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\centerline{\bf What's New with \TeX?}
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\noindent 
This is the first of what will, hopefully, be a regular
feature.  Its purpose is to summarise recent developments in \TeX\ and
\TeX-related things, primarily for people who don't receive any of the
network mailings.

{\bf \TeX\ itself} has now reached version 2.93b following the
discovery of a few bugs during the summer.  Most of these are pretty
esoteric, although one could crop up if you use \TeX's \cmd{read} and
\cmd{write} frequently.  The most recent \unix\ and VMS distribution
tapes both contain version 2.93b.  The |plain| format has also been
updated slightly: anyone who claims to have a genuine \TeX\ 2.93 must
also have version 2.93 of the |plain| format (the version number is
near the bottom of |plain.tex|).  \MFb\ is now at version 1.5, since
several of the problems with \TeX\ concerned memory allocation and
were therefore present in \MF\ too.


On the \unix\ front, the people at the University of Washington have
managed to produce a sort of {\WEB}-to-C translator.  As well as
making \TeX\ and \MF\ more easily available on \unix\ system~V (which, I
am told, has a lousy {\sc pascal} compiler), the C translation
apparently runs over four times faster than the {\sc pascal} on
|bsd|-based systems!

There has been a spate of large-memory versions of \TeX.  Adrian
Clark, now at Essex University, was the first to report a large-memory
($>$64\,Kbyte) \TeX, which he used for typesetting halftone pictures.
(This uses a special font, designed by Knuth, for mapping characters
onto grey-values.)  Users of \PiCTeX\ (see below) also require very
big-memory versions, so the \unix\ \TeX-in-C implementation is
normally quite large.

The {\bf CM font family} has had a small number of tweaks made to it,
none of them being very significant (to the author's untrained eye).
John Sauter of DEC has made some minor (upwards-compatible) changes to
the font definitions which makes them more suitable for white-writing
laser printers such as the DEC~|LN03| (Ricoh print engine).  He has
also devised a way of generating any CM font at any design size,
rather than using scaled 10-point (or whatever) fonts.  This produces
more attractive characters, particularly when many magnified fonts
would otherwise be used (e.g., with \LaTeX).

Non-English versions of \TeX\ are proliferating.  These generally make
a stab at generating correct hyphenation patterns for the target
language.  There are now versions to support most European languages,
as well as Japanese.  Non-English fonts are also a topic of interest:
for example, there are now correctly-accented Greek and Turkish fonts.
These may cause problems with some {\dvi} drivers, since they
contain more than 128~glyphs.  People have also been experimenting
with other, stranger fonts: Elvish (from {\it Lord of the Rings\/}),
bar-codes and electronic components all cropped up at the \TeX88
jamboree at Exeter in July.

The latest version of {\bf \LaTeX} is still 2.09, but dated {\bf
August 1988}; Leslie Lamport has made a few minor fixes.  There is now
a large collection of style files for \LaTeX, including IEEE, ACM and
many other journal styles: copies of the collection are kept on-line
for network access at Clarkson University in the U.S.\ and at Aston
University in the U.K.  They can also be obtained by conventional
mail, but not from Clarkson or Aston.

\BibTeX, which maintains bibliographic databases for \LaTeX, appears
to have undergone a pretty major re-write.  The most recent version I
know of is 0.99c.  Alas, \BibTeX\ style files (|.bst| files) for the
new version are incompatible with those for older versions. The
standard ones (plain, alpha, etc.) have all been converted, as have
most of those submitted to the \LaTeX\ style collections.

Anyone who has used \LaTeX\ in anger for book production will know the
hassle involved in generating the index.  Although \LaTeX\ can
generate the page references for an index and has a suitable
environment for formatting it, the only way to sort the entries was by
hand.  Thankfully, this is no longer the case: a few people have
written tools to automate sorting, such as |Idxtex| for VMS systems.
And there now appears to be a program, |makeindex|, which has the
Lamport seal of approval.  As yet, I don't know anything about it;
I'll provide details in the next \TeXline.

One interesting new facility is \PiCTeX, a macro package for drawing
figures and graphs, written by Michael J. Winchura of Chicago
University. It can be used with both |plain| \TeX\ and \LaTeX.
\PiCTeX\ does {\it not\/} work by generating \cmd{special}s for the
{\dvi} driver, unlike most other graphics facilities for \TeX: it
draws curved lines with closely-spaced dots.  Although this works, in
principle at least, with {\it any\/} \TeX, it requires lots of memory,
both in \TeX\ and in the {\dvi} driver.  The author has used
\PiCTeX\ successfully under both VMS and \unix.  But it's unlikely to
work on any PC or Macintosh implementations of \TeX.  The only
documentation, incidentally, is the \PiCTeX\ manual, sold by
the \TeX\ Users' Group.

Finally, anyone who finds designing diagrams for inclusion in \TeX\ or
\LaTeX\ documents somewhat painful could look towards |fig|.  This is
a {\it wysiwyg\/} program, rather similar to MacDraw, for SUN workstations.
It, and its accompanying |TransFig| package, can generate \PS,
\TeX, \LaTeX\ |picture| or \PiCTeX\ descriptions of the
interactively-generated figure.  And there's a version which drives
|X|-windows, too.
\smallskip
\rightline{\sl Adrian F. Clark (no relation)}