Date: 11 Mar 95 Message No: 043 To: TeX implementors and distributors From: Barbara Beeton Subject: Announcing the 1995 update to TeX, Metafont, and friends A few days ago, I received the attached announcement from Don Knuth. As you read therein, he has updated several programs and related files, resulting in these new versions: TeX 3.14159 METAFONT 2.718 Computer Modern fonts (sources only) DVItype 3.5 PLtoTF 3.5 VPtoVF 1.4 plain.tex 3.14159 The new sources are in an alpha directory at labrea (see below); none of the "usual" /tex directories have been updated, so there will be no automatic updating of CTAN. I will ask Don about this, whether he would like the new material to undergo an initial shakedown after which the /tex areas at labrea will be upgraded, or if CTAN should be updated separately. The details of the bug reports and Don's responses have been delivered to me as a formidable stack of paper with his handwritten comments. As is my custom, I will transcribe the comments into an electronic file, send the originals to those who submitted the reports, and post the electronic version in this forum. That may well take a couple of weeks. (I will be out of town at a standards meeting March 21-26, and must prepare for it, as well as covering my usual AMS responsibilities, so the time available for this is limited.) I will do it as quickly as possible. ######################################################################## Date: 08 Mar 1995 18:22:30 -0800 --------- ANNOUNCING THE 1995 UPDATE TO TeX, METAFONT, and FRIENDS -------- I've just gone through all accumulated correspondence and made appropriate changes to the master TeX sources on my home computer. (I plan to do this again in February of 1998, 2002, 2007, etc.!) My files are grouped in two main subdirectories, "dist" and "local"; the former consists of the master WEB, TeX, METAFONT, Computer Modern, TeXware, and MFware sources, while the latter consists of my own change files and supplementary macros and fonts that other people might like to look at. These files fit into similarly named parts of the big TeX archive tree; they should replace their former counterparts. I don't know how to do this myself, not even at labrea, so I am hoping that all current maintainers of TeXnicalities will be alerted to the existence of this new material. I've checked everything pretty carefully, so I don't think there's any need to wait until independent vetting has been done. TeX Version 3.14159 has four bug fixes, two of which are significant: 1) fontmemsize can vary between formats dumped by INITEX and loaded by VIRTEX --- this problem had already been fixed by all the major implementations 2) math kerns disappear again at line breaks, as they should --- this problem arose by mistake in version 3.1415. 3) overflow won't occur when converting huge stretch/shrink amounts from real to integer --- again, implementors had fixed this 4) you can have more than 32K font parameters without crashing TeX (nobody ever wanted so many, but a crash is a crash) METAFONT Version 2.718 has only one bug fix, but it corrects a problem in the linear-equation-solving engine that lost significant figures and caused spurious overflows; the bug had been present since version 0.1. I've written a letter to Barbara Beeton about this, and she can send you a copy if you need more information. The bug had only microscopic effect on Computer Modern fonts. Ten changes were made to the Computer Modern fonts, affecting nine of the master source files, but the changes are rather minor and nearly invisible to the eye. (Again they help reduce the chance of overflow.) I have been unhappy to see so many people still using the pre-1992 CM fonts, because I made MAJOR important improvements in that year, and I hate to run across the obsolete symbols in preprints that people send me! Anybody who hasn't installed CM fonts since 1991 should surely change now; and please help stamp out all copies of the old fonts that you see installed anywhere. (The lowercase delta is the main giveaway --- the new shape is vastly better than the old. Also arrows are now darker, and several calligraphic caps are improved, etc etc; the TFM files did not change, but the images got lots better.) On the other hand, if you do have the 1993-or-later version of the fonts, there's no need to replace old bitmaps. Just replace the old source files, and regenerate fonts from them at your leisure. There are new versions of DVItype (3.5), PLtoTF (3.5), and VPtoVF (1.4). DVItype now checks the DVI file more carefully in material that is skipped over (e.g., between pages). Plain TeX format, version 3.14159, has eight changes, but only the change to \bmod has a substantial probability of affecting existing .tex files. Accents \b and \d have gotten better in four ways. Barbara Beeton will be distributing reward checks to 20 people who were first to report significant errors in Volumes A--E. The big "sweepstakes" winners this year were Chris Thompson (Cambridge) and Bogus{\l}aw Jackowski (Gdansk), who received the maximum $327.68 reward for pointing out longstanding bugs in TeX and METAFONT, respectively. All sources are frozen and no future changes will be made unless a new, serious and easily fixable error is reported. The threshold for calling something a feature rather than a bug is rising exponentially and may be almost infinitely high when I do this exercise again in 1998! However, I do still promise to maintain these programs as long as I am able. Where can you find the new sources? At labrea.stanford.edu, in file ~ftp/alpha/tex95.tar.gz (slightly less than 3MB). Thanks to all of you for continued high quality support. -- Don Knuth 3/8/95 ######################################################################## %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% % Character code reference %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% % % Upper case letters: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ % Lower case letters: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz % Digits: 0123456789 % Square, curly, angle braces, parentheses: [] {} <> () % Backslash, slash, vertical bar: \ / | % Punctuation: . ? ! , : ; % Underscore, hyphen, equals sign: _ - = % Quotes--right left double: ' ` " %"at", "number" "dollar", "percent", "and": @ # $ % & % "hat", "star", "plus", "tilde": ^ * + ~ % %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% [ end of message 043 ]