Date: Mon, 8 Jan 90 22:37:11 -0800
From: Don Knuth and Joe Weening <weening@Gang-of-Four.Stanford.EDU>
Subject: New TeX/MF sources available on Stanford's master archive
Keywords: TeX, METAFONT, source

Thanks to excellent contributions by TeXhaxers and Grand Wizards around
the world, the new versions of TeX and METAFONT and their supporting
programs have now been quite thoroughly checked out. All known bugs have
been corrected and the current state of the master files should be very
nearly the permanent one. Therefore, anybody who "held back" on trying
the October 1989 versions (on grounds that they were sure to crash) can
now be fairly confident that time invested in switching to the new
versions will not be wasted.

Although TeX and MF have not changed extensively since October, the
English language commentary in their WEB files has been edited to agree
with the contents of Volumes B and D. Hence you will find that your
change files probably need to be revised slightly in this go-round...
(some lines won't "match" any more). But this should be the last time
you have to fool with such stuff.

The archive at Labrea.Stanford.EDU now contains the latest sources of
everything, including the brand-new support programs for virtual fonts
(VFtoVP and VPtoVF) that have been mentioned in a separate message to
TeXhax.

Here are the latest version numbers:

        TANGLE version 4
        WEAVE version 4
        TeX version 2.993
        POOLtype version 3
        TFtoPL version 3.1
        PLtoTF version 3.2
        DVItype version 3.2
        METAFONT version 1.9
        GFtype version 3
        GFtoPK version 2.2
        GFtoDVI version 3.0
        MFT version 2.0
        VFtoVP version 1.0
        VPtoVF version 1.0

The new sources also have uptodate versions of the WEB and TRIP and TRAP
manuals, as well as the current versions of The TeXbook and The METAFONTbook.

To get these files, open an FTP connection to Labrea.Stanford.EDU, log
in as "anonymous" with any password, and connect to the directory
"pub/tex".  The README file in that directory describes what is there.
For the programs listed above, the file CHANGES lists the names of files
that have changed since the October 1989 release.  (It does not list
changes to LaTeX, BibTeX, AmSTeX, etc. that have happened in the past
few months.)

We believe TeX version 3.0 and METAFONT version 2.0 will be essentially
identical to the present versions 2.993 and 1.9, since these have been
subjected to so many exacting tests. But the version numbers won't be
changed officially until two months go by with no bug reports from anywhere
in the world.