Motivation

This increase in the range of applications of L^ATEX has highlighted certain limitations of the current system, both for authors of documents and for designers of formatting styles.

In addition to the need to extend the variety of classes of document which can be processed by L^ATEX, substantial enhancements are necessary in, at least, the following areas:

• the command syntax (attributes, short references, etc);
• the layout specification interface (style design);
• the level of robustness (error recovery, omitted tags);
• the extendibility (package interface);
• the layout specification of tabular material;
• the specification and inclusion of graphical material;
• the positioning of floating material, and other aspects of page layout;
• the requirements of hypertext systems.

Further analysis of these deficiencies has shown that some of the problems are to be found in L^ATEX's internal concepts and design. This project to produce a new version therefore involves thorough research into the challenges posed by new applications and by the use of L^ATEX as a formatter for a wide range of documents, e.g.  SGML documents; on-line PDF documents with hypertext links.

This will result in a major re-implementation of large parts of the system. Some of the results of such rethinking of the fundamentals are already available in Standard L^ATEX, notably in the following areas:

• Font declaration and selection;
• Font and glyph handling within mathematical formulas;
• Handling multiple font glyph encodings within a document;
• Allowing multiple input character encodings within a document;
• A uniform interface for graphics inclusion;
• Support for coloured text;
• Building and interfacing new classes and extension packages.