nov 98 15:59:30 +0000 (GMT) References: <199811262254.IAA20689@bigted.maths.uq.edu.au>, <13918.39374.95531.209114@srahtz> <13919.57916.952197.754236@fell.open.ac.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.93.2i Message-ID: <19981128155929.B7318@maths.tcd.ie> Date: Sat, 28 Nov 1998 15:59:29 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Timothy Murphy Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13919.57916.952197.754236@fell.open.ac.uk>; from Chris Rowley on Sat, Nov 28, 1998 at 01:03:27PM +0100 On Sat, Nov 28, 1998 at 01:03:27PM +0100, Chris Rowley wrote: > Would you be happy to have to do all your Java course on-line, without > a decent printer available? A colleague told me that the term "printist" (by analogy with "sexist", "racist", etc) has been coined to describe people (including me) with this misguided view. Printists are evil people who cut down rain forests and clog up waste-disposal units. Hopefully the EU will soon promulgate directives to cut out this kind of thing. -- Timothy Murphy e-mail: tim@maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland 28-Nov-1998 17:22:47-GMT,3042;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id KAA24801 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 10:22:40 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id SAA27509; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 18:08:11 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411433 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 18:08:09 +0100 Received: from mail0.nada.kth.se (mail0.nada.kth.se [130.237.222.70]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id SAA27497 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 18:08:08 +0100 (MET) Received: from [130.237.37.36] (sl16.modempool.kth.se [130.237.37.36]) by mail0.nada.kth.se (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id SAA11626 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 18:08:06 +0100 (MET) X-Sender: su95-hab@mail.nada.kth.se References: <13919.57916.952197.754236@fell.open.ac.uk>; from Chris Rowley on Sat, Nov 28, 1998 at 01:03:27PM +0100 <199811262254.IAA20689@bigted.maths.uq.edu.au>, <13918.39374.95531.209114@srahtz> <13919.57916.952197.754236@fell.open.ac.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-ID: Date: Sat, 28 Nov 1998 18:08:13 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Hans Aberg Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <19981128155929.B7318@maths.tcd.ie> At 15:59 +0000 1998/11/28, Timothy Murphy wrote: >A colleague told me that the term "printist" >(by analogy with "sexist", "racist", etc) >has been coined to describe people (including me) >with this misguided view. > >Printists are evil people who cut down rain forests >and clog up waste-disposal units. >Hopefully the EU will soon promulgate directives >to cut out this kind of thing. I gather printing all the EU directives on this will caused a whole rain forest to be cut down, filling an uncountable number of waste disposal units, and the landfill will provide London with a new suburb. On Sat, Nov 28, 1998 at 01:03:27PM +0100, Chris Rowley wrote: > Would you be happy to have to do all your Java course on-line, without > a decent printer available? This is of the kind of temporary material I would myself try to avoid printing out. Hans Aberg * Email: Hans Aberg * Home Page: * AMS member listing: 28-Nov-1998 20:50:55-GMT,2496;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id NAA28324 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 13:50:52 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id VAA05864; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 21:36:06 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411510 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 21:36:04 +0100 Received: from blaubaer.kn-bremen.de (root@blaubaer.kn-bremen.de [194.94.232.249]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id VAA05849 for ; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 21:36:02 +0100 (MET) Received: from dream.kn-bremen.de (uucp@localhost) by blaubaer.kn-bremen.de (8.9.1/8.9.1) with UUCP id VAA30257 for latex-l@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de; Sat, 28 Nov 1998 21:20:44 +0100 Received: by dream.kn-bremen.de (1.65/waf) via UUCP; Sat, 28 Nov 98 19:58:16 CET for latex-l@relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de References: <13919.57622.145781.34105@fell.open.ac.uk> <13919.63332.828325.388538@fell.open.ac.uk> X-Mailer: Helldiver 1.08 (Waffle 1.65) Lines: 17 Message-ID: Date: Sat, 28 Nov 1998 19:58:16 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Martin Schroeder Organization: The Dreaming Subject: Re: portable LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In <13919.63332.828325.388538@fell.open.ac.uk> Chris Rowley writes: >Robin >> > Now why does immediately bring to my mind the legendary Algol68 >> > standard ... >I knew that would wake you up:-). I should have said "the legend of" >since I no so little about the detailed history. Look up the SIGPLAN Proceedings of History of Programming Languages II (might even be available via ACMs Digital Library). Fascinating... :-) -- Martin Schr"oder, MS@Dream.KN-Bremen.DE Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. (Margaret Mead) 30-Nov-1998 9:57:59-GMT,2835;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id CAA07617 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 02:57:51 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA18410; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 10:37:52 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411307 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 10:37:49 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA18128 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 10:35:20 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id JAA29311; hop 0; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 09:26:42 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Mon, 30 Nov 1998 09:34:42 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <4.1.19981127083748.00a473d0@pop.tiac.net> <19981127212632.D5643@maths.tcd.ie> Message-ID: <13922.24865.178414.901591@srahtz> Date: Mon, 30 Nov 1998 09:10:57 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <19981127212632.D5643@maths.tcd.ie> Timothy Murphy writes: > The only PDF documents I've seen with useful hypertext > are pdflatex ones presumably generated using hyperref. where the only links are 1:1 "click and go" types. if the source had more sophisticated XLink syntax, we could not render it with Acrobat > Incidentally, has something happened to pdflatex-hypertex links, > or am I doing something stupid? > I no longer seem to get the links eg to the bibliography > which I used to. is this what is known in the trade as a "bug report"? no, i have not deliberately broken owt. > [It surely isn't just because I disagree with Them. > I know They are mean, but surely They are not malicious?] "They" have no control over hyperref or pdftex.... sebastian 30-Nov-1998 10:04:31-GMT,3784;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id DAA07717 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 03:04:25 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id KAA18616; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 10:39:47 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411326 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 10:39:45 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id KAA18189 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 10:35:43 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id JAA29338; hop 0; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 09:27:22 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Mon, 30 Nov 1998 09:35:03 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199811262254.IAA20689@bigted.maths.uq.edu.au> <13918.39374.95531.209114@srahtz> <13919.57916.952197.754236@fell.open.ac.uk> Message-ID: <13922.25418.636862.331937@srahtz> Date: Mon, 30 Nov 1998 09:20:10 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13919.57916.952197.754236@fell.open.ac.uk> Chris Rowley writes: > > its amazing how the tens of millions of Web users out there happily > > use this inferior technology, isn't it. > > Indeed, it is so amazing that I simply do not believe it. The WEB has one has to start asking if you and I inhabit the same world! yes, of course Web heads all want better and better and better wotsits, but the growth of Web usage is *surely* undeniable evidence that it satifies some basic needs? what else is happiness? > Would you be happy to have to do all your Java course on-line, without > a decent printer available? why do yo think i have a printer available as I do my course? > > of course, many are not 20th century mathematicians... > > And I am sure that the world is a better place for that:-)? > > Puts on statistical hat: I suspect that the proportion of this dying > race that uses the web is very high compared with the whole of the > great unwashed. i was talking abolute numbers, not proportions. hence the word "many". > lot of basic stuff in common. Thus in the context of this list, there > is no need to make a large distinction but just to extend our idea of > what a document is. sure, no large distinction. but Lucida New Math vs CMR is a detail > Even more interesting: I think that PDF is an excellnet medium for > viewing on screen, and printing if needed, a 10pt CM math document. > > And we happy breed of people, the 20C pure mathematicians, now do this > a lot thanks to the efforts of our professional bodies (and maybe some > publishers too;-). am curious to hear what your professional bodies have done to help you get your 10pt CM PDF documents up. sebastian 30-Nov-1998 14:41:27-GMT,5763;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA12901 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 07:41:12 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA18700; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 15:23:24 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411621 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 15:23:22 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA18681 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 15:23:17 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id OAA11766; hop 0; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 14:14:56 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Mon, 30 Nov 1998 14:22:39 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <009CFD94.D68FD580.665@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> Message-ID: <13922.42197.588805.524179@srahtz> Date: Mon, 30 Nov 1998 13:59:49 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <009CFD94.D68FD580.665@ROSE.IPM.AC.IR> Roozbeh Pournader writes: > Sebastian Rahtz wrote: > > > these days we'd have it retyped :-} > So what about authors' full control of line/page breaks? Forget it? absolutely. how can you control the line breaks when you dont use the same font as me? you want us to insist that you buy commercial fonts? > > cos the AMS use TeX to typeset. why dont Elsevier's typesetters? > What is the Elsevier's typesetting engine? > you misunderstand. we dont typeset. we send articles off to typesetting companies around the world. they use whatever they want. > > oh, i agree. good LaTeX is very good. no argument. > And I can't forget the really good documentation in TeXLive CD > in many formats which I could not believe. It seems so > clean (well, except for some little cases) so that I thought it has > been prepared from scratch for each format... (don't believe :). no, it all came from a Makefile, no tweaking at all. but that took me quite a while to set up, and enforces constraints on the markup. each time I do such things, I have to tweak the setup or the document a little - seldom is the work flow of production quality re XML > to this list. But my viewpoint is different. It is good, and has a good > future, but it will be misused by Microsoft or other companies, and > come into non-portablity problems (just like HTML). I think LaTeX's I dont entirely agree. its hard to break XML itself, even for Bill G. what he can (and will) break is the technology that makes XML useable, like XSL. > Having sebastian's comments in mind, XML is taking the world, > so why shouldn't we support XML ideas as soon as possible? Why not > make LaTeX3 as robust, as simple, and as powerful as possible? > Even as a XML publishing engine, LaTeX has a good future, > and even if XML does not take the world, LaTeX is far from > perfect. I think we must discuss more exact problems (like > that frontmatter idea, table formatting problems, etc.). hmm. i see the problem as the perceived differentiation in XML Paradise between transformation and formatting. LaTeX has no transformation layer, so its relegated to the formatting end; but by that time half the interesting work has been done (eg TOCs), so LaTeX becomes over heavy > But I have seen that no academician cen resist not-using TeX, except those > who don't write. how many do you want me to show you before you believe that there are eg computer science and physics academics who never use TeX? > Yes, yes. Dear Sebastian, this is very important. LaTeX has got > somewhere in between, between visual markup and and a logical one. > How do you think a math author trying to introduce a new notation > can use generic MathML? macros, you mean? you want to say, "from now on, we will write this as \Dipsy{34}"? conceptually, the same way you do at present - define a new markup language, with an element , and write in it. then write a transformation specification for how that maps to low-level MathML. keep that separate from the typesetting/style specification. but this enters deep waters and begs many questions. its equally possible we'll be talking about special purpose DTDs with multiple inheritance from things like MathML and CML, or an extensible MathML. I suspect David Carlisle can give a more realistic "future view" that me. but *conceptually*, its no problem - write any language you like. what the user interface will look like is less clear. what I do claim is that IF you want to talk about elements, it is reasonable to ask you to spend a little time defining the semantics of Dipsy in an abstract way, not jumping straight into \def\Dipsy#1:#2\\{$\expandafter\expandafter\expandafter\takeawaythenumberyoufirtstthoughtof\futurelet$} Sebastian 30-Nov-1998 14:44:06-GMT,4545;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA12934 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 07:44:02 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id PAA17669; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 15:14:24 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411615 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 15:14:22 +0100 Received: from sarah.albany.edu (sarah.albany.edu [169.226.1.103]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA17641 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 15:14:18 +0100 (MET) Received: from hilbert.math.albany.edu (hilbert.math.albany.edu [169.226.23.52]) by sarah.albany.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id JAA29803 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 09:13:45 -0500 (EST) Received: (from hammond@localhost) by hilbert.math.albany.edu (8.8.4/8.8.3) id JAA17823 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 09:13:42 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <199811301413.JAA17823@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Date: Mon, 30 Nov 1998 09:13:42 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "William F. Hammond" Subject: Re: portable LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L David Carlisle writes: : I think the problem is is that SGML has been around since whenever it : was, about the same vintage as TeX (older if you count GML), and with : that power it had essentially zero impact on mainstream applications. : (Although of course it was used in house in many larger companies.) One can speculate about why SGML has been such a well kept secret. It takes some work to appreciate it. That does not means that it does not work nor that there are not reliable free tools nor that it would not be fairly easy once we come to understand what it can do for us to generate tools that are optimized for our purposes. : So it seems to be the case that the `SGML experience' says that as soon : as you want to move the document anywhere then it should be in a : standard concrete syntax, with all minimisation normalised. ie be XML. Probably. This is "public exchange". : Of course how one personally authors the document is up to the author, : it might be gellmu, or you might use latex and then tex4ht or omega-mml : or frame+SGML or MSOffice2000 or whatever you want. : : If however you expect to allow people to edit the transmitted document : and send you back the changed version (eg a co author, or a journal : editor) it makes sense to use a system that really uses the transmitted : XML form of the document, rather than a gellmu or latex->*ml style : translation where it is not necessarily easy to go back. : Within the tex world it makes sense to pass tex documents, (contin. below) (Two LaTeX co-authors should exchange drafts in plain TeX?) Anyway, this is "shared authoring". (contin. from above) : but I do not : think it makes sense now to be passing SGML documents that make : essential use of a non standard SGML declaration, and SGML minimisation : features. The number of XML applications appearing increases at a : ridiculous rate, the number of applications that can actually handle : minimised SGML documents is small and static, I fear. Note: HTML 2.0, HTML 3.2, and HTML 4 all use different SGML declarations, none the default. For this purpose one should perhaps view an SGML document type as a decl/dtd pair. Of course, there is no decl for an XML. There are many more web readers than math authors. Math authors have done very well for many years with a very small number of tools that are not used by the masses. (1) Authoring, (2) shared authoring, (3) public exchange, (4) private archiving, and (5) public archiving are different things with different objectives. Obviously, to the extent that it is sensible to adopt different formats for different purposes, it is desirable to have automatic processing to faciliate conversions. Many such conversions should be fairly easy. -- Bill 30-Nov-1998 15:34:18-GMT,3427;000000000000 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id IAA14166 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 08:34:12 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA26237; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 16:07:55 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411760 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 16:07:53 +0100 Received: from pillar.elsevier.co.uk (root@pillar.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.222.35]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id QAA26207 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 16:07:46 +0100 (MET) Received: from snowdon.elsevier.co.uk [193.131.197.164]; by pillar.elsevier.co.uk (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP; for ""; sender "s.rahtz@elsevier.co.uk"; id OAA14032; hop 0; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 14:59:20 GMT Received: from srahtz (actually host srahtz.elsevier.co.uk) by snowdon.elsevier.co.uk with SMTP (PP); Mon, 30 Nov 1998 15:06:37 +0000 X-Mailer: emacs 20.3.2 (via feedmail 9-beta-3 Q); VM 6.61 under Emacs 20.3.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <199811301413.JAA17823@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Message-ID: <13922.45865.691998.450110@srahtz> Date: Mon, 30 Nov 1998 15:00:57 +0000 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Sebastian Rahtz Subject: Re: portable LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811301413.JAA17823@hilbert.math.albany.edu> William F. Hammond writes: > One can speculate about why SGML has been such a well kept secret. It > takes some work to appreciate it. That does not means that it does > not work nor that there are not reliable free tools nor that it would > not be fairly easy once we come to understand what it can do for us to > generate tools that are optimized for our purposes. you would have enjoyed a keynote at MT 98 by Brian "Scribe" Reid, where he basically repeated a talk he gave in 1981. it was an effective demonstration that being "right" and "working" markup stuff has zero impact on most people, who simply dont *want* generic markup... > Note: HTML 2.0, HTML 3.2, and HTML 4 all use different SGML declarations, > none the default. > and no HTML browser enforces validation, does it? > For this purpose one should perhaps view an SGML document type as a > decl/dtd pair. Of course, there is no decl for an XML. oh come. there is very much a decl for XML!!! its vital for parsing XML with SGML tools! > Obviously, to the extent that it is sensible to adopt different formats > for different purposes, it is desirable to have automatic processing to > faciliate conversions. Many such conversions should be fairly easy. ^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^ by which we see why LaTeX is unpopular in production workflows. that translates to "10% failure" sebastian 30-Nov-1998 18:41:03-GMT,4221;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA18990 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 11:40:50 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA14633; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:10:40 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 412045 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:10:38 +0100 Received: from ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.2]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA14619 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:10:35 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:09:31 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:09:04 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:08:26 +0100 X400-Received: by mta open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:08:25 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:09:06 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13922.56551.363265.349994@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: What is (... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <199811262254.IAA20689@bigted.maths.uq.edu.au>, <13919.57916.952197.754236@fell.open.ac.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13922.56551.363265.349994@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:09:06 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <13922.25418.636862.331937@srahtz> Sebastian wrote -- > one has to start asking if you and I inhabit the same world! yes, of > course Web heads all want better and better and better wotsits, Not sure, but I was not talking about heads, just 'ornery folk who want useful, usable stuff that works! > the growth of Web usage is *surely* undeniable evidence that it > satifies some basic needs? what else is happiness? Mmm, so does working (in our wonderful new society:-) and breathing but I do not normally associate these necesities with "happiness". > why do yo think i have a printer available as I do my course? Exactly... But think of all those who do not. > i was talking abolute numbers, not proportions. hence the word "many". How amazing, I would never have guessed: do archeologists always do that? > > > lot of basic stuff in common. Thus in the context of this list, there > > is no need to make a large distinction but just to extend our idea of > > what a document is. > sure, no large distinction. but Lucida New Math vs CMR is a detail maybe, maybe not a detail; but not really the sort of design issue i had in mind at the time. > > am curious to hear what your professional bodies have done to help you > get your 10pt CM PDF documents up. Put money into such things as a system that produces them and makes them (relatively freely) acessible. And, more recently, putting a huge (questionably so???) effort into producing character sets and glyph sets and ... etc etc. OK, I know that some publishers are also supporting this but I do not think that they alone would have started it nor that they would have available the expertise needed, however glowing their academic pedigree may be. chris 30-Nov-1998 18:41:43-GMT,2882;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA19016 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 11:41:42 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA15761; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:23:36 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 412058 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:23:32 +0100 Received: from ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.2]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA15720 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:23:28 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:19:29 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:19:08 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:18:30 +0100 X400-Received: by mta open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:18:29 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:19:15 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13922.57543.853960.826423@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: portable ... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <199811261227.NAA14424@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13922.57543.853960.826423@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:19:15 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: portable LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811261313.NAA28971@lurgmhor.elsevier.co.uk> Sebastian Rahtz wrote -- > too right. i think the situation you describe is shocking, and I am > ashamed of my profession. seriously. In this context, it would be interesting to know whether Elsevier still budgets about 5-times as much for typestting maths as for non-technical copy? Here it is diffiuclt to tell whether we still do, since we went electronic and in-house simultaneously. chris 30-Nov-1998 18:45:39-GMT,5861;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA19094 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 11:45:24 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA15599; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:22:21 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 412051 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:22:19 +0100 Received: from sarah.albany.edu (sarah.albany.edu [169.226.1.103]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA15574 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:22:15 +0100 (MET) Received: from hilbert.math.albany.edu (hilbert.math.albany.edu [169.226.23.52]) by sarah.albany.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id NAA03651 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 13:21:57 -0500 (EST) Received: (from hammond@localhost) by hilbert.math.albany.edu (8.8.4/8.8.3) id NAA21383 for LATEX-L@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 13:21:58 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <199811301821.NAA21383@hilbert.math.albany.edu> Date: Mon, 30 Nov 1998 13:21:58 -0500 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: "William F. Hammond" Subject: Re: portable LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Sebastian: : > One can speculate about why SGML has been such a well kept secret. It : > takes some work to appreciate it. That does not means that it does : > not work nor that there are not reliable free tools nor that it would : > not be fairly easy once we come to understand what it can do for us to : > generate tools that are optimized for our purposes. : you would have enjoyed a keynote at MT 98 by Brian "Scribe" Reid, where : he basically repeated a talk he gave in 1981. it was an effective : demonstration that being "right" and "working" markup stuff : has zero impact on most people, who simply dont *want* generic markup... So may I conclude that Sebastian now realizes that my comment this past Friday was "right"? :-) I'm not sure what "generic markup" means, but I do want personally convenient markup, which I would take *not* to be "generic". It is true that there is a vague "political" factor, apart from technical factors, that is involved in the determination of whether an innovation gains acceptance. I think all of us here understand that the markup under mathml for solving quadratic equations has not "played well" in the community. Some will want wysiwyg authoring interfaces for writing. Fine. But I do not, and most of my mathematical friends do not. There are free reliable tools for sgml (including the xml subset). The tools that I am now using have been available since December 1995. Most of my friends are not using them because they do not understand them. Sometimes they think they understand them and reject them as "inadequate". I thought that it might make it easier for some if there were a LaTeX-like interface. I have been trying to persuade my friends, mostly academics, that they need sgml. I think that Sebastian agrees except that he would say xml only. I agree with xml for browsing except I see a gain for us in using sgml inside our shops. In-shop stuff is private. My gellmu dtd is didactic, not prescriptive. In fact, my docs have always said that I expect each shop to want its own dtd just as each LaTeX shop now wants its own favorite list of packages and styles outside the core. : > Note: HTML 2.0, HTML 3.2, and HTML 4 all use different SGML declarations, : > none the default. : > : and no HTML browser enforces validation, does it? That's also a web rule. Authors and servers should behave according to strict rules. Clients should be very tolerant. (And indeed clients need to be very tolerant.) In fact, the prevalence of invalid html gives one pause in contemplating the future of roll-your-own xml, where documents that are not valid will splatter across one's screen. (We do agree that html is sgml and not xml.) : > For this purpose one should perhaps view an SGML document type as a : > decl/dtd pair. Of course, there is no decl for an XML. : oh come. there is very much a decl for XML!!! its vital for parsing : XML with SGML tools! Indeed. Yes, there is *one* decl for XML. Hence it is silly in the case of an XML to conceptualize a document type as a dtd/decl pair. : > Obviously, to the extent that it is sensible to adopt different formats : > for different purposes, it is desirable to have automatic processing to : > faciliate conversions. Many such conversions should be fairly easy. : ^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^ Disagreement? Going (1) from exchange to authoring formats or (2) from shared-authoring to personal authoring formats under sgml does require some thought. Providing the thought at early dtd design stages is a big help. That's going "uphill". Going downhill really is easy. : by which we see why LaTeX is unpopular in production workflows. that : translates to "10% failure" Hmmm... I believe that the head editor of a math journal that I know would disagree with this last statement about LaTeX. I think that he would say that no mathematician uses sgml or xml and that the LaTeX he receives is almost always better than the plain TeX that he receives. (I myself have no formal connection with that journal.) -- Bill 30-Nov-1998 18:54:12-GMT,3209;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id LAA19345 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 11:53:15 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id TAA16130; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:28:13 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 412064 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:28:11 +0100 Received: from ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.2]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id TAA16117 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:28:08 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:26:34 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:26:22 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:25:45 +0100 X400-Received: by mta open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:25:44 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:26:28 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13922.57886.556268.322175@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: What is (... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <19981125165741.D8854@maths.tcd.ie>, <13914.43859.281032.18501@srahtz>, <199811142302.AAA24385@na6.mathematik.uni-tuebingen.de>, , <13917.4472.820603.957391@srahtz> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13922.57886.556268.322175@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:26:28 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <4.1.19981126090908.03437f10@pop.tiac.net> > (I won't say classes because I doubt whether too > many of these people know there even is a LaTeX 2e). This is also clearly true of much that comes my way. > > Which is indeed sad, since one can do so much more with (La)TeX. Some of us do! > The fact that the authors do the typesetting limits the design seriously > (while saving the publisher a pile of money). Mmm, most publishers do not want to pay for any design input for such books anyway. So it would not make much difference who does the typestting. chris 30-Nov-1998 19:21:51-GMT,3757;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id MAA19998 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 12:20:18 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id UAA18838; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 20:03:01 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 412135 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 20:02:56 +0100 Received: from ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate01.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.1]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id UAA18810 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 20:02:53 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 20:02:48 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 20:02:35 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 20:01:55 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 20:02:42 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13922.59823.854744.337810@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: What is (... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: , <365A9F55.88C46733@na.uni-tuebingen.de>, <13913.60537.514744.407614@srahtz>, <13916.96.643934.277862@srahtz>, <13917.4472.820603.957391@srahtz> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13922.59823.854744.337810@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Mon, 30 Nov 1998 20:02:42 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <19981127205441.A5643@maths.tcd.ie> Timothy Murphy wrote -- > I am just looking at a very well printed old book (Hardy & Wright, 1954), That would be the Monotype 5-line as used by CUP I think? This is what Knuth would have emulated had he been working 5000 miles further east. > For one thing, they do things which would be difficult (for me) in LaTeX, > eg Theorem 6: with a displayed formula on the same line. A known deficiency (but this is not the right list:-). I have a much more recent, but pre-computers, CUP-printed book that is an amazing example of very tight math typography despite a large amount of in-line math (which usually messes up any attempt at godd typography): totally, mind-blowingly different from what we are used to now! > It should be said that Hardy & Wright is an exception for its period. > Most of the research maths books of that vintage > were appallingly badly "printed" (usually typed). As early as that??: it is something I associate with the 60s: bring back the golf-ball! > TeX has been responsible for > an immense increase in the average printing quality of maths books. Absolutely. But it would be really serious fun (for everyone but sebastian:-) to try and emulate using TeX what CUP could do back then. chris 1-Dec-1998 1:07:56-GMT,2737;000000000001 Received: from relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by csc-sun.math.utah.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id SAA29014 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 18:07:50 -0700 (MST) Received: from relay (relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de [129.206.119.201]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id BAA10818; Tue, 1 Dec 1998 01:45:40 +0100 (MET) Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 411112 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Tue, 1 Dec 1998 01:44:49 +0100 Received: from ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de (ixgate02.dfnrelay.d400.de [193.174.248.2]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id BAA10770 for ; Tue, 1 Dec 1998 01:44:19 +0100 (MET) X400-Received: by mta d400relay in /PRMD=dfnrelay/ADMD=d400/C=de/; Relayed; Tue, 1 Dec 1998 01:44:09 +0100 X400-Received: by mta venus in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:51:34 +0100 X400-Received: by mta fell.open.ac.uk in /PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/; Relayed; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:50:56 +0100 X400-Received: by mta UK.AC.MHS-RELAY.SUN2 in /PRMD=uk.ac/ADMD= /C=gb/; Relayed; Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:52:04 +0100 X400-Originator: C.A.Rowley@open.ac.uk X400-Recipients: non-disclosure:; X400-MTS-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<13922.59462.279452.122152@fell.] X400-Content-Type: P2-1988 (22) Content-Identifier: Re: portable ... Alternate-Recipient: Allowed References: <199811271514.KAA22026@hilbert.math.albany.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: VM 6.44 under Emacs 19.34.1 Message-ID: <13922.59462.279452.122152@fell.open.ac.uk> Date: Mon, 30 Nov 1998 19:52:04 +0100 Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project From: Chris Rowley Subject: Re: portable LaTeX To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L In-Reply-To: <199811271535.PAA22400@nag.co.uk> David Carlisle wrote -- ... mostly about normalisation and concrete syntax. He did not mention the lack of extensibility: was this deliberate? It is tortuously difficult in SGML to have bothe extendabilty and portability; it is therefore impossible to have extendability in XML (correct?). I know that it is not, in general, a Good Thing to have extendability but ... see other message. chris