The GELLMU Archiveusepackagelfaqtolerance=9999The UK <tex
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> Questions AnsweredGELLMU Editionversion 2.4.7a, date 20000707Maintained for the UK Users Group Committee
by Robin FairbairnsNotesmall
This document is an updated and extended version of the FAQ article
that was published as the December 1994 and 1995, and March 1999
editions of the UKTUG magazine Baskerville (which weren't formatted like
this)
The article is also available via the World Wide WebPart AIntroductionSU-1Part BThe BackgroundSU-21What is ?SU-2.12How should I pronounce ?SU-2.23What is MF?SU-2.34What is MP?SU-2.45How can I be sure it's really ?SU-2.56Are and friends Y2K compliant?SU-2.67What is ?SU-2.78How should I pronounce (2)?SU-2.89Should I use plain or ?SU-2.910What is CONT?SU-2.1011What are the AMS packages (AMSTeX, etc.)?SU-2.1112What is Eplain?SU-2.1213What is Lollipop?SU-2.1314What is Texinfo?SU-2.1415If is so good, how come it's free?SU-2.1516What is the future of ?SU-2.1617What are TUG and TUGboat?SU-2.1718Are there nationallybased user groups, too?SU-2.1819TUG Technical Working GroupsSU-2.19Part CDocumentation and HelpSU-320Books on and its relationsSU-3.121Books on TypeSU-3.222Where to find this articleSU-3.323Where to get helpSU-3.424AllTeX TutorialsSU-3.525MF and MP TutorialsSU-3.626BibTeX DocumentationSU-3.727The PiCTeX manualSU-3.828Finding AllTeX macro packagesSU-3.929Finding files in the CTAN archivesSU-3.10Part DBits and pieces of SU-430What is a DVI file?SU-4.131What is a driver?SU-4.232What are PK files?SU-4.333What are TFM files?SU-4.434Virtual fontsSU-4.535special commandsSU-4.636Documented sources (.dtx files)SU-4.737What are the EC fonts?SU-4.838What is TDS?SU-4.9Part EAcquiring the SoftwareSU-539Repositories of materialSU-5.140What's the CTAN nonfree tree?SU-5.241Contributing a file to the archivesSU-5.342Finding new fontsSU-5.443CDROMsSU-5.5Part F SystemsSU-644AllTeX for different machinesSU-6.145friendly editors and shellsSU-6.246Commercial implementationsSU-6.3Part GDVI Drivers and PreviewersSU-747DVI to PostScript conversion programsSU-7.148DVI drivers for HP LaserJetSU-7.249DVI previewersSU-7.3Part HSupport Packages for SU-850Fig, a friendly drawing packageSU-8.151CAD, a drawing package for SU-8.252Spelling checkers for work with SU-8.3Part ILiterate programmingSU-953What is Literate Programming?SU-9.154WEB for C, FORTRAN, and other languagesSU-9.2Part JFormat conversionsSU-1055Conversion between AllTeX and othersSU-10.156Conversion from AllTeX to plain ASCIISU-10.257Conversion from SGML or HTML to SU-10.358AllTeX conversion to HTMLSU-10.459Making hypertext documents from SU-10.560Making Acrobat documents from SU-10.661Using to read SGML or XML directlySU-10.7Part KMFSU-1162Getting MF to do what you wantSU-11.163Which font files should be keptSU-11.264Getting bitmaps from the archivesSU-11.3Part LPostScript and SU-1265Using PostScript fonts with SU-12.166Previewing files using PostScript fontsSU-12.267 font metric files for PostScript fontsSU-12.368Problems using PostScript fontsSU-12.469Choice of scalable outline fontsSU-12.570Including a PostScript figure in AllTeXSU-12.6Part MSpecial sorts of typesettingSU-1371Drawing with SU-13.172Doublespaced documents in SU-13.273Formatting a thesis in SU-13.374Flowing text around figures in SU-13.475Alternative head and footlines in SU-13.576Including a file in verbatim in SU-13.677Including line numbers in typeset outputSU-13.778Generating an index in AllTeXSU-13.879Typesetting URLsSU-13.980Citing URLs with BibTeXSU-13.1081Using BibTeX with plainSU-13.1182Typesetting music in SU-13.1283Drawing Feynman diagrams in SU-13.13Part NHow do I do X in or SU-1484Proof environmentSU-14.185Symbols for the number setsSU-14.286Roman theoremsSU-14.387Fancy enumeration listsSU-14.488Unnumbered sections in the Table of ContentsSU-14.589Footnotes in tablesSU-14.690Style of section headingsSU-14.791Indent after section headingsSU-14.892Footnotes in section headingsSU-14.993Changing the margins in SU-14.1094Finding the width of a letter, word, or phraseSU-14.1195Changing the space between lettersSU-14.1296Excluding blocks of text from the DVI fileSU-14.1397Setting bold Greek letters in SU-14.1498Defining a new loglike function in SU-14.1599Typesetting all those related logosSU-14.161001column abstract in 2column documentSU-14.17101Changing babel's ideas of words to useSU-14.18102Code listings in SU-14.19Part OMacros for Particular Types of DocumentsSU-15103Setting papers for journalsSU-15.1104A report from lots of articlesSU-15.2105Curriculum Vitae (Resume)SU-15.3Part PThings are Going WrongSU-16106Weird hyphenation of wordsSU-16.1107(Merely) peculiar hyphenationSU-16.2108Accented words aren't hyphenatedSU-16.3109Enlarging SU-16.4110Moving tables and figures in SU-16.5111pagestyleempty on first page in SU-16.6112Underlined text won't breakSU-16.7113Odd behaviour of rm, bf, etc.SU-16.8114Old font references such as tenrmSU-16.9115Missing symbolsSU-16.10116 gets crossreferences wrongSU-16.11117 and in macro namesSU-16.12118Where are the msx and msy fonts?SU-16.13119Where are the am fonts?SU-16.14120String too long in BibTeXSU-16.15Part QWhy does it do that?SU-17121What's going on in my include commands?SU-17.1122Why does it ignore paragraph parameters?SU-17.2123What's the reason for protection?SU-17.3124Why doesn't verb work within?SU-17.4125Casechanging odditiesSU-17.5126Why are signs doubled in macros?SU-17.6127Why does split footnotes across pages?SU-17.7128Getting marginpar on the right sideSU-17.8129Why does PiCTeX run out of
dimens?SU-17.9130Why won't fixed names stay changed?SU-17.10Part RCurrent ProjectsSU-18131LaTeXe (the new standard )SU-18.1132The 3 projectSU-18.2133The Omega projectSU-18.3134The NTS projectSU-18.4135The PDF projectSU-18.5Part SPerhaps There isn't an AnswerSU-19136What to do if you find a bugSU-19.1Part AIntroductionThis article was prepared by the Committee of the UK Users
Group (UKTUG) For 199899: Peter Abbott,
Kaveh Bazargan,
Malcolm Clark,
Roy Everett,
James Foster,
David Hardy,
Hong Ji,
Phil Molyneux,
John Palmer,
Kim Roberts,
Philip Taylor
and
Dominik Wujastyk
as a development of a regular posting to the Usenet newsgroup
comptexttex that was maintained for some time by
Bobby Bodenheimer (bobbyhotcaltechedu)Usenet is a mechanism for exchanging articles between people who share
interests or needs Usenet, as its name implies, is a means of using some sort of
network; in the earliest days the network was made by stringing
together a series of telephone lines, but nowadays Usenet is most
often carried over the Internet
a newsgroup is an area within Usenet carrying a particular
class of articles Since a common sort of article asks for help,
advice or information, and since certain of these questions are
regularly repeated (often with monotonous regularity), some
publicspirited souls took to writing articles which listed
Frequently Asked Questions and answers to them Many members
of UKTUG do not have access to Usenet, but could be expected to value
the answers about that have accumulated over the years; so we
decided to update the list and publish it in Baskerville; we are
grateful to Bobby for his permission to use his article in this way
As a quid pro quo, we are making the source of the article
freely available (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/usergrps/uktug-faq"usergrpsuktugfaq), and it can be compiled by
anyone who runs reasonably current
LaTeXe (iref="latex2e"questionlatex2e),
and has the required fonts
It was the committee's original intention that it would also be
possible for the content of this article to feed back to the worldwide
community via regular posting to Usenet, but since Bobby was forced to
abandon his work in the area, noone has been able to take his place
Therefore, a translation of the article has been made available on the
WorldWide Web, via URL
http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?introduction=yesA hypertext version is also to be found on the Live CDROM
(iref="Q-CD"questionQ-CD)When we started, we rearranged Bobby's original, and we have since added new questions and answers on the basis of our experience of
answering questions about , writing documents in , and
developing macros for , over the yearsThe committee is grateful for help and advice, from the following
outside its number:
Donald Arseneau,
Barbara Beeton,
Karl Berry,
Damian Cugley,
Michael Downes,
John Hobby,
Berthold Horn,
Werner Icking,
David Kastrup,
Ted Nieland,
Pat Rau,
Peter R. Wilson,
Piet van Oostrum,
Oren Patashnik,
Joachim Schrod,
Ulrik Vieth,
Rick Zaccone and
Reinhard ZierkeFurther, Rosemary Bailey and Chris Rowley (who resigned from the
committee in 1995), Alan Jeffrey and Carol Hewlett (who resigned from
the committee in 1996), David Carlisle (who resigned from the
committee in 1997), and Robin Fairbairns, Jonathan Fine and Sebastian
Rahtz (who resigned from the committee in 1998) all made significant
contributions to the conception, development and subsequent revision
of this FAQ while they remained on the committee, and we are
grateful to them for their contributions to it In particular, Alan
Jeffrey developed the technique whereby the Web version of the FAQ is
generatedAnd lastly, the editor has regularly used the work of other groups for
inspiration, notably the excellent (Germanlanguage) FAQ published
by Dantee.V. (see http://www.dante.de/faq/de-tex-faq/)Finding the FilesUnless otherwise specified, all files mentioned in this article are
available from a CTAN archive, or from one of their mirrorsiref="Q-archives"QuestionQ-archives
gives details of the CTAN archives, and how to retrieve files from
them If you don't have access to the Internet,
iref="Q-CD"questionQ-CD tells you of sources of CDROMs that offer
snapshots of the archivesThe reader should also note that the first directory name of the path
name of every file on CTAN has been elided from what follows, for the
simple reason that it's always the same (texarchive)To avoid confusion, we've also elided the full
stopFull stop (British English)period (American English)
from the end of any sentence whose last item is a path name (note that
such sentences only occur at the end of paragraphs) Though the path
names are set in a different font from running text, it's not easy to
distinguish the font of a single dotPart BThe Background1What is ? is a typesetting system written by Donald E.Knuth, who
says in the Preface to his book on
(see iref="Q-books"questionQ-books)
that it is intended for the creation of beautiful booksand especially for books that contain a lot of mathematicsKnuth developed a system of literate programming to write ,
and he provides the literate (WEB) source of free of charge,
together with tools for processing the web source into something
that can be compiled and something that can be printed; there's never
any mystery about what does Furthermore, the WEB system
provides mechanisms to port to new operating systems and
computers; in order that one may have some confidence in the ports,
Knuth supplied a test by means of which one may judge the fidelity of
a system and its documents are therefore highly
portable is a macro processor, and offers its users a powerful
programming capability For this reason, on its own is a
pretty difficult beast to deal with, so Knuth provided a package of
macros for use with called plainplain is
effectively the minimum set of macros one can usefully employ with
, together with some demonstration versions of higherlevel
commands (the latter are better regarded as models than used asis)
When people say they're programming in , they usually mean
they're programming in plain2How should I pronounce ?The X stands for the Greek letter
Chi (),
and is pronounced by Englishspeakers either a bit like the ch in
loch ([x] in the IPA) or like k It definitely is not pronounced
ks3What is MF?MF was written by Knuth as a companion to whereas
defines the layout of glyphs on a page, MF defines the shapes of
the glyphs and the relations between themMF details the sizes of
glyphs, for 's benefit, and details the rasters used to
represent the glyphs, for the benefit of programs that will produce
printed output as post processes after a run of MF's language for defining fonts permits the expression of several
classes of things: first (of course), the simple geometry of the
glyphs; second, the properties of the print engine for which the
output is intended; and third, metainformation which can
distinguish different design sizes of the same font, or the difference
between two fonts that belong to the same (or related) familiesKnuth (and others) have designed a fair range of fonts using MF,
but font design using MF is much more of a minority skill than is
macrowriting The complete user nevertheless needs to
be aware of MF, and to be able to run MF to generate personal
copies of new fonts4What is MP? The MP system (by John Hobby) implements a picturedrawing
language very much like that of MF except that it outputs
Encapsulated PostScript files instead of runlengthencoded bitmapsMP is a powerful language for producing figures for documents
to be printed on PostScript printers, either directly or embedded
in AllTeX documents. It includes facilities for directly integrating
text and mathematics with the graphics. The PostScript output is
of such a simple form that MP output files can be directly
included in PDF PDF cannot normally handle PostScript inclusions
documents (iref="Q-pdftex"questionQ-pdftex).
(Knuth tells us that he uses nothing else but
MP for diagrams in text that he is writing.)Much of MP's source code was copied from MF's sources with
Knuth's permission5How can I be sure it's really ? (and MF and MP) are written in a
literate programming language called Web (iref="Q-lit"questionQ-lit)
which is designed to be portable across a wide range of computer
systems How, then, is a new version of checkedOf course, any sensible software implementor will have his own suite
of tests to check that his software runs: those who port and
its friends to other platforms do indeed perform such testsKnuth, however, provides a conformance test for both
(trip) and MF (trap)
He characterises these as torture tests: they are designed not to
check the obvious things that ordinary typeset documents, or font
designs, will exercise, but rather to explore small alleyways off the
main path through the code of They are, to the casual reader,
pretty incomprehensibleOnce an implementation of has passed its trip, or and
implementation of MF has passed its trap, test it may
reasonably be distributed as a working version6Are and friends Y2K compliant?Crashing:None of , MF or MP can themselves crash
due to any change whatever in the date of any sortTimestamps:As Knuth delivers the sources, a 2digit year is
stored as the creation time for format files and that value is
printed in logfiles These items should not be of general concern,
since the only use of the date format file is to produce the log
output, and the log file is designed for human readers only Knuth's distributed source does not designate the code, which
generates this 2digit date, as a valid area where implementations
may differ However, he announced in 1998 that implementators can
alter this code without fear of being accused of noncompliance
Nearly all implementations that are being actively maintained had
been modified to generate 4digit years in the format file and the
log, by the end of 1998The year primitive:Certification of a
implementation (see iref="Q-triptrap"questionQ-triptrap)
does not require that year return a meaningful value (which
means that can, in principle, be implemented on platforms
that don't make the value of the clock available to user programs)
The book (see
iref="Q-books"questionQ-books) defines year as
the current year of our Lord, which is the only correct meaning
for year for those implementations which can supply a
meaningful value, which is to say nearly all of them In short, implementations should provide a value in year
giving the 4digit year Anno Domini, or the value 1776 if the
platform does not support a date function Note that if the system itself fails to deliver a correct date to
, then year will of course return an incorrect value cannot be considered Y2K compliant, in this sense, on a
system that is not itself Y2K compliantMacros: macros can in principle perform calculations on
the basis of the value of year
The suite (iref="Q-latex"questionQ-latex)
performs such calculations in a small number of places; the
calculations performed in the current (supported) version of are
known to be Y2K compliant Other macros and macro packages should be individually checkedExternal software:Software such as DVI translators
needs to be individually checked7What is ? is a macro package, originally written by Leslie Lamport, that
provides a document processing system allows markup to
describe the structure of a document, so that the user
need not think about presentation. By using document classes and
addon packages, the same document can be produced in a variety of
different layoutsLamport says that represents a balance between functionality and ease of use
This shows itself as a continual conflict that leads to
the need for such as the present article: can
meet most user requirements, but finding out how is often
tricky8How should I pronounce (2)?Lamport never recommended how one should pronounce , but a lot
of people pronounce it Lay or perhaps Lah (with
pronounced as the program itself; see
iref="tex-pronounce"questiontex-pronounce)The epsilon in LaTeXe is supposed to be suggestive of a small
improvement over the old LaTeXo Nevertheless, most people
pronounce the name as twoee9Should I use plain or ?There's no straightforward answer to this question Many people swear
by plain, and produce highly respectable documents using it
(Knuth is an example of this, of course) But equally, many people
are happy to let someone else take the design decisions for them,
accepting a small loss of flexibility in exchange for a saving of
brain powerThe arguments around this topic can provoke huge amounts of noise and
heat, without offering much by way of light; your best bet is to find
out what those around you are using, and to go with the crowd Later
on, you can always switch your allegiance; don't bother about itIf you are preparing a manuscript for a publisher or journal, ask them
what markup they want before you
develop your own; many big publishers have developed their own
styles for journals and books, and insist that authors stick
closely to their markup10What is CONT?CONT is a macro package developed by Hans Hagen, originally to
serve the needs of the Dutch firm, Pragma It was designed with the
same generalpurpose aims as , but (being younger) reflects
much more recent thinking about the structure of markup, etc In
particular, CONT can customise its markup to an
author's language (customising modules for Dutch, English and German
are provided, at present)CONT is well integrated, in all of its structure,
with the needs of hypertext markup, and in particular with the
facilities offered by PDFCONT doesn't yet have quite such a strong developer community as
does , but those developers who are active seem to have
prodigious energyTry a copy, from Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/context"macroscontext11What are the AMS packages (AMSTeX, etc.)?AMSTeX is a macro package, originally written by Michael Spivak for
the American Mathematical Society (AMS) during 19831985. It
is described in
The Joy of by Michael D.Spivak (second edition,
AMS, 1990, ISBN0821829971) It is based on plain,
and provides many
features for producing more professionallooking maths formulas with
less burden on authors It pays attention to the finer details of
sizing and positioning that mathematical publishers care about. The
aspects covered include multiline displayed equations, equation
numbering, ellipsis dots, matrices, double accents, multiline
subscripts, syntax checking (faster processing on initial
errorchecking runs), and other thingsAs increased in popularity, authors asked to submit papers to
the AMS in , and so the AMS developed
AMSLaTeX, which is a
collection of packages and classes that offer authors most of
the functionality of AMSTeX12What is Eplain?The Eplain macro package expands on and extends the
definitions in plain Eplain is not intended to provide
generic typesetting capabilities, as do or
Texinfo (iref="Q-texinfo"questionQ-texinfo)
Instead, it provides definitions that are intended to be useful
regardless of the highlevel commands that you use when you actually
prepare your manuscriptFor example, Eplain does not have a command section,
which would format section headings in an appropriate way, as
's section The philosophy of Eplain is that
some people will always need or want to go beyond the macro designer's
idea of appropriate Such canned macros are fine as long as you
are willing to accept the resulting output If you don't like the
results, or if you are trying to match a different format, you are out
of luckOn the other hand, almost everyone would like capabilities such as
crossreferencing by labels, so that you don't have to put actual page
numbers in the manuscript Karl Berry, the author of Eplain, says
he is not aware of any generally available macro packages that do
not force their typographic style on an author, and yet provide
such capabilities13What is Lollipop?Lollipop is a macro package written by Victor Eijkhout; it was used in
the production of his book by Topic (see
iref="Q-books"questionQ-books) The manual says of
it:
Lollipop is made easy. Lollipop is a macro package that
functions as a toolbox for writing macros It was my
intention to make macro writing so easy that implementing a fully
new layout in would become a matter of less than an hour for
an average document, and that it would be a task that could be
accomplished by someone with only a very basic training in
programming Lollipop is an attempt to make structured text formatting available
for environments where previously only WYSIWYG packages could be
used because adapting the layout is so much more easy with them than
with traditional macro packagesThe manual goes on to talk of ambitions to capture some of the
market share; it's a very witty package, but little sign of
it taking over from is detectable
An article about Lollipop appeared in TUGboat 13(3)14What is Texinfo?Texinfo is a documentation system that uses one source file to
produce both online information and printed output So
instead of writing two different documents, one for the online help
and the other for a typeset manual, you need write only one
document source file When the work
is revised, you need only revise one document You can read the
online information, known as an Info file, with an Info
documentationreading program By convention, Texinfo source file
names end with a texi or texinfo extension
You can write and format Texinfo files into Info files within GNU
emacs, and read them using the emacs Info
reader If you do not have emacs, you can format Texinfo
files into Info files using makeinfo and read them using
infoThe Texinfo distribution, including a set of macros for
formatting Texinfo files is available as Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/texinfo-dist"macrostexinfodist15If is so good, how come it's free?It's free because Knuth chose to make it so He is nevertheless
apparently happy
that others should earn money by selling based services and
products. While several valuable related tools and packages are
offered subject to restrictions imposed by the GNU General Public
Licence (Copyleft), itself is not subject to CopyleftThere are commercial versions of available; for some users,
it's reassuring to have paid support What is more, some of the
commercial implementations
have features that are not available in free versions (The
reverse is also true: some free implementations have features
not available commercially.)Usually, this article does not describe commercial
versions; iref="Q-commercial"QuestionQ-commercial lists the major vendors16What is the future of ?Knuth has declared that he will do no further development of
he will continue to fix any bugs that are reported to him (though
bugs are rare) This decision was made soon after
version3.0 was released; at each bugfix release
the version number acquires one more digit, so that it tends to the
limit (at the time of writing, Knuth's latest release is version
3.14159) Knuth wants to be frozen at version when he
dies; thereafter, no further changes may be made to Knuth's source
(A similar rule is applied to MF; its version number tends to the
limite, and currently stands at 2.718.)There are projects (some of them longterm
projects: see, for example,
iref="LaTeX3"questionLaTeX3)
to build substantial
new macro packages based on For the even longer term, there
are various projects to build a successor to see
iref="Q-omega"questionsQ-omega and iref="Q-NTS"Q-NTS17What are TUG and TUGboat?TUG is the Users GroupTUGboat is
TUG's main journal,
containing useful articles about and MF. TUG also produces a
newsletter for members ( and TUG News), organises a yearly
conference, runs training courses, sells almost all related
books, and distributes related microcomputer software on disk.
TUG has a Technical Council to coordinate related developments
(iref="Q-TUGTC"questionQ-TUGTC)
Enquiries should be directed to:
18Are there nationallybased user groups, too?The following groups publish their membership (etc.)information
electronically on CTAN archives:
A listing of all known groups is available as Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/usergrps-list"usergrpslist19TUG Technical Working Groups
TUG (iref="Q-TUG"questionQ-TUG)
has an autonomous Technical Council which can appoint
Technical Working Groups related to the specific areas of interest
to the community.
Each group has a chaircontact person and establishes its own working
methods and membership; anyone interested in taking part should contact
the group's chair person. Suggestions for new groups should be addressed to
techcounciltugorg;
a list of members of the Technical Council can be found
at http://tug.org/committees.htmlBelow is a brief list of currently active groups:
WG9201 Extended Mathematics Font Encoding.
To create font encoding standards for Mathematical fonts
used in systemsContact: Barbara Beeton (bnbmathamsorg)
WG9205 Archive Guidelines.
To develop
guidelines for the effective management and utilisation of major
archives, and to initiate communication among the maintainers of the
existing archives for the purpose of coordination and synchronisationContact: Sebastian Rahtz (srahtzelseviercouk)
WG9407 Directory Structure.
To identify a universal directory
structure for macros, fonts and other related software so that
recommendations can be made to all suppliers of softwareThe group's current set of proposals are to be found on CTAN at
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/tds/draft-standard/tds-0.9996"tdsdraftstandardtds0.9996Contact: Karl Berry (kbcsumbedu)
WG9408DVI Driver Implementation and Standardisation Issues.
To study the issues in
the requirements of DVI Drivers imposed by changing needs and
technologies, and to make recommendations for implementation and
standardisation of such drivers to enhance the uniformity of their use
Work will include, but not be limited to, the examination of the use,
syntax, and semantics of special commandsContact: Michael Sofka (sofkamrpiedu)
WG9410 and Linguistics.
To study and discuss the
requirements for typesetting linguistics in and as a means of
identifying, examining, testing, and comparing macros, fonts, style files
and other aids for typesetting linguisticsContact: Christina Thiele (cthieleccscarletonca)Part CDocumentation and Help20Books on and its relationsWhile Knuth's book is the definitive reference for , there are
other books covering :
The bookby Donald Knuth (AddisonWesley, 1984,
ISBN0201134470, paperback ISBN0201134489)A Beginner's Book of by Raymond Seroul and Silvio Levy,
(Springer Verlag, 1992, ISBN0387975624) by Example: A Beginner's Guideby Arvind Borde
(Academic Press, 1992, ISBN0121176509)Introduction to by Norbert Schwarz (AddisonWesley,
1989, ISBN020151141X)A Plain Primerby Malcolm Clark (Oxford University
Press, 1993, ISBNs0198537247 (hardback) and0198537840
(paperback)) by Topicby Victor Eijkhout (AddisonWesley, 1992,
ISBN0201568829) for the Beginnerby Wynter Snow (AddisonWesley, 1992,
ISBN0201547996) for the Impatientby Paul W.Abrahams, Karl Berry and
Kathryn A.Hargreaves (AddisonWesley, 1990, ISBN0201513757) in Practiceby Stephan von Bechtolsheim (Springer
Verlag, 1993, 4 volumes, ISBN354097296X for the set, or
Vol.1: ISBN0387975950,
Vol.2: ISBN0387975969,
Vol.3: ISBN0387975977, and
Vol.4: ISBN0387975985): Starting from Square One
by Michael Doob (Springer
Verlag, 1993, ISBN3540564411)The Advanced bookby David Salomon (Springer Verlag, 1995,
ISBN0387945563)
A collection of Knuth's publications about typography has recently been
published:
Digital Typographyby Donald Knuth (CSLI and Cambridge
University Press, 1999, ISBN1575860112, paperback
ISBN1575860104)
For , see:
, a Document Preparation Systemby Leslie Lamport
(second edition, Addison Wesley, 1994, ISBN020115790X)A guide to LaTeXeHelmut Kopka and Patrick W.Daly (third
edition, AddisonWesley, 1998, ISBN0201398257)The Companionby Michel Goossens, Frank Mittelbach,
and Alexander Samarin (AddisonWesley, 1993, ISBN0201541998)The Graphics Companion:Illustrating documents with and PostScript by Michel
Goossens, Sebastian Rahtz and Frank Mittelbach (AddisonWesley,
1997, ISBN0201854694)The Web CompanionIntegrating , HTML and XML by Michel
Goossens and Sebastian Rahtz (AddisonWesley, 1999, ISBN0201433117) Unbound: and strategies for fonts, graphics, and more
by Alan Hoenig (Oxford University Press, 1998, ISBN0195096851
hardback, ISBN019509686X paperback)Math into :A Simplified Introduction using AMSLaTeX
by George Gratzer (Birkhauser, 1993, ISBN0817636374, or,
in Germany, ISBN3764336374)Math into :An Introduction to and AMSLaTeX
by George Gratzer (Birkhauser, 1996, ISBN0817638059)First Steps in by George Gratzer (Birkhauser, 1999,
ISBN0817641327): Line by Line:Tips and Techniques for Document Processing
by Antoni Diller (second edition, John Wiley Sons,
1999, ISBN047197918X) for Linux:A Vade Mecum
by Bernice Sacks Lipkin (SpringerVerlag, 1999,
ISBN0387987088, second printing)
A list of errata for the first printing is available from:
http://www.springer-ny.com/catalog/np/jan99np/0-387-98708-8.html
A sample
of George Gratzer's book, in Adobe Acrobat format, is also available
(Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/info/mil/mil.pdf"infomilmil.pdf)Example files for the Graphics and Web Companions are
available in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/info/lgc"infolgc (Graphics) and Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/info/lwc"infolwc (Web)
Example files for George Gratzer's First Steps are available in
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/info/FirstSteps"infoFirstStepsThe list for MF is rather short:
The MFbookby Donald Knuth (Addison Wesley, 1986,
ISBN0201134454, ISBN0201529831 paperback)
Alan Hoenig's Unbound includes some discussion and
examples of using MFThis list only covers books in English: UKTUG cannot hope to maintain
a list of books in languages other than our own21Books on Type The following is a partial listing of books on typography in general
Of these, Bringhurst seems to be the one most often recommendedThe Elements of Typographic Styleby Robert Bringhurst
(Hartley Marks, 1992, ISBN0881790338)Finer Points in the Spacing Arrangement of Typeby Geoffrey Dowding
(Hartley Marks, 1996, ISBN0881791199)The Thames Hudson Manual of Typographyby Ruari McLean
(Thames Hudson, 1980, ISBN0500680221)The Form of the Bookby Jan Tschichold
(Lund Humphries, 1991, ISBN0853316236)Type Layoutby Colin Wheildon
(Strathmore Press, 1995, ISBN0962489158)The Design of Booksby Adrian Wilson
(Chronicle Books, 1993, ISBN081180304X) There are many catalogues of type specimens but the following books provide
a more interesting overall view of types in general and some of their historyAlphabets Old Newby Lewis F.Day
(Senate, 1995, ISBN1859581609)An Introduction to the History of Printing Typesby Geoffrey Dowding
(British Library, 1998, UK ISBN0712345639; USA ISBN1884718442)The Alphabet Abecedariumby Richar A.Firmage
(David R.Goodine, 1993, ISBN0879239980)The Alphabet and Elements of Letteringby Frederick Goudy
(Dover, 1963, ISBN0486207927)Anatomy of a Typefaceby Alexander Lawson
(David R.Goodine, 1990, ISBN0879233388)A Tally of Typesby Stanley Morison
(David R.Goodine, 1999, ISBN1567920047)Counterpunchby Fred Smeijers
(Hyphen, 1996, ISBN0907259065)Treasury of Alphabets and Letteringby Jan Tschichold
(W.W.Norton, 1992, ISBN0393701972) The above lists are limited to books published in English. Typographic
styles are somewhat languagedependent, and similarly the interesting fonts
depend on the particular writing system involved22Where to find this articleBobby Bodenheimer's article, from which the present one was developed, used
to be posted (nominally monthly) to newsgroup
comptexttex and crossposted to newsgroups
newsanswers and companswers. The most
recently posted copy of that article is kept on CTAN in directory
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/obsolete/help"obsoletehelp; it is no longer kept in the
newsanswers archives
A version of the present article may be browsed via the WorldWide Web, at URL
http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?introduction=yes; the
sources of the article are available from Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/usergrps/uktug-faq"usergrpsuktugfaqBoth the Francophone usergroup Gutenberg and the CzechSlovak
usergroup CSTUG have published translations of this FAQ, with
extensions appropriate to their languagesIn addition, the German usergroup Dante posts a FAQ in German to
decomptex, which is archived as Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/usergrps/dante-faq"usergrpsdantefaq,
and MariePaule Kluth posts a FAQ in French to
frcomptexttex, which is archived as Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/help/LaTeX-FAQ-francaise"helpLaTeXFAQfrancaise23Where to get helpFirst read any FAQ you can find (Which is what you're
doing now, isn't it?) The tutorials and other online documentation can get you started but
for more indepth understanding you should get and read at least one of the
many good books on the subject (iref="Q-books"questionQ-books). The definitive source for
AllTeX is the source code itself, but that is not something to be
approached lightly (if at all) If you are seeking a particular package or program, look on your own
system first: you might already have it If you have access to the internet, and in particular newsgroups,
then AllTeX discussions, including MF and MP, are on
comptexttex
It is best to
spend a little time familiarising yourself with the current threads before
asking a question. The group is normally very responsive but asking a question
that has just been answered is likely to dampen people's enthusiasm to help
you. In case you are not familiar with some of the abbreviations used in
newsgroup postings,
RTFMThe F stands for Fill in the blank
stands for Read The Manual,
and you don't really want to get that response, do youhttp://www.deja.com/usenet makes a good job of archiving Usenet
news discussions, and comptexttex may be found there
If your internet access doesn't include direct access to Usenet news,
you can participate in discussions via DejaThe few people who can't use the World Wide Web, can't access Usenet
news, but can use electronic mail can seek help through mailing listsThe hax digest is operated as a
mailing list Send a message subscribe texhax to
texhaxrequesttexacuk to join it Its turnaround is not
rapid, but questions submitted to it do eventually get
answeredMany mailing lists exist that cover some small part of the
arena A good source of pointers is http://www.tug.org/Announcements of related installations on the CTAN
archives are sent to the mailing list ctanann Subscribe
to the list by sending a message subscribectanannyour name' to
listservurzUniHeidelbergdeIssues related to MF (and, increasingly, MP) are discussed on
the metafont mailing list; subscribe by sending a message
subscribemetafontyour name to listservensfrSeveral other related lists may be accessed via
listservurzuniheidelbergde Send a message containing
the line help to this address. 24AllTeX TutorialsSome very fine tutorials have been written, over the years Michael
Doob's splendid Gentle Introduction to plain has been stable
for a very long time See Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/info/gentle/gentle.pdf"infogentlegentle.pdfMore dynamic is Tobias Oetiker's (Not so) Short Introduction to
LaTeXe, which is regularly updated, as people suggest better ways
of explaining things, etc See Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/info/lshort/english/lshort.pdf"infolshortenglishlshort.pdfA recent entrant is Harvey Greenberg's Simplified Introduction to
; this was written for a lecture course, and is available
(PostScript only, unfortunately) as Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/info/simplified-latex/latex.ps"infosimplifiedlatexlatex.ps25MF and MP Tutorials Unfortunately there appear to be no tutorials on how to use either
MF or MP, except for the information provided by their respective
authors. There are,
though, a couple of articles on how to run the programs.Geoffrey Tobin has provided MF for Beginners which is available as
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/info/metafont-for-beginners.tex"infometafontforbeginners.tex (iref="Q-mf"questionQ-mf). This describes how the MF
system works and how to avoid some of the potential pitfalls Peter Wilson's Some Experiences in Running MF and MP is
available at Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/info/metafp.ps"infometafp.ps (PostScript) or Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/info/metafp.pdf"infometafp.pdf
(PDF format). On the MF side the article
is more geared towards testing and installing new MF fonts than on
the system, while on the other side it describes how to use MP
illustrations in and PDF documents, with an emphasis on
how to use appropriate fonts for any text or mathematics26BibTeX DocumentationBibTeX, a program originally designed to produce bibliographies in
conjunction with , is explained in Section 4.3 and Appendix B
of Leslie Lamport's manual
(see iref="Q-books"questionQ-books)
The document BibTeXing, contained in the file btxdoctex,
gives a more complete descriptionThe Companion
(see iref="Q-books"questionQ-books) also
has information on BibTeX and writing BibTeX style filesThe document Designing BibTeX Styles, contained in the file
btxhaktex, explains the postfix stackbased language used to write
BibTeX styles (bst files). The file btxbstdoc is the template
for the four standard styles (plain, abbrv, alpha, unsrt). It
also contains their documentation
The complete BibTeX documentation set (including the files above)
is in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/lsedit/bibtex-doc"supportlseditbibtexdocThere is a Unix BibTeXman page in the web2c
package (see iref="TeX-systems"questionTeX-systems) Any copy
you may find of a man page written in 1985 (before
BibTeXing and Designing BibTeX Styles appeared) is
obsolete, and should be thrown away27The PiCTeX manualPiCTeX is a set of macros by Michael Wichura for drawing diagrams
and pictures. The
macros are freely available in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/graphics/pictex"graphicspictex; however, the
PiCTeX manual itself is not free
Unfortunately, TUG is no longer able to supply copies of the
manual (as it once did), and it is now available only through Personal
Inc, the vendors of PC (http://www.pctex.com/) The
manual is not available electronically28Finding AllTeX macro packagesBefore you ask for a macro or class or package file to
do something, try searching Graham Williams'
catalogue, available as
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/catalogue.html"helpCataloguecatalogue.html, or for efficient interactive searching via
http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/catalogue.html;
this lists many macro packages together with brief descriptive textsHaving learnt of a file
that seems interesting, search a CTAN archive for it (see
iref="siteindex"questionsiteindex). For packages
listed in
The Companion (iref="Q-books"questionQ-books),
the file Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/info/companion.ctan"infocompanion.ctan may be consulted as an alternative to
searching the archive's index. It lists the current location in the archive of
such files29Finding files in the CTAN archivesTo find software at a CTAN site, you can use anonymous ftp to
the host with the command quote site index term, or the
searching script at http://www.dante.de/cgi-bin/ctan-indexTo get the best use out of the ftp facility you should remember that
term is a Regular Expression and not a fixed string,
and also that many files are distributed
in source form with an extension different to the final file. (For
example packages are often distributed sources with extension
dtx rather than as package files with extension sty.)One should make the regular expresion general enough to find the file
you are looking for, but not too general, as the ftp interface will
only return the first 20 lines that match your requestThe following examples illustrate these points
To search for the package caption,
you might use the command:
quotesiteindexcaptionsty
but it will fail to find the desired package (which is
distributed as captiondtx) and does return unwanted hits (such as
hangcaptionsty) Also, although this example does not show it the
in captionsty is used as the regular expression that
matches any character
So
quotesiteindexdocsty
matches such unwanted files as
languageswedishslatexdoc2stymakefileOf course if you know the package is stored as dtx you can
search for that name, but in general you may not know the extension
used on the archive
The solution is to add to the front of the package name and
to the end. This will then search for a file name that consists
solely of the package name between the directory separator and the
extension. The two commands:
quotesiteindexcaptionquotesiteindexdoc
do narrow the search down sufficiently. (In the case of doc, a few
extra files are found, but the list returned is sufficiently small to
be easily inspected.)If the search string is too wide and too many files would match, the
list will be truncated to the first 20 items found. Using some
knowledge of the CTAN directory tree you can usually narrow the search
sufficiently. As an example suppose you wanted to find a copy of the
dvips driver for MSDOS. You might use the command:
quotesiteindexdvips
but the result would be a truncated list, not including the file you
want. (If this list were not truncated 412 items would be returned)
However we can restrict the search to MSDOS related drivers as
followsquotesiteindexmsdosdvips
Which just returns relevant lines such as
systemsmsdosdviwaredvipsdvips5528zipA basic introduction to searching with regular expressions is:
itemsep=0.5itemsepMost charcters match themselves, so a matches a etc.; matches any character;abcDF matches any single character from the set
a,b,c,D,E,F; placed after an expression matches zero or more occurrences
so a matches a and aaaa, and azAZ matches a
word;quotes a special character such as so just
matches ; matches the beginning of a line; matches the end of a lineFor technical reasons in the quote site index command, you need to
double any hence the string caption in the above example
The quote site command ignores the case of letters Searching for
caption or CAPTION would produce the same resultPart DBits and pieces of 30What is a DVI file?A DVI file (that is, a file with the type or extension dvi) is
's main output file, using in its broadest sense to
include , etcDVI is supposed to be an acronym for
DeViceIndependent, meaning that the file can be
printed on almost any
kind of typographic output device The DVI file is designed to be
read by a driver (iref="Q-driver"questionQ-driver) to produce
further output designed specifically for a particular printer (e.g., a
LaserJet) or to be used as input to a previewer for display on a
computer screen DVI files use 's internal coding; a
input file should produce the same DVI file regardless of which
implementation of is used to produce itA DVI file contains all the information that is needed for printing
or previewing except for the actual bitmaps or outlines of fonts, and
possibly material to be introduced by means of
special commands (iref="Q-specials"questionQ-specials)The canonical reference for the structure of a DVI file is the source of dvitype (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/knuth/texware/dvitype.web"systemsknuthtexwaredvitype.web)31What is a driver?A driver is a program that takes as input a dvi file
(iref="Q-dvi"questionQ-dvi) and
(usually) produces a file that can be sent to a typographic
output device, called a printer for shortA driver will usually be specific to a particular printer,
although any PostScript printer ought to be able to print
the output from a PostScript driverAs well as the DVI file, the driver needs font information
Font information may be held as bitmaps or as outlines, or simply as a
set of pointers into the fonts that the printer itself has
Each driver will expect the font information in
a particular form For more information on the forms of fonts,
see questions iref="Q-pk"Q-pk,
iref="Q-tfm"Q-tfm,
iref="virtualfonts"virtualfonts
and iref="Q-usepsfont"Q-usepsfont32What are PK files?PK files (packed raster) contain font bitmaps. The output
from
MF (iref="Q-mf"questionQ-mf)
includes a generic font (GF) file and the
utility gftopk produces the PK file from that
There are a lot of PK files, as one is needed for each font,
that is each magnification (size) of each design (point) size for each
weight for each family Further, since the PK files for one printer
do not necessarily work well for another, the whole set needs to be
duplicated for each printer type at a site As a result, they are
often held in an elaborate directory structure, or in font library
files, to regularise access33What are TFM files?TFM stands for font metrics, and TFM files hold
information about the sizes of the characters of the font in question,
and about ligatures and kerns within that font One TFM file is
needed for each font used by , that is for each design (point)
size for each weight for each family; one TFM file serves for all
magnifications, so that there are (typically) fewer TFM files than
there are PK files The important point is that TFM files are
used by (, etc.), but are not, generally, needed by the
printer driver34Virtual fontsVirtual fonts for were first implemented by David Fuchs in the
early days of , but for most people they started when Knuth
redefined the format, and wrote some support software, in 1989
Virtual fonts provide a way of telling about something more
complicated than just a onetoone character mapping. The entities you
define in a virtual font look like characters to (they appear
with their sizes in a font metric file), but the DVI processor may
expand them to something quite different. You can use this facility
just to remap characters, to make a composite font with glyphs drawn
from several sources, or to build up an effect in arbitrarily
complicated ways a virtual font may contain anything which is
legal in a DVI file
In practice, the most common use of virtual fonts is to remap
PostScript fonts (see iref="Q-metrics"questionQ-metrics) or to
build fake maths fontsIt is important to realise that itself does not see
virtual fonts; for every virtual font read by the DVI driver there
is a corresponding TFM file read by . Virtual fonts are normally
created in a single ASCII vpl (Virtual Property List) file, which
includes both sets of information. The vptovf program is
then used to the create the binary TFM and VF files The
commonest way (nowadays) of generating vpl files is to use the
fontinst package, which is described in detail
iref="Q-metrics"in questionQ-metricsHref="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/fonts/utilities/qdtexvpl"fontsutilitiesqdtexvpl is another utility for creating adhoc virtual
fonts35special commands provides the means to express things that device drivers can
do, but about which itself knows nothing For example,
itself knows nothing about how to include PostScript figures into
documents, or how to set the colour of printed text; but some device
drivers doSuch things are introduced to your document by means of special
commands; all that does with these commands is to expand their
arguments and then pass the command to the DVI file In most
cases, there are macro packages provided (often with the driver) that
provide a comprehensible interface to the special; for example,
there's little point including a figure if you leave no gap for it in
your text, and changing colour proves to be a particularly fraught
operation that requires real wizardry. LaTeXe
has standard graphics and colour packages that make file inclusion,
rotation, scaling and colour via specials all easyThe allowable arguments of special depend on the device driver
you're using Apart from the examples above, there are special
commands in the em drivers (e.g., dvihplj, dviscr,
etc.)that will draw lines at arbitrary orientations, and
commands in dvitoln03 that permit the page to be set in
landscape orientation36Documented sources (.dtx files)LaTeXe, and many support macro packages, are now written in a
literate programming style (iref="Q-lit"questionQ-lit),
with source and documentation in the
same file This format, known as doc, was originated by Frank
Mittelbach. The documented sources conventionally have the suffix
.dtx, and should normally be stripped of documentation
before use with Alternatively you can run on a
.dtx file to produce a nicely formatted version of the
documented code. An installation script (with suffix
.ins) is usually provided, which needs the standard LaTeXedocstrip package (among other things, the installation
process strips all the comments that make up the documentation for
speed when loading the file into a running system) Several
packages can be included in one .dtx file, with conditional
sections, and there facilities for indices of macros etc Anyone can
write .dtx files; the format is explained in
The Companion
(see iref="Q-books"questionQ-books). There are
no programs yet to assist in composition.dtx files are not used by after they have been
processed to produce .sty or .cls (or whatever)
files They need not be kept with the working system; however, for
many packages the .dtx file is the primary source of
documentation, so you may want to keep .dtx files elsewhere37What are the EC fonts?A font consists of a number of glyphs In order that the
glyphs may be printed, there has to be some way of accessing them; in
they're arranged in a numerical order called an
encoding, and their number in the encoding is used For
various reasons, Knuth chose rather eccentric encodings; in
particular, he chose different encodings for different fontsWhen version 3 arrived, some at least of the reasons for the
eccentricity of
Knuth's encodings went away, and at TUG's Cork meeting, an encoding for
a set of 256 glyphs, for use in text, was defined The
intention was that these glyphs should cover most European
languages, in the sense of including all accented letters needed
(Knuth's CMR fonts missed things necessary for Icelandic,
Polish and Sami, for example, but the Cork fonts have them.)
LaTeXe (iref="latex2e"questionlatex2e)
refers to the Cork encoding as T1, and provides the means to
use fonts thus encoded to avoid problems with the interaction of
accents and hyphenation
(see iref="hyphenated-accents"questionhyphenated-accents)The only MFfonts that conform to the Cork encoding are the
EC fonts (available as Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/fonts/ec"fontsec) They look
CMlike, and are now regarded as stable (in the same sense
that the CM fonts are stable: their metrics are unlikely ever
to change) Their serious
disadvantage for the casual user is
that they are large each EC font is roughly twice the size
of the corresponding CM font; what's more, until corresponding
fonts for mathematics are produced, the CM fonts must be
retainedThe EC fonts supersede the experimental DC fonts, which
have now been removed from the archives They are distributed with a
set of Text Companion (TC) fonts that provide glyphs for
symbols commonly used in text The TC fonts are encoded
according to the TS1 encoding, and are not viewed as
stable in the same way as are the EC fonts areThe Cork encoding is also implemented by the
PSNFSS system (iref="Q-usepsfont"questionQ-usepsfont),
for PostScript fonts38What is TDS? TDS stands for the Directory Structure, which is a standard
way of organising all the related files on a computer system. The
TDS specification can be found on CTAN in
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/tds/draft-standard/tds-0.9996"tdsdraftstandardtds0.9996 Most modern distributions conform to the TDS, which
provides for both a standard hierarchy and a local hierarchy. The
TDS reserves the name texmf as the name of the root directory
(folder) of the hierachies Files supplied as part of the
distribution are put into the standard hierarchy. The location of the
standard hierarchy is system dependent, but on a Unix system it might
be at
usrlocaltexmf, or
usrlocalsharetexmf, or
opttexmf, or
a similar location, but in each case the files will be under the
texmf subdirectory. There can be multiple local hierarchies in which additional files can be
put. In the extreme an installation can have a local hierarchy and each user
can also have an individual local hierarchy. The
location of any local hierarchy is not only system dependent but also user
dependent. Again, though, all files should be put under a local texmf
directoryPart EAcquiring the Software39Repositories of materialTo aid the archiving and retrieval of of related files, a
TUG working group developed the Comprehensive Archive
Network (CTAN) Each CTAN site has identical material,
and maintains authoritative versions of its material These
collections are extensive; in particular, almost everything mentioned
in this article is archived at the CTAN sites, even if its
location isn't explicitly statedThe CTAN sites are currently dantectanorg (Mainz, Germany),
camctanorg (Cambridge, UK) and tugctanorg (Colchester,
Vermont, USA)
Two of the CTAN web servers offer a search facility:
http://www.tex.ac.uk/search and
http://www.ctan.org/search; you can look for a file whose name
you already know, or you can do a keywordbased search of the
catalogue The search script requires that you choose an appropriate
CTAN site or mirror to retrieve files from, and stores details
of that site in a cookie on your machine Choose a site that is close
to you, to reduce network loadThe organisation of files on all
CTAN sites is identical and starts at
texarchive Again, to reduce network load, please use the
CTAN site
or mirror closest to you A complete and current list of CTAN sites
and known mirrors can be obtained by using the finger utility on
userctancamctanorg, ctandantectanorg or
ctantugctanorg; it is
also available as file Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/CTAN.sites"CTAN.sitesTo find software at a CTAN site using anonymous ftp
to the host,
execute the command quote site index term (see
iref="siteindex"questionsiteindex for details)The email servers ftpmaildantectanorg and
ftpmailtugctanorg provide an ftplike
interface through mail Send a message containing just the line
help to your nearest server, for details of useThere is also the DECUS collection of
material for VMS, Unix, MSDOS, and the Macintosh
It is available via anonymous ftp from
wuarchivewustledu (128.252.135.4) in
decustex It can also be obtained from the DECUS Library
(reference number VS0058) in the US, or through your DECUS office
outside of the US. To contact the DECUS Library, send mail or telephone:
DECUSLIBRARY ORDER PROCESSING334 South Street, SHR31T25Shrewsbury, MA 015454195USA
Tel: 800DECUS55 (within the USA, for information)Fax: 1 5088413373 (for inquiries)
or send electronic mail for information to the DECUS Collection
Editor, Ted Nieland (nielandtedhcstcom)Finally, of course, the user who has no access to any sort of network may buy a copy of the archive on CDROM (see
iref="Q-CD"questionQ-CD)40What's the CTAN nonfree tree?The CTAN archives are currently restructuring their holdings
so that files that are not free are held in a separate tree The
definition of what is free (for this purpose) is influenced by, but
not exactly the same as the Debian Free Software Guidelines
(DFSG: see
href="http://www.debian.org/socialcontractguidelines"The Debian Social Contract)Material is placed on the nonfree tree if it is not freelyusable (e.g., if the material is shareware, commercial, or if
its usage is not permitted in certain domains at all, or without
payment) Users of the archive should check that they are entitled to
use material they have retrieved from the nonfree treeFor details of the licence categories, see
http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/licenses.html41Contributing a file to the archivesUse anonymous ftp to any CTAN archive
(see iref="Q-archives"questionQ-archives) and retrieve
the file Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/README.uploads"README.uploads in the root directory. It contains
instructions for uploading files and notifying the appropriate people
for that siteIf you cannot use ftp, mail your contribution to
ctanurzUniHeidelbergde and it will be passed along You will make
everyone's life easier if you choose a descriptive and unique name for
your submission, so it's probably a good idea to check that your style
file's name is not already in use by means of the
site index
command (iref="siteindex"questionsiteindex)42Finding new fontsA comprehensive list of MF fonts is posted to
compfonts and to comptexttex, roughly
every six weeks, by Lee Quin (leesqsqcom); it is available
as Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/info/metafont-list"infometafontlistThe list contains details both of commercial fonts and of fonts
available via anonymous ftp. Most of the fonts are available via
anonymous ftp from the CTAN archives
(see iref="Q-archives"questionQ-archives)43CDROMsIf you don't have access to the Internet, there are obvious
attractions to collections on a CDROM Even those with net
access will find large quantities of related files to hand a
great convenienceReadytorun systems on CDROM are available:
A consortium of User Groups (notably TUG,
UKTUG and GUTenberg) distribute the
Live CDROM, now in its third edition All members of
several User Groups are receiving copies, and additional copies may
be purchased, for example, from UKTUG for 25,
including an edition of Baskerville which serves as a manual Online details of Live are available at
http://www.tug.org/texlive.htmlThe Dutch Users Group (NTG) publish the whole
4All workbench on a 2CDROM set packed with all the
MSDOS software, macros and fonts you can want. It is
available from NTG direct (see
iref="Q-othergroups"questionQ-othergroups), from TUG for
40 and from UKTUG for 30 (a manual is
included). It is a useful resource for anyone to browse, not just
for MSDOS usersAn alternative to the readytorun system is the CTAN archive
snapshot; in general one would expect that such systems would be
harder to use, but that the volume of resources offered would balance
this extra inconvenienceWalnut Creek CDROM provide a twodisc CDROM set, holding
1000Mb of related material Information about the CDROM is
available at
http://www.cdrom.com/titles/prog/tex.html, which also
has a link to an ordering page Walnut Creek's address, etc., are:
Walnut Creek CDROM4041 Pike Lane, Ste DwwwConcord, CA 94520USATel: 1 510 6740783 or
800 7869907 (within the USA and Canada)Fax: 1 510 6740821Email: infocdromcom (for questions) and
orderscdromcom (for orders)
Walnut Creek (who run one of the major CTAN mirrors) are
rumoured to be producing a new release of their disc set in 1997Prime Time Freeware produced cetera 1.1 in July 1994,
which was a snapshot of CTAN taken in June 1994 Regular
updates were planned (but have not apparently been forthcoming)
The material is all compressed in ZIP format to fit it all on
one CD, and to avoid the limitations of the ISO9660
file system directory. You can buy the CD from:
Prime Time Freeware370 Altair Way, Suite 150Sunnyvale CA 94086USATel: 1 408 433 9662Fax: 1 408 433 0727Email: ptfcfclcom
or from many CDROM resellers, or the
iref="Q-TUG"questionQ-TUG office
Price will be around 60. Please note that PTF is not a big
commercial firm, and is a good friend of the communityPart F Systems44AllTeX for different machinesWe list here the free or shareware packages;
see iref="Q-commercial"questionQ-commercial for details of commercial packagesUnixInstructions for retrieving the Unix distribution
via anonymous ftp are available in the document
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/unix/unixtex.ftp"systemsunixunixtex.ftp, though nowadays the sensible installer will
take (and possibly customise) one of the packaged distributions such
as te , or the
Live CDROM (see iref="Q-CD"questionQ-CD) For te, browse Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/unix/teTeX/1.0/distrib/sources"systemsunixteTeX1.0distribsources for relevant files: you
need at most one each of the targz files for teTeXsrc,
teTeXtexmf and teTeXtexmfsrc Sets of binaries for many common Unix systems are to be found as
part of the te distribution, or on the Live CDROM
For te binaries, browse Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/unix/teTeX/1.0/distrib/sources-bin"systemsunixteTeX1.0distribsourcesbin there's a
compressed tar archive for each supported architecture in the
directory In default of a precompiled version, te will
compile on most Unix systems, though it was originally developed for
use under Linux (see below)LinuxThere are at least two respectable implementations of
to run on Linux, N (available as Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/unix/linux/ntex"systemsunixlinuxntex) and
te (browse Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/unix/teTeX/1.0/distrib/sources"systemsunixteTeX1.0distribsources) Beware the Slackware '96 CDROM distribution of N: it
includes a version of the CM fonts that has deeply offended
Don Knuth (since it contravenes his distribution conditions) The
Slackware updates now offer te, as do most Linux distributionsPCThe em package for PCs running OS2, MSDOS or Windows
includes , BibTeX, previewers, and drivers, and is
available in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/msdos/emtex"systemsmsdosemtex as a series of zip archives The
package was written by Eberhard Mattes, and documentation is
available in both German and English Appropriate memory managers
for using em with 386 (and better) processors and under
Windows, are included in the distribution The most recent offering is an MSDOS port of the Web2C7.0
implementation, using the GNU djgpp compiler It
is available from Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/msdos/djgpp"systemsmsdosdjgppPC: Win32fp, by Fabrice Popineau, is a version of te for Windows
systems As such, it is particularly attractive to those who need
to switch back and forth between Windows and Unix environments, and
to administrators who need to maintain both (fp can use the
same texmf tree as a te installation) fp's
previewer (Windvi) is based on xdvi, and takes
advantage of extra facilities in the Win32 environment Printing is
available via dvips only fp is available from
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/win32/fptex"systemswin32fptex Mik, by Christian Schenk, is also a comprehensive
distribution, developed separately from the te work It has
its own previewer, YAP, which is itself capable of printing,
though the distribution also includes a port of dvips
The current version is in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/win32/miktex"systemswin32miktexWindows NT, other platformsA Power PC port of
Mik is available from Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/win32/miktexppc"systemswin32miktexppc, and an AXP
port is available from Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/win32/miktex-AXP"systemswin32miktexAXP; these versions have not
been updated for version1.2 (and later) of Mik they may
not be satisfactoryMacOz is a shareware version of for the Macintosh. A
DVI previewer and PostScript driver are also included. It should run
on any Macintosh Plus, SE, II, or newer model, but will not work on
a 128K or 512K Mac. It was written by Andrew Trevorrow, and is
available in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/nonfree/systems/mac/oztex"nonfreesystemsmacoztex UKTUG prepays the shareware fee, so that its members may
acquire the software without further payment Questions about
Oz may be directed to oztexmidwayuchicagoedu Another partly shareware program is CMac (available as
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/mac/cmactex"systemsmaccmactex), put together by Tom Kiffe. This is much closer
to the Unix setup (it uses dvips, for instance)
CMac includes a port of the latest version of
Omega (iref="Q-omega"questionQ-omega) A useful resource for Mac users is to be found at http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/; it has a news and help
section, as well as details of systems and toolsOpenVMS for OpenVMS is available as
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/OpenVMS/TEX97CTAN.ZIP"systemsOpenVMSTEX97CTAN.ZIP Standard tape distribution is through DECUS
(see iref="Q-archives"questionQ-archives)Atari is available for the Atari ST in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/atari"systemsatari If anonymous ftp is not available to you, send a message
containing the line help to
atariatariarchiveumicheduAmigaFull implementations of 3.1 (Pas) and MF
2.7 are available in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/amiga"systemsamiga You can also order a CDROM containing this and other Amiga software
from Walnut Creek CDROM, telephone 1 5109475997TOPS20 was originally written on a DEC10
under WAITS,
and so was easily ported to TOPS20. A distribution that runs on
TOPS20 is available via anonymous ftp from ftpmathutahedu
(128.110.198.34) in pubtexpubweb45friendly editors and shellsThere are good writing environments and editors for most
operating systems; some are described below, but this is only a
personal selection:
UnixTry GNUemacs, and the AUC mode
(Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/auctex"supportauctex) This provides menu items and control sequences
for common constructs, checks syntax, lays out markup nicely, lets
you call and drivers from within the editor, and everything
else like this that you can think of Complex, but very powerfulVMSAn lsedit mode for editing source is
available from
TUG (iref="Q-TUG"questionQ-TUG)
as niques 1, VAX LanguageSensitive Editor, by Kent MacPherson
(1985)MSDOSThere are several choices:
The (shareware) 4All workbench (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/msdos/4alltex"systemsmsdos4alltex)
provides a very
comprehensive environment written in 4DOS which lets you
access most related
software in a friendly way. You can choose your own editor;
something such as QEdit or Brief is
suitable. This whole package is available in easytouse form on
CDROM from user groupsshell (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/msdos/texshell"systemsmsdostexshell) is a simpler,
easilycustomisable environment, which can be used with the editor
of your choiceEddi4 (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/msdos/e4t"systemsmsdose4t; also shareware) is a
speciallywritten
editor which features intelligent colouring, bracket matching,
syntax checking, online help and the ability to call
programs from within the editor. It is highly customisable, and
features a powerful macro language
You can also use GNUemacs and AUC
under MSDOSWindows 3.1Your best public domain bet is probably to use
MicroEmacs as an editor and control centre for programstelmExtel (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/msdos/emtex-contrib/TeXtelmExtel"systemsmsdosemtexcontribTeXtelmExtel) is a Shell for em or
W and related tools under Windows It includes a
simple multipledocument editor, a builtin spelling checker,
automatic OEMANSI character conversion,
userdefinable pointandclick Templates, support for the forward
and inverse search mechanism of DVI driver for Windows and
for automatic font generation Besides the predefined tools, up to
10 userdefined tools can be set up On a PC with large enough memory, a version of
GNUemacs,
that will run under Windows, is available; thus you can also use
AUC under Windows YY's commercial (and highquality) Windows previewer, dviwindo,
can be used as a good shell, calling programs such as ,
drivers, and editors (YY supply the public domain PE, and
recommend the commercial Epsilon) from customisable menus
(see iref="Q-commercial"questionQ-commercial for details of YY) Scientific Word is a WYSIWYG editing program, strong on maths, which
uses for output (see iref="Q-commercial"questionQ-commercial
for contact address)Windows '9x, NTWinedt, a shareware package (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/win32/winedt/winedt32.exe"systemswin32winedtwinedt32.exe),
is highly spoken of It provides a shell for the use of tex and
related programs, as well as a powerful and wellconfigured editorOS2Eddi4 works under OS2; look also at
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/os2/epmtex"systemsos2epmtex for a specific OS2 shellMacintoshThe commercial Textures provides an excellent integrated
Macintosh environment with its own editor More powerful still (as an
editor) is the shareware Alpha (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/mac/support/alpha"systemsmacsupportalpha) which is
extensible enough to let you perform almost any related job. It
works well with Oz
Atari, Amiga and NeXT users also have nice environments.
users who like make should try Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/latexmk"supportlatexmkThere is another set of shell programs to help you manipulate
BibTeX databases46Commercial implementationsThere are many commercial implementations of . The first
appeared not long after itself appeared. Of the vendors,
ArborText (formerly Textset) and Personal are those who have
survived longest (since the mid or early 80s)What follows is probably an incomplete list Naturally, no warranty or
fitness for purpose is implied by the inclusion of any vendor in this
list The source of the information is given to provide some clues to
its currencyIn general, a commercial implementation will come complete, that is,
with suitable previewers and printer drivers They normally also have
extensive documentation (i.e., not just the book) and some
sort of support service In some cases this is a toll free number
(probably applicable only within the USA and or Canada), but others
also have email, and normal telephone and fax supportUnix; Silicon Graphics IrisIndigo, Solaris 2.1, IBM RS6000,
DECRISCUltrix, HP 9000. Complete packages. Ready to use,
fully documented and supported. ArborText Inc1000 Victors WaySuite 400Ann Arbor MI 48108USA
Tel: 1 3139963566Fax: 1 3139963573
Source: TUGboat 15(1) (1994)VAXVMS; Convergent Complete system for VAXVMS machines
(a version for Alphas is in preparation); includes ,
multinational typesetting support, MF and Web Northlake Software, Inc.812 SW Washington, Ste 1100Portland, OR 97201USA
Tel: 1 5032283383Fax: 1 5032285662Email: raunlscom
Source: Email from Pat Rau, November 1994
PC; TrueRuns on Windows3.1, WindowNT and Windows95 Richard J. KinchTrueTeX Software6994 Pebble Beach CourtLake Worth FL 33467USA
Tel: 1 5619668400Fax: 1 3056446978Email: kinchtruetexcomWeb: http://truetex.com/
Source: News posting from Richard Kinch, October 1997, updated from
new web pagePC; Bitmap free for Windows. YY, Inc.45 Walden StreetConcord MA 01742USA
Tel: 8007424059 (within the USA)Tel: 1 5083713286Fax: 1 5083712004Email: saleshelpYandYcom and
techhelpYandYcomWeb: http://www.YandY.com/
Source: YY announcement, February 1995
pcLongestablished: pc32 is a Windows implementation Personal Inc12 Madrona StreetMill Valley, CA 94941USA
Tel: 8008087906 (within the USA)Fax: 1 4153888865Email: texsalespctexcom and
texsupppctexcomWeb: http://www.pctex.com/
Source: Mail from Personal Inc, September 1997
PC; VDVI, PDF and HTML
backends, Visual Tools and Type 1 fonts
MicroPress Inc6830 Harrow StreetForest Hills, NY 11375USA
Tel: 1 7185751816Fax: 1 7185758038Email: supportmicropressinccomWeb: http://www.micropress-inc.com/
Source: Mail from MicroPress, Inc., July 1999
PC; Scientific WordScientific Word and Scientific Workplace
offer a mechanism for nearWYSIWYG input of documents; they
ship with True from Kinch (see above) Queries within the UK
and Ireland should be addressed to Scientific Word Ltd., others should be
addressed directly to the publisher, MacKichan Software Inc
Source: Mail from Christopher Mabb, May 1999
Macintosh; TexturesA system for the rest of
us; also gives away a MF implementation and some
font manipulation tools Blue Sky Research534 SW Third AvenuePortland, OR 97204USA
Tel: 8006228398 (within the USA)Tel: 1 5032229571Fax: 1 5032221643Email: salesblueskycomWeb: http://www.bluesky.com/
Source: TUGboat 15(1) (1994)
AmigaA full implementation for the Commodore Amiga,
including full, onscreen and printing support for all PostScript
graphics and fonts, IFF raster graphics, automatic font generation,
and all of the standard macros and utilities Radical Eye SoftwarePO Box 2081Stanford, CA 94309USA
Source: Mail from Tom Rokicki, November 1994Part GDVI Drivers and Previewers47DVI to PostScript conversion programsThe best public domain DVI to PostScript conversion program which
runs under many operating systems is Tom Rokicki's dvipsdvips is written in C and ports easily to other operating
systems; it is available as Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/dviware/dvips"dviwaredvipsVMS versions are available through the DECUS library
(see iref="Q-archives"questionQ-archives),
and also as part of the CTAN distribution of for VMS
(Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/OpenVMS/TEX97CTAN.ZIP"systemsOpenVMSTEX97CTAN.ZIP)A precompiled version for MSDOS is available from Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/msdos/dviware/dvips"systemsmsdosdviwaredvipsKarl Berry's version of dvips (called dvipsk)
has a configure script and path searching code similar to that in his
other programs (e.g., web2c); it is available from
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/dviware/dvipsk"dviwaredvipskAnother good portable program is dvitops by James Clark,
which is also written in C and will compile under Unix, MSDOS, VMS,
and Primos; however, it does not support virtual fonts It is
available from
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/obsolete/dviware/dvitops"obsoletedviwaredvitopsMacintosh users can use either the excellent drivers built into Oz
or Textures, or a port of dvips in the CMac package48DVI drivers for HP LaserJetThe em package (see iref="TeX-systems"questionTeX-systems)
contains a driver for the LaserJet, dvihpljVersion 2.10 of the Beebe drivers supports the LaserJet. These drivers
will compile under Unix, VMS, and on the Atari ST and
DEC20's, and are available from Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/dviware/beebe"dviwarebeebeKarl Berry's dviljk, which has the same pathsearching code
as his dvipsk (see
iref="Q-dvips"questionQ-dvips), is available in
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/dviware/dviljk"dviwaredviljk49DVI previewersEm for PCs running MSDOS or OS2, Mik and
fp for PCs running Windows and Oz for the Macintosh, all
come with previewers that can be used on those platforms. Em's
previewer can also be run under Windows3.1, as can the public
domain Windows previewer dviwin (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/dviware/dviwin"dviwaredviwin)Commercial PC packages (see
iref="Q-commercial"questionQ-commercial)
have good previewers for PCs running Windows, or for MacintoshesFor Unix systems, there is one canonical viewer, xdvi
The basic distribution is available as Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/dviware/xdvi"dviwarexdvi, and a version
integrated with the current state of web2c is available
from Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/dviware/xdvik"dviwarexdvik; Unix distributions (such as te or
N include a version of xdvik which is compatible
with the version of web2c that they useAlternatives to previewing include
conversion to similar ASCII text (using
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/dviware/dvi2tty"dviwaredvi2tty or something of the sort) and using a conventional
text viewer to look at that,generating a PostScript version of your document and viewing it
with a ghostscript previewer, andgenerating PDF output, and viewing that with
AcrobatReader or one of the substitutes for thatPart HSupport Packages for 50Fig, a friendly drawing packageXFig is a menu driven tool that allows you to
draw objects on the screen of an X workstationtransfig
is a set of tools which translate the code fig produces to
other graphics languages including PostScript and the picture
environment. They are available in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/graphics/xfig"graphicsxfig and
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/graphics/transfig"graphicstransfigFig is supported by Micah Beck (beckcscornelledu) and
transfig is maintained by Brian Smith (bvsmithlblgov).
Another tool for fig conversion is fig2mf which
generates MF code from fig input. It is available in
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/graphics/fig2mf"graphicsfig2mf51CAD, a drawing package for CAD is a program for the PC which enables the user to draw diagrams
on screen using a mouse or arrow keys, with an onscreen menu of available
pictureelements. Its output is code for the picture environment
Optionally, it can be set to include lines at all angles using
the em driverfamily
specials (iref="Q-specials"questionQ-specials)CAD is part of the em distributionA Unix port of the program exists, Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/graphics/xtexcad/xtexcad-2.4.tar.gz"graphicsxtexcadxtexcad2.4.tar.gz52Spelling checkers for work with For Unix, ispell is probably the program of choice. Browse
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/ispell"supportispell for a version, but beware of any with a number
4x such versions represent a divergent version of the source
which lacks many useful facilities of the 3x seriesFor MSDOS, there are several programs. amspell can be called from within an editor (available as
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/amspell"supportamspell)jspell is an extended version of
ispell (available as Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/jspell"supportjspell)For the Macintosh, Excalibur is the program of choice It
will run in native mode on both sorts of Macintosh, and is available as
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/mac/support/excalibur/Excalibur-2.6-sit.hqx"systemsmacsupportexcaliburExcalibur2.6sit.hqx (there are other dictionaries in the same
directory)For VMS, a spell checker can be found in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/vmspell"supportvmspellPart ILiterate programming53What is Literate Programming?Literate programming is the combination of documentation and source
together in a fashion suited for reading by human beings.
In general, literate programs combine source
and documentation in a single file Literate programming tools then
parse the file to produce either readable documentation or compilable
source The WEB style of literate programming was created by D.E.Knuth
during the development of his typesetting softwareDiscussion of literate programming is conducted in the newsgroup
compprogrammingliterate
The literate programming FAQ is stored as
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/help/LitProg-FAQ"helpLitProgFAQ54WEB for C, FORTRAN, and other languages is written in the programming language WEB; WEB is a tool to
implement the concept of literate programmingCWEB, a WEB for C programs, written by Silvio
Levy, is available as Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/web/ccpp/cweb"webccppcwebSpidery WEB supports many
languages including Ada, awk, and C. It was written by Norman Ramsey
and, while not in the public domain, is usable free. It is available
in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/web/spiderweb"webspiderwebFWEB is a version for Fortran, Ratfor, and C written by John
Krommes
It is available in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/web/fweb"webfwebSchemeWEB is a Unix filter that translates SchemeWEB into
source or Scheme source. It was written by John Ramsdell and is
available in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/web/schemeweb"webschemewebAPLWEB is a version of WEB for APL and is available in
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/web/apl/aplweb"webaplaplwebFunnelWeb is a version of WEB that is language independent. It is
available in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/web/funnelweb"webfunnelwebOther language independent versions of WEB are nuweb (which
is written in ANSI C), available in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/web/nuweb"webnuweb, and
noweb, available in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/web/noweb"webnowebA WEB for plain macro files, using noweb, has
recently been made available in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/web/tweb"webtwebPart JFormat conversions55Conversion between AllTeX and otherstrofftrofftolatex (available as
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/indexing/makeindex/troff-to-latex"indexingmakeindextrofftolatex), written by Kamal AlYahya at Stanford
University (California, USA), assists in the translation of a
troff document into format It recognises most
ms and man macros, plus most eqn and some
tbl preprocessor commands Anything fancier needs to be
done by hand. Two style files are provided. There is also a man page
(which converts very well to ) The program is
copyrighted but free. An enhanced version of this program,
tr2latex, is available in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/tr2latex"supporttr2latex The DECUS distribution (see
iref="Q-archives"questionQ-archives)
also contains a program which converts troff to WordPerfectwp2latex (available as
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/wp2latex"supportwp2latex) has recently been much improved, and is now
available either for MSDOS or for Unix systems, thanks to its
current maintainer Jaroslav FojtikPCWritepcwritexarc, from Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/pcwritex"supportpcwritex, is a
print driver for PCWrite that prints a PCWrite
V2.71 document to a compatible disk file It was written by Peter
Flynn at University College, Cork, Republic of IrelandrunoffPeter Vanroose's (vanrooseesatkuleuvenacbe)
conversion program is written in VMS Pascal
The sources and a VAX executable are available from
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/rnototex"supportrnototexrefertibThere are a few programs for converting bibliographic
data between BibTeX and refertib formats
They are in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/biblio/bibtex/utils/refer-tools"bibliobibtexutilsrefertools In spite of the directory name, it also contains a shell script to
convert BibTeX to refer as well. The collection
is not maintainedRTFA program for converting Microsoft's Rich Text Format to
is available in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/rtf2tex"supportrtf2tex, which was written and is
maintained by Robert Lupton (rhlastroprincetonedu)
There is also a convertor to by Erwin Wechtl, in
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/rtf2latex"supportrtf2latex Translation to RTF may be done (for a somewhat
constrained set of documents) by 2RTF, which
can produce ordinary RTF, Windows Help RTF (as well as
HTML, iref="Q-LaTeX2HTML"questionQ-LaTeX2HTML)2RTF is supported on various Unix platforms and under
Windows3.1; it is available from Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/tex2rtf"supporttex2rtfMicrosoft WordA rudimentary program for converting MSWord to
is wd2latex, for MSDOS (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/dviware/wd2latex"dviwarewd2latex); a better
idea, however, is to convert the document to RTF format and use one
of the RTF converters mentioned aboveA FAQ that deals specifically with conversions between
based formats and word processor formats is regularly posted to
comptexttex, is available via
http://www.kfa-juelich.de/isr/1/texconv/texcnv.html and is archived as
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/help/wp-conv/wp-conv.zip"helpwpconvwpconv.zipA group at Ohio State University (USA) is working on
a common document format based on SGML, with the ambition that any
format could be
translated to or from this oneFrameMaker provides
import filters to aid translation from alien formats
(presumably including ) to Framemaker's own56Conversion from AllTeX to plain ASCIIThe aim here is to emulate the Unix nroff, which formats
text as best it can for the screen, from the same
input as the Unix typesetting program troffRalph Droms (dromsbucknelledu) has a style file and a
program that provide the equivalent of nroff,
though it doesn't do a good job with tables and mathematics. The
software is available in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/txt"supporttxt; the original
dvi2tty often does an acceptable job and is available in
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/dviware/dvi2tty"dviwaredvi2tty
Another possibility is to use screensty, available as
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex209/contrib/misc/screen.sty"macroslatex209contribmiscscreen.sty Use a dvi2tty program of some kind;
you might try Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/dviware/crudetype"dviwarecrudetype as well Another possibility is to
use the toASCII conversion program, l2a
(Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/l2a"supportl2a), although this is really more of a deing
programThe canonical deing program is detex
(Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/detex"supportdetex), which removes all comments and control sequences
from its input before writing it to its output Its original purpose
was to prepare input for a dumb spelling checker57Conversion from SGML or HTML to SGML is a very important system for document storage and interchange,
but it has no formatting features; its companion ISO standard
DSSSL
(http://www.jclark.com/dsssl/) is designed for writing
transformations and formatting,
but this has not yet been widely implemented. Some SGML authoring
systems (e.g., SoftQuad AuthorEditor) have formatting
abilities, and
there are highend specialist SGML typesetting systems (e.g., Miles33's
Genera) However, the majority of SGML users probably transform
the source to an existing typesetting system when they want to print.
is a good candidate for this. There are three approaches to writing a
translator:
Write a freestanding translator in the traditional way, with
tools like yacc and lex; this is hard, in
practice, because of the complexity of SGMLUse a specialist language designed for SGML transformations; the
best known are probably Omnimark and Balise
They are expensive, but powerful, incorporating SGML query and
transformation abilities as well as simple translationBuild a translator on top of an existing SGML parser By far
the bestknown (and free) parser is James Clark's
nsgmls, and this produces a much simpler output format,
called ESIS, which can be parsed quite straightforwardly (one also
has the benefit of an SGML parse against the DTD). Two
good public domain packages use this method:
David Megginson's sgmlspm, written in Perl 5
Available from
http://www.perl.com/CPAN/modules/by-module/SGMLSJoachim Schrod and Christine Detig's stil, written in
Common Lisp. Available from
ftp://ftp.th-darmstadt.de/pub/text/sgml/stil
Both of these allow the user to write handlers for every SGML
element, with plenty of access to attributes, entities, and
information about the context within the document tree If these packages don't meet your needs for an average SGML
typesetting job, you need the big commercial stuffSince HTML is simply an example of SGML, we do not need a specific
system for HTML However, Nathan Torkington
(NathanTorkingtonvuwacnz) developed
html2latex from the HTML parser in NCSA's
Xmosaic package
The program takes an HTML file and generates a file from it
The conversion code is subject to NCSA restrictions, but the whole
source is available as Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/html2latex"supporthtml2latexMichel Goossens and Janne Saarela published a very useful summary of
SGML, and of public domain tools for writing and manipulating it, in
TUGboat 16(2)58AllTeX conversion to HTML is a typesetting language, not a markup system
With properlyused , you may be luckier,
but don't expect a free lunch. Remember that a) if you want a really
good Web document, you had better redesign it from scratch, and b) HTML
(even HTML3) has pretty poor typesetting facilities, and anything
beyond the trivial will probably need to end up a graphic2HTML (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/latex2html"supportlatex2html) is a package by Nikos Drakos
(mostly of perl scripts) that breaks up a document
into one or more components, and links them together so that they can
be read over the WorldWide Web as an hypertext document
It defines a mapping between intradocument
references and hyperlinks, and extends the
mechanisms to permit reference to other (possibly remote) documents
and other Internet resources It translates accented and
other characters (as best it can) to things that WorldWide Web
browsers can display, and translates mathematics
(and other things that browsers can't deal with) to
images that can be loaded inline into the hypertext document2HTML needs Perl, the PBM utilities,
dvips, Ghostscript, and other sundries; it
assumes it is running on a Unix system
Michel Goossens and Janne Saarela published a detailed discussion of
2HTML, and how to tailor it, in TUGboat 16(2)There are two alternative strategies:
Freestanding to HTML translations. Hard, but
not impossible Julian Smart's latex2rtf (available from
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/latex2rtf"supportlatex2rtf) does a plausible job on a subset of Writing an HTMLoutput backend in itself See
Sebastian Rahtz' paper in TUGboat 16(3) for a discussion of how
to go about this for the general case of SGML59Making hypertext documents from If you want online hypertext with a AllTeX source, probably on the
World Wide Web, consider four technologies (which overlap):
Try direct conversion to HTML; see
iref="Q-LaTeX2HTML"questionQ-LaTeX2HTML;Rewrite your document using Texinfo
(see iref="Q-texinfo"questionQ-texinfo), and
convert that to HTML;Look at Adobe Acrobat, an electronic delivery system guaranteed
to preserve your typesetting perfectly
See iref="Q-acrobat"questionQ-acrobat;Invest in the hyper conventions (standardised special
commands); there are supporting macro packages for plain and
)The Hyper project aims to extend the functionality of all the
crossreferencing commands (including the table of contents)
to produce special commands which are parsed by DVI processors
conforming to the Hyper guidelines;
it provides general hypertext links, including those
to external documentsThe Hyper specification says that conformant viewerstranslators
must recognize the following set of special commands:
href:htmlahrefhrefstringname:htmlanamenamestringend:htmlaimage:htmlimgsrchrefstringbasename:htmlbasehrefhrefstringThe href, name and end commands are used to do
the basic hypertext operations of establishing links between sections
of documents.Further details are available on http://xxx.lanl.gov/hypertex/; there
are two commonlyused implementations of the specification, a
modified xdvi and (recent releases of) dvips. Output from the
latter may be used in recent releases of Ghostscript or Acrobat Distiller60Making Acrobat documents from There are three general routes to Acrobat output: Adobe's original
distillation route (via PostScript output), conversion of an
DVI file, and the use of a direct PDF generator such
PDF (see iref="Q-pdftex"questionQ-pdftex) or
MicroPress's V (see
iref="Q-commercial"questionQ-commercial)For simple documents (with no hyperreferences), you can either
process the document in the normal way, produce PostScript
output and distill it,(on a Windows or Macintosh machine with AcrobatExchange installed) pass the output through the
PDFwriter in place of a printer driver This route is a dead
end: the PDFwriter cannot create hyperlinksprocess the document in the normal way and process the
DVI with dvipdfm (available from
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/dviware/dvipdfm"dviwaredvipdfm, and on the latest live disc), orprocess the document direct to PDF with PDF or
V PDF has
the advantage of availability for a wide range of platforms, V
(available commercially for Windows, or free of charge for LinuxHref="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/linux/micropress"systemslinuxmicropress) has wider graphics capability, dealing with
encapsulated PostScript and some inline PostScriptTo translate all the crossreferencing into Acrobat
links, you need a package to suitably redefine
the internal commands There are two of these for , both
capable of conforming to the Hyper specification
(see iref="Q-hyper"questionQ-hyper):
Sebastian Rahtz's hyperref (available from
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/hyperref"macroslatexcontribsupportedhyperref), and Michael Mehlich's
hyper (available from Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/hyper"macroslatexcontribsupportedhyper). Hyperref
uses a configuration file to determine how it will generate hypertext;
it can operate using PDF primitives, the hyperspecials, or DVI driverspecific special commands
Both
dvips or YY's
DVIPSONE
to translate the DVI into PostScript acceptable to
DistillerThere is no free implementation of all of AdobeDistiller's
functionality, but Ghostscript (version 4.00 onwards)
provides some restricted distilling capability (note the restrictions
on the fonts it can use) However, Distiller itself is now
remarkably cheap (for academics at least)For viewing (and printing) the resulting files, Adobe's
AcrobatReader is available for a wide
range of platforms (see
ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/acrobatreader) For those
platforms for which Adobe's reader is unavailable,
GhostScript (versions 3.51 onwards) can display
and print PDF files61Using to read SGML or XML directlyThis can nowadays be done, with a certain amount of clever macro
programming David Carlisle's xmltex (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/xmltex/base"macrosxmltexbase) and Jonathan
Fine's SGMLbase (see http://www.active-tex.demon.co.uk) are two
examples of packages that have been developed and are publicly
available At the time of writing, xmltex is more mature than
SGMLbase, and offers a practical solution to typesetting
XML files SGMLbase is designed to cope with
SGML as well as XML, but at present only has toy
typesetting examplesOne use of a that can typeset XML files is as a backend
processor for XSL formatting objects, serialized as XML
Sebastian Rahtz's Passive (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/xmltex/contrib/passivetex"macrosxmltexcontribpassivetex) uses xmltex to
achieve this endPart KMF62Getting MF to do what you wantMF allows you to create your own fonts, and most users
will never need to use it. MF, unlike , requires some
customisation: each output device for which you will be generating
fonts needs a mode associated with it. Modes are defined using the
modedef convention described on page94 of The MFbook
(see iref="Q-books"questionQ-books). You will need
a file, which conventionally called localmf, containing all the
modedefs you will be using. If localmf doesn't already
exist, Karl Berry's collection of modes,
available as Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/fonts/modes-file"fontsmodesfile, is a good starting point
(it can be used as a localmf without modification in a big
enough implementation of MF). Lists of
settings for various output devices are also published periodically in
TUGboat (see iref="Q-TUG"questionQ-TUG). Now create
a plain base
file using inimf, plainmf, and localmf:
inimfThisisMETAFONTplainyoutypeplainoutputinputlocalyoutypethisoutputdumpyoutypethisBeginningtodumponfileplainoutput
This will create a base file named plainbase (or something
similar; for example, it will be
PLAINBAS
on MSDOS systems) which should be moved to the directory containing
the base files on your system (note that some systems have two or more
such directories, one for each size of MF used)Now you need to make sure MF loads this new base when it starts up. If
MF loads the plain base by default on your system, then you're
ready to go. Under Unix (using the default web2c
distributionThe commandname is symbolically linked to
virmf, and virmf loads commandnamebase)
this does indeed happen, but we could for instance define a command
mf which executes virmfplain loading the plain base
fileThe usual way to create a font with plainMF is to start
it with the line
modemodename;magmagnification;inputfontfilename
in
response to the prompt or on the MF command line. (If
modename is unknown or omitted, the mode defaults to proof and
MF will produce an output file called
fontfilename2602gf)
The magnification is a floating point number or
magstep (magsteps are defined in The MFbook and
The book)
If magmagnification is omitted, then the default
is 1 (magstep 0) For example, to generate cmr10 at 12pt for an epson
printer you would type
mfmodeepson;magmagstep1;inputcmr10
Note that under Unix the and ; characters must usually be quoted or
escaped, so this would typically look something like
mfmodeepson;magmagstep1;inputcmr10If you don't have inimf or need a special mode that isn't
in the base, you can put its commands in a file (e.g.,
ln03mf) and invoke it on the fly with the smode command
For example, to create cmr10300gf for an LN03 printer, using
the file
Thisisln03mfasof19900227modedefcourtesyofJohnSauterproofing0;fontmaking1;tracingtitles0;pixelsperinch300;blacker065;fillin01;ocorrection5;
(note the absence of the modedef and enddef commands), you would
type
mfsmodeln03;inputcmr10
This technique isn't one you should regularly use, but it may
prove useful if you acquire a new printer and want to experiment with
parameters, or for some other reason are regularly editing the
parameters you're using Once you've settled on an appropriate set of
parameters, you should use them to rebuild the base file that you useA summary of the above written by Geoffrey Tobin, and tips about
common pitfalls in using MF, is available as Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/info/metafont-for-beginners.tex"infometafontforbeginners.tex63Which font files should be keptMF produces from its run three files, a metrics (TFM) file, a
generic font (GF) file, and a log file; all of these files have the
same base name as does the input (e.g., if the input file was
cmr10mf, the outputs will be cmr10tfm,
cmr10nnngf Note that the file name may be transmuted by such
operating systems as MSDOS, which don't permit
long file names
and cmr10log)For to use the font, you need a TFM file, so you need
to keep that However, you are likely to generate the same font
at more than one magnification, and each time you do so you'll
(incidentally) generate another TFM file; these files are
all the same, so you only need to keep one of themTo preview or to produce printed output, the DVI processor will need a
font raster file; this is what the GF file provides However, while
there used (once upon a time) to be DVI processors that could use
GF files, modern processors use packed raster (PK) files
Therefore, you need to generate a PK file from the GF file; the
program gftopk does this for you, and once you've done that you
may throw the GF file awayThe log file should never need to be used, unless there was some sort
of problem in the MF run, and need not be ordinarily kept64Getting bitmaps from the archivesMost people these days start using with a 300 dotsperinch (dpi)
laser printer, and Computer Modern bitmap fonts for this resolution
are supplied with most packages There are also two such sets
available on CTAN: Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/fonts/cm/pk/pk300.zip"fontscmpkpk300.zip (for writeblack printer engines)
and Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/fonts/cm/pk/pk300w.zip"fontscmpkpk300w.zip (for writewhite engines)
However, some users want to
send their work to high quality typesetting machines (typically with a
resolution of 1270dpi or greater); it is also becoming more common to
use a 600dpi laser printer. Why don't the archives or suppliers
provide bitmap fonts at these sizes? There are two reasons:
When a bitmap font is created with MF, it needs to know the
characteristics of the device; who knows what 600 or 1270dpi device
you have (Of course, this objection applies equally well to
300dpi printers.)Bitmap fonts get big at high resolutions. Who knows what
fonts at what sizes you need
It would be possible to provide some set of 1270dpi bitmap fonts in
the archives, but it would take a lot of space, and might not be right
for you.So what to do You can build the fonts you need yourself with MF:
this isn't at all hard, and some drivers help you (dvips, and the
em drivers construct the MF commands). You might need to look
at Karl Berry's collection of MF modes (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/fonts/modes-file"fontsmodesfile).
Alternatively, if it is a PostScript device you have, consider using
the fonts in Type1 font format. You can buy all the Computer Modern
fonts in
outline form from Blue Sky Research, Kinch or YY
(iref="Q-commercial"questionQ-commercial for addresses),
or you can use Basil
Malyshev's public domain versions in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/fonts/cm/ps-type1"fontscmpstype1 (the Paradissa
collection is complete, but has largely been replaced by the better
BaKoMa collection).Part LPostScript and 65Using PostScript fonts with In order to use PostScript fonts, needs
metric (called TFM) files. Several sets of metrics are
available from the archives; for mechanisms for generating new ones,
see iref="Q-metrics"questionQ-metrics You
also need the fonts themselves; PostScript printers come with a set of
fonts built in, but to extend your repertoire you almost invariably
need to buy from one of the many commercial font vendors (see, for
example, iref="Q-psfchoice"questionQ-psfchoice)If you use LaTeXe, the best way to get PostScript fonts into your
document is to use the PSNFSS package maintained by Sebastian Rahtz
and Alan Jeffrey (available in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/required/psnfss"macroslatexrequiredpsnfss); it's supported by
the 3 project team, so bug reports can and should be submitted.
PSNFSS gives you a set of packages for changing the default
roman, sansserif and typewriter fonts; e.g., timessty will set
up Times Roman, Helvetica and Courier in place of Computer Modern,
while avantsty just changes the sansserif family to
AvantGarde. To go with these packages, you will need the font metric
files (watch out for encoding problems see
iref="Q-metrics"questionQ-metrics)
and font description (.fd) files for each font family you
want to use. These can be obtained from Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/fonts/psfonts"fontspsfonts, arranged by
vendor (e.g., Adobe, Monotype, etc.). For convenience,
metrics for the common 35 PostScript fonts found in most printers
are provided with PSNFSS, packaged as Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/packages/psnfss/lw35nfss.zip"macroslatexpackagespsnfsslw35nfss.zipFor older versions of there are various schemes, of which the
simplest to use is probably the PS macros distributed with
dvipsFor plain, you load whatever fonts you like; if the encoding of
the fonts is not the same as Computer Modern it will be up to you to
redefine various macros and accents, or you can use the font
reencoding mechanisms available in many drivers and in
ps2pk and afm2tfmVictor Eijkhout's sophisticated Lollipop package (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/lollipop"macroslollipop)
supports declaration of font families and styles in a similar way to
's NFSS, and so is easy to use with PostScript fontsSome common problems encountered are discussed elsewhere
(see iref="psfonts-problems"questionpsfonts-problems)66Previewing files using PostScript fontsMost previewers only display bitmap PK fonts. If you want to
preview documents using PostScript fonts, you have three choices:
Convert the DVI file to PostScript and use a
PostScript previewer. Some modern Unix X implementations have this
built in (as does NeXTstep); (X11) Unix, Windows, OS2, and MSDOS
users can use the free Ghostscript (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/ghostscript"supportghostscript), a
complete level 2 implementationUnder Windows on a PC, or on a Macintosh, let Adobe Type Manager
display the fonts. Textures (Macintosh) works like this, and under
Windows you can use YY's dviwindo for bitmapfree
previewing
(See iref="Q-commercial"questionQ-commercial for details of these
suppliers.)
If you have the PostScript fonts in Type1 format, use ps2pk (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/fonts/utilities/ps2pk"fontsutilitiesps2pk) or gsftopk
(designed for use with the Ghostscript fonts;
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/fonts/utilities/gsftopk"fontsutilitiesgsftopk) to make PK bitmap fonts which your previewer
will understand. This can produce excellent results, also suitable
for printing with nonPostScript devices. Check the legalities of
this if you have purchased the fonts. The very commonest PostScript
fonts such as Times and Courier come in Type1 format on disk with
Adobe Type Manager (often bundled with Windows, and part of OS2)67 font metric files for PostScript fontsFont vendors such as Adobe supply metric files for each font, in AFM
(Adobe Font Metric) form; these can be converted to TFM
( Font Metric) form. The CTAN archives have prebuilt metrics
which will be more than enough for many people (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/fonts/psfonts"fontspsfonts;
beware this directory is at the root of a huge tree), but you may
need to do the conversion yourself if you have special needs or
acquire a new font. One important question is the encoding of
(Latin character) fonts; while we all more or less agree about the
position of about 96 characters in fonts (the basic ASCII set), the
rest of the (typically) 256 vary. The most obvious problems are with
floating accents and special characters such as the pounds sterling
sign. There are three ways of dealing with this: either you change the
macros which reference the characters (not much fun, and
errorprone); or you change the encoding of the font (easier than you
might think); or you use
virtual fonts (iref="virtualfonts"questionvirtualfonts)
to pretend to
that the encoding is the same as it is used to. If you use
LaTeXe, it allows for changing the encoding in read the
Companion
(see iref="Q-books"questionQ-books) for more details.
In practice, if you do much nonEnglish (but Latin script)
typesetting, you are strongly recommended to use the fontenc
package with option T1 to select T1
(Cork: iref="ec-fonts"questionec-fonts)
encoding.Alan Jeffrey's fontinst package (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/fonts/utilities/fontinst"fontsutilitiesfontinst) is an
AFM to TFM converter written in it is used to
generate the
files used by LaTeXe's PSNFSS package
to support use of PostScript fonts. It is a sophisticated package, not
for the fainthearted, but is powerful enough to cope with most needs
Much of its power relies on the use of
virtual fonts (iref="virtualfonts"questionvirtualfonts)For slightly simpler problems, Rokicki's afm2tfm, distributed with dvips (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/dviware/dvips"dviwaredvips), is fast and
efficient; note that the metrics and styles that come with
dvips are not currently LaTeXe compatible, but
Karl Berry plans to distribute metrics directly compatible with PSNFSS
in his dvipsk packageFor the Macintosh, there is a program called EdMetrics which does
the job (and more) It comes with the Textures distribution, but is
in fact free software, available as Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/mac/textures/utilities/EdMetrics.sea.hqx"systemsmactexturesutilitiesEdMetrics.sea.hqxMSDOS users can buy
(see iref="Q-commercial"questionQ-commercial)
YY's Font Manipulation Tools package which includes a powerful
afmtotfm program among many other goodies68Problems using PostScript fontsFor the typical user trying to use the
PSNFSS (iref="Q-usepsfont"questionQ-usepsfont)
package, three questions often arise
First, you have to declare to the DVI driver that you are using
PostScript fonts; in the case of dvips, this means adding
lines to the psfontsmap file. Otherwise, dvips will try
to find PK
files. If the font isn't built into the printer, you have to acquire
it (in many cases this means buying it from a commercial supplier)
You then have to instruct the driver to download it with each job (the
mechanism depends on your driver). So it's no
good just installing the metrics for Optima and expecting it to
work. You have to pay hard cash for the font itself, which will come
(for Unix and MSDOS users) in pfb (Printer Font Binary) formSecond, you cannot expect your previewer to suddenly start displaying
PostScript fonts; most of them only know about PK bitmap fonts
such as Computer Modern. ps2pk (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/fonts/utilities/ps2pk"fontsutilitiesps2pk) can create
these from the pfb file you have bought; this would also let you use
the fonts with nonPostScript device drivers such as the em
ones You are responsible for making sure you are not breaking the
licence restrictions on font you boughtThird, the stretch and shrink between words is a function of the
font metric; it is not specified in AFM files, so different converters
choose different values. The PostScript metrics that come with PSNFSS
used to produce quite tight setting, but they were revised in mid 1995
to produce a compromise between American and European practice. Really
sophisticated users may not find even the new the values to their taste, and
want to override them. Even the casual user may find more
hyphenation or overfull boxes than CMR produces; but CMR
is extremely generous.
69Choice of scalable outline fontsIf you are interested in text alone, you can use any of over 20,000
fonts() in Adobe Type1 format (called PostScript fonts in the
world and ATM fonts in the DTP world), or any of several
hundred fonts in TrueType format That is, provided of course, that
your previewer and printer driver support scalable outline fonts itself only cares about metrics, not the actual
character programs You just need to create a metric file
TFM using some tool such as afm2tfm, afmtotfm
(from YY, see iref="Q-commercial"questionQ-commercial)
or fontinst For the previewer or printer driver you need the
actual outline font files themselves (pfa for Display PostScript, pfb
for ATM on IBM PC, Mac outline font files on Macintosh)If you also need mathematics, then you are severely limited by the
demands that makes of maths fonts (for details, see the paper by B.K.P.
Horn in TUGboat 14(3))
For maths, then, there are relatively few choices:
Computer Modern(75 fonts optical scaling) Donald E. Knuth
Note that CM is available in scalable outline form
There are commercial as well as public domain versions, and
there are both Adobe Type1 and TrueType versions
Some of these are commercial grade, with full handtuned hinting,
some render very poorly, while others are merely incompatible with
Adobe Type Manager (ATM)Lucida Bright with Lucida New Math(25 fonts) Chuck Bigelow and
Kris Holmes
Lucida is a family of related fonts including seriffed, sans serif,
sans serif fixed width, calligraphic, blackletter, fax,
Kris Holmes' connected handwriting font, etc; they're
not as spindly as Computer Modern, with a large xheight, and
include a larger set of maths symbols, operators, relations and
delimiters than CM (over 800 instead of 384: among others, it also
includes the AMS msam and msbm symbol sets)
The planned Lucida Bright Expert (14 fonts)
adds seriffed fixed width, another handwriting font,
smallcaps, bold maths, upright maths italic, etc., to the set
The distribution includes support for use with plain and
LaTeXo Support under LaTeXe is provided in
PSNFSS (iref="Q-usepsfont"questionQ-usepsfont)
thanks to Sebastian RahtzMathTime 1.1(3 fonts) plorators (Michael Spivak)
The set contains maths italic, symbol, and extension
fonts, designed to work well with TimesRoman These are
typically used with Times, Helvetica and Courier (which are
resident on many printers, and which are supplied with
some PC versions) In addition you may want to complement this
basic set with Adobe's Times Smallcap, and perhaps the set of
Adobe Math Pi fonts, which include blackboard bold, blackletter,
and script faces The distribution includes support for use with
plain and LaTeXo (including code to link in Adobe Math
Pi2 and Math Pi6)
Support under LaTeXe is provided in
PSNFSS (iref="Q-usepsfont"questionQ-usepsfont)
thanks to Sebastian RahtzAdobe Lucida, LucidaSans and LucidaMath(12 fonts)
Lucida and LucidaMath are generally considered to be a bit heavy
The three maths fonts contain only the glyphs in the CM
maths italic, symbol, and extension fonts
Support for using LucidaMath with is not very good;
you will need to do some work reencoding fonts etc
(In some sense this set is the ancestor of the LucidaBright
plus LucidaNewMath font set.)Concrete, the AMS maths fonts etc.Donald
E. Knuth and the AMS.
These are sometimes mentioned as alternatives to CM, but they are
really adjuncts, in that you need to use at least the basic CM
maths fonts with themProprietary fontsVarious sources.
Since having a high quality font set in scalable outline form that
works with can give a publisher a real competitive advantage, there
are some publishers that have paid (a lot) to have such font sets made
for them Unfortunately, these sets are not available on the open
market, despite the likelihood that they're more complete than
those that areMathptm(4 fonts) Alan Jeffrey.
This set contains maths italic, symbol, extension, and roman
virtual fonts, built from Adobe Times, Symbol, Zapf Chancery, and
the Computer Modern fonts The Mathptm fonts are free, and
the resulting PostScript files can be freely exchanged
Contains most of the CM math symbols.
Support under LaTeXe in
PSNFSS (iref="Q-usepsfont"questionQ-usepsfont)
thanks to Alan Jeffrey and Sebastian Rahtz (A similar development by Walter Schmidt, using the Adobe Palatino
fonts, is available from Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/fonts/mathpple"fontsmathpple)All of the first three font sets are available in formats suitable for
IBM PCWindows, Macintosh and UnixNeXT from YY and from Blue Sky
Research (see iref="Q-commercial"questionQ-commercial for
details) The MathTime fonts are also available from:
plorators1572 West Gray 377Houston TX 77019USA
The very limited selection of maths font sets is a direct result of
the fact that a maths font has to be explicitly designed for use with
and as a result it is likely to lose some of its appeal in
other markets. Furthermore, the market for commercial fonts is
minute (in comparison, for example, to Microsoft TrueType font pack
1, which sold something like 10 million copies in a few weeks after
release of Windows 3.1)Text fonts in Type1 format are available from many vendors including
Adobe, Monotype, Bitstream Avoid cheap ripoffs: not only are you
rewarding unethical behaviour, destroying the cottage industry of
innovative type design, but you are also very likely to get junk
The fonts may not render well (or at all under ATM), may not have the
standard complement of 228 glyphs, or may not include metric files
(needed to make TFM files). Also, avoid TrueType fonts from all but
the major vendors TrueType fonts are an order of magnitude harder to
hint properly than Type1 fonts and hence TrueType fonts from places
other than Microsoft and Apple may be suspect In any case you may
find other problems with TrueType fonts such as service bureaux not
accepting jobs calling for them70Including a PostScript figure in AllTeXLaTeXe (iref="latex2e"questionlatex2e)
has a standard package for graphics inclusion, rotation, colour, and
other driverrelated features. The package is documented in the second
edition of Lamport's book, as well as in the
Graphics Companion
(see iref="Q-books"questionQ-books)The distribution itself comes with documentation, and a processed copy
(grfguideps) is available in the distribution so that users
can read documentation without first installing the packageThe graphics package comes with a relative,
graphicx, which provides more convenient means of scaling
and otherwise manipulating graphics Both packages are configured for
the particular processor you're using (either DVI processor, or
PDF), and the packages cope with any sort of graphics inclusion
the processor understands, be it PostScript, bitmap, PDF or
anythingBoth graphics and graphicx are to be found on
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/required/graphics"macroslatexrequiredgraphicsIf you don't use LaTeXe, a version of the package is available that
will work under Plain (and other formats) see
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/required/graphics-plain"macroslatexrequiredgraphicsplainOne point to note about including PostScript figures is that they
are not part of the DVI file, but are only included when you
use a DVI
to PostScript conversion program The special commands used to
do this are potentially different for every DVI processor
(which is why the graphics package must be configured for
the processor you use)
As a result, some DVI previewers
will simply show the blank space has reserved for your figure,
not the figure itselfThere are two rather good documents on CTAN addressing figure
production, with rather different emphasis Keith Reckdahl's,
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/info/epslatex.pdf"infoepslatex.pdf (also available in PostScript format as
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/info/epslatex.ps"infoepslatex.ps), covers the standard facilities, as
well as some of the supporting packages, notably subfigure
(Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/subfigure"macroslatexcontribsupportedsubfigure) and psfrag (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/psfrag"macroslatexcontribsupportedpsfrag) Anil
K.Goel's, Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/info/figsinltx.ps"infofigsinltx.ps, covers the different ways in which
you might generate figures, and the old (LaTeXo) ways of including
them into documentsPart MSpecial sorts of typesetting71Drawing with There are many packages to do pictures in AllTeX itself (rather than
importing graphics created externally), ranging from simple use of
picture environment, through enhancements like epic, to
sophisticated (but slow) drawing with PiCTeX. Depending on your type
of drawing, and setup, four systems should be at the top of your list
to look at:
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/graphics/pstricks"graphicspstricks; this gives you access to all the power of
PostScript from itself, by sophisticated use of
specials. You need a decent DVI to PostScript driver
(like dvips), but the results are worth it The
welldocumented package gives you not only lowlevel drawing
commands (and full colour) like lines, circles, shapes at arbitrary
coordinates, but also highlevel macros for framing text, drawing
trees and matrices, 3D effects, and moreMP; you liked MF, but never got to grips with font files
Try MP (iref="Q-MP"questionQ-MP)
all the power of MF, but it generates PostScript figures Knuth
uses it for all his workMfpic; you liked MF, but can't understand the
language The package (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/graphics/mfpic"graphicsmfpic) makes up MF code for you
within using familiarlooking macros Not quite the
full power of MF, but a friendlier interfaceYou liked PiCTeX but don't have enough memory or time Look
at Eitan Gurari's Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/generic/dratex"macrosgenericdratex, which is as powerful as most
other drawing packages, but is an entirely new
implementation, which is not as hard on memory, is much more
readable (and is fully documented)72Doublespaced documents in Are you producing a thesis, and trying to obey regulations that were
drafted in the typewriter era Or are you producing copy for a
journal that insists on double spacing for the submitted articles is a typesetting system, so the appropriate design
conventions are for real books If your requirement is from
thesis regulations, find whoever is responsible for the regulations,
and try to get the wording changed to cater for typeset theses
(e.g., to say if using a typesetting system, aim to make your
thesis look like a welldesigned book) (If your requirement is
from a journal, you're probably even less likely to be able to get the
rules changed, of course.)If you fail to convince your officials, or want some interline
space for copyediting:
Try changing baselinestretch:
renewcommandbaselinestretch12
may be enough to give
officials the impression you've kept to their regulations. Don't try
changing baselineskip: its value is reset at any sizechanging
commandAlternatively, use a linespacing package The best for current
is Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/setspace/setspace.sty"macroslatexcontribsupportedsetspacesetspace.sty73Formatting a thesis in Thesis styles are usually very specific to your University, so it's
usually not profitable to ask around for a package outside your own
University Since many Universities (in their eccentric way) still
require doublespacing, you may care to refer to
iref="Q-linespace"questionQ-linespace
If you want to write
your own, a good place to start is the University of California style
(available as Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/ucthesis"macroslatexcontribsupporteducthesis), but
it's not worth going to a lot of trouble. (If officials won't allow
standard typographic conventions, you won't be able to produce an
sthetically pleasing document anyway)
74Flowing text around figures in There are several packages that purport to do this, but they
all have their limitations because the machine isn't really
designed to solve this sort of problem Piet van Oostrum has
conducted a survey of the available packages; he recommends:
picinspicinssty is part of a large package
(Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/msdos/picins/picins.zip"systemsmsdospicinspicins.zip) that allows inclusion of pictures (e.g., with
shadow boxes, various MSDOS formats, etc.) The command is:
parpicwidthheightxoffyoffOptionsPositionPictureParagraph text All parameters except the Picture are optional The picture
can be positioned left or right, boxed with a rectangle, oval,
shadowbox, dashed box, and a caption can be given which will be
included in the list of figures Unfortunately (for those of us whose understanding of German is not
good), the documentation is in German Piet van Oostrum has written
an English summary Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/msdos/picins/picins.zip-summary"systemsmsdospicinspicins.zipsummaryfloatfltHref="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/other/floatflt"macroslatexcontribotherfloatflt is an improved version
(for LaTeXe) of floatfigsty, and its syntax is:
beginfloatingfigureoptionswidth of figurefigure contentsendfloatingfigure There is a (more or less similar) floatingtable environment The tables or figures can be set left or right, or alternating on
evenodd pages in a doublesided document The package works with the multicol package, but doesn't work well
in the neighbourhood of list environments (unless you change your
document)wrapfigHref="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/other/misc/wrapfig.sty"macroslatexcontribothermiscwrapfig.sty has syntax:
beginwrapfigureheight of figure in linesl,r,etcoverhangwidthfigure, caption, etc.endwrapfigure The syntax of the wraptable environment is similar Height can be omitted, in which case it will be calculated by the
package; the package will use the greater of the specified and the
actual width The l,r,etc. parameter can also be
specified as i(nside) or o(utside) for twosided
documents, and uppercase can be used to indicate that the picture
should float The overhang allows the figure to be moved into the
margin The figure or table will entered into the list of figures
or tables if you use the caption command The environments do not work within list environments that end
before the figure or table has finished, but can be used in a parbox
or minipage, and in twocolumn format75Alternative head and footlines in The standard document classes define a small set of page
styles which (in effect) specify head and footlines for your
document The set defined is very restricted, but is capable
of much more; people occasionally set about employing
facilities to do the job, but that's quite unnecessary Piet van
Oostrum has already done the workThe package is found in directory Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/fancyhdr"macroslatexcontribsupportedfancyhdr and provides
simple mechanisms for defining pretty much every head or footline
variation you could want; the directory also contains some (rather
good) documentation and one or two smaller packages Fancyhdr
also deals with the tedious behaviour of the standard styles with
initial pages (iref="Q-ps-empty"questionQ-ps-empty),
by enabling you to define
different page styles for initial and for body pages76Including a file in verbatim in A good way is to use Rainer Schopf's verbatimsty,
which provides a command verbatiminput that takes a file name
as argument. This package is available as part of Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/required/tools"macroslatexrequiredtoolsAnother way is to use the alltt environment, which requires
allttsty (which is now part of )alltt interprets
its contents mostly verbatim, but executes any commands it
finds: so one can say:
beginallttinputverbtxtendalltt
of course, this is little use for inputting AllTeX source codeThe moreverb package (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/moreverb"macroslatexcontribsupportedmoreverb) extends the
facilities of verbatim package), providing a listing
environment and a listinginput command, which linenumber the text
of the fileThe fancyvrb package (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/fancyvrb"macroslatexcontribsupportedfancyvrb) offers configurable
implementations of everything verbatim and moreverb
have, and more besides It is nowadays the package of choice for the
discerning typesetter of verbatim text, but its wealth of facilities
makes it a complex beast and study of the documentation is strongly
advised77Including line numbers in typeset outputFor general numbering of lines, there are two packages for use with
, Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/lineno"macroslatexcontribsupportedlineno (which permits labels attached to
individual lines of typeset output) and Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/numline/numline.sty"macroslatexcontribsupportednumlinenumline.styBoth of these packages play fast and loose with the output
routine, which can cause problems: the user should bewareIf the requirement is for numbering verbatim text, the
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/moreverb"macroslatexcontribsupportedmoreverb or Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/fancyvrb"macroslatexcontribsupportedfancyvrb packages (see
iref="Q-verbfile"questionQ-verbfile) may be usedOne common use of line numbers is in critical editions of texts, and
for this the edmac package (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/plain/contrib/edmac"macrosplaincontribedmac) offers comprehensive
support78Generating an index in AllTeXMaking an index is not trivial; what to index, and how to index it, is
difficult to decide, and uniform implementation is difficult to
achieve You will need to mark all items to be indexed in your text
(typically with index commands)It is not practical to sort
a large index within , so a postprocessing program is used to sort
the output of one run, to be included into the document at the
next runThe following programs are available:
makeindexfor under Unix (but runs under other OSs
without changes) Available in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/indexing/makeindex"indexingmakeindex; a version for
the Macintosh is available as Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/mac/macmakeindex.sit"systemsmacmacmakeindex.sit, and one for
MSDOS is part of the em distribution (the
em version also runs under OS2) The Makeindex documentation is a good source of information on how
to create your own index. Makeindex can be used with some
macro packages other than , such as Eplain(iref="Q-eplain"questionQ-eplain), and sis, Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/nonfree/macros/texsis"nonfreemacrostexsis
(whose macros, Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/nonfree/macros/texsis-index"nonfreemacrostexsisindex, can be used independently
with plain)idxtexfor under VMS Available (together with a
glossarymaker called glotex) in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/indexing/glo+idxtex"indexinggloidxtextexindexA witty little shellsedscriptbased
utility for under Unix Available from Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/texindex"supporttexindex There are other programs called texindex, notably
one that comes with the
Texinfo distribution (iref="Q-texinfo"questionQ-texinfo)xindya recent development, designed for wideranging flexibility (including support for multilingual indexes), based on
Common Lisp The system is available on CTAN
(Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/xindy"supportxindy), but is more easily accessed from a web
browser via http://www.iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de/xindy/
since the distribution contains several different implementations79Typesetting URLsURLs tend to be very long, and contain characters that would
naturally prevent them being hyphenated even if they weren't typically
set in ttfamily, verbatim Therefore, without special treatment,
they often produce wildly overfull hboxes, and their typeset
representation is awfulThere are two approaches to this problem:
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/other/misc/path.sty"macroslatexcontribothermiscpath.sty, which defines a path command The command
defines each potential break character as a discretionary, and
offers the user the opportunity of specifying a personal list of
potential break characters Its chief disadvantage is fragility in
the contextHref="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/other/misc/url.sty"macroslatexcontribothermiscurl.sty, which defines an url command (among others,
including its own path command) The command gives each
potential break character a mathsmode personality, and then sets
the URL itself in the user's choice of font, in maths mode
It can produce (style) robust commands
(see iref="Q-protect"questionQ-protect) for use
within moving arguments Note that, because the operation is
conducted in maths mode, spaces within the URL argument are
ignored unless special steps are takenThe author of this answer prefers the (rather newer) urlsty;
both packages work equally well with plain (though of course,
the fancy facilities of urlsty don't have much place
there)80Citing URLs with BibTeXThere is no citation type for URLs, per se, in the
standard BibTeX styles, though Oren Patashnik (the author of
BibTeX) is considering developing one such for use with the
longawaited BibTeX version1.0The actual information that need be available in a citation of an
URL is discussed at some length in the publicly available
online extracts of ISO6902, available via
http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/iso/tc46sc9/standard/690-2e.htm; the
techniques below do not satisfy all the requirements of
ISO6902, but they offer a solution that is at least
available to users of today's toolsUntil the new version arrives, the simplest technique is to use the
howpublished field of the standard styles' misc function Of
course, the strictures
about typesetting URLs (iref="Q-setURL"questionQ-setURL)
still apply, so the entry will look like:
mischowpublishedurlhttpAnother possibility is that some conventionallypublished paper,
technical report (or even book) is also available on the Web In such
cases, a useful technique is something like:
techreportnoteAlsoavailableasurlhttpThere is good reason to use Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/other/misc/url.sty"macroslatexcontribothermiscurl.sty in this context, since (by
default) it ignores spaces in its argumentBibTeX has a habit of
splitting lines it considers excessively long, and if there are no
space characters for it to use as natural breakpoints, BibTeX
will insert a comment ()
character which is an acceptable character in an URL,
so that url will typeset it The way around the problem is to
insert odd spaces inside the URL itself in the bib file, to
enable BibTeX to make reasonable decisions about breaking the
line81Using BibTeX with plainThe file Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/eplain/btxmac.tex"macroseplainbtxmac.tex contains macros and documentation
for using BibTeX with plain, either directly or with
Eplain (iref="Q-eplain"questionQ-eplain)
See iref="BibTeXing"questionBibTeXing for more
information about BibTeX itself82Typesetting music in A powerful package which allows the typesetting of
polyphonic and other multiplestave music is Music, written by
Daniel Taupin
(taupinrsovaxlpsupsudfr). It is available
in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/musictex"macrosmusictexIn the recent past, Daniel (as well as with various other people,
notably Ross Mitchell and Andreas Egler) have been working on a development of
Music, known as MusiX MusiX is a threepass
system (with a processor program that computes values for the element
spacing in the music), and achieves finer control than is possible in
the unmodified based mechanism that Music uses Daniel
Taupin and Andreas Egler are pursuing distinct versions of
MusiX they are available, respectively, from
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/musixtex/taupin"macrosmusixtextaupin and Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/musixtex/egler"macrosmusixtexeglerDigital music fans can typeset notation for their efforts by using
midi2tex, which translates MIDI data files into Music
source code It is available from Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/midi2tex"supportmidi2texA rather simpler notation than Music is supported by abc2mtex;
this is a package designed to notate tunes stored in an ASCII format
(abc notation). It was designed primarily for folk and traditional
tunes of Western European origin (such as Irish, English and Scottish)
which can be written on one stave in standard classical notation
However, it should be extendable to many other types of music It is
available from Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/abc2mtex"supportabc2mtexThere is a mailing list for discussion of typesetting music in
To subscribe, send mail to mutexrequeststolafedu containing
the word subscribe in the body83Drawing Feynman diagrams in Michael Levine's macro package for drawing Feynman diagrams in
is available in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex209/contrib/feynman"macroslatex209contribfeynmanAnother possibility is Thorsten Ohl's Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/feynmf"macroslatexcontribsupportedfeynmf, that works in
combination with MF (or MP) The feynmf or
feynmp package reads a description of the diagram written
in , and writes out codeMF (or MP) can then produce a
font (or PostScript file) for use in a subsequent run For
new users, who have access to MP, the PostScript version is
probably the better route, for document portability and other reasonsPart NHow do I do X in or 84Proof environmentIt is not possible to make a proof environment which automatically
includes an endofproof symbol. Some proofs end in displayed maths;
others do not. If the input file contains endproof then
finishes off the displayed maths and gets ready for a new
line before it reads any instructions connected with ending the proof
But traditionally the endofproof sign goes in the display, not on a
new line. So you just have to put it in by hand in every proof85Symbols for the number setsIt is a good idea to have commands such as R for the real numbers and
other standard number sets. Traditionally these were typeset in bold
Because mathematicians usually do not have access to bold chalk, they
invented the special symbols that are now often used for R, C,
etc These symbols are known as blackboard bold. Before
insisting on using them, consider whether going back to the old system
of ordinary bold might not be acceptable (it is certainly simpler)A set of blackboard bold capitals is available in the AMS fonts
msam (e.g., msam10 for 10pt) and msbm. The fonts
have a large number of mathematical symbols to supplement the ones in
the standard distribution. The fonts are available in
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/fonts/ams/amsfonts-symbols"fontsamsamsfontssymbolsTwo files which load the fonts and define the symbols are provided,
and both work with either or Questions or
suggestions regarding these fonts should be directed to
techsupportmathamsorgAnother complete set of blackboard bold fonts, the bbold family, is
available in MF (in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/fonts/bbold"fontsbbold) This set has the interesting
property of offering blackboard bold forms of lowercase letters,
something rather rarely seen on actual blackboardsThe lazy persons blackboard bold macros:
newcommandRsfRhspace09exrule015ex15exhspace09exnewcommandNsfNhspace10exrule015ex13exhspace10exnewcommandQsfQhspace11exrule015ex15exhspace11exnewcommandCsfChspace09exrule015ex13exhspace09ex
work well at normal size if the surrounding text is cmr10. However,
they are not part of a proper maths font, and so do not work in sub and
superscripts. Moreover, the size and position of the vertical bar is
affected by the font of the surrounding text86Roman theoremsIf you want to take advantage of the powerful newtheorem command
without the constraint that the contents of the theorem is in a sloped
font (for example, to use it to create remarks, examples, proofs,
) then you can use the style file theoremsty (part of
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/required/tools"macroslatexrequiredtools). Alternatively, the following sets up an
environment remark whose content is in romannewtheorempreremarkRemarknewenvironmentremarkbeginpreremarkrmendpreremark
This will not work if you are using the prototype NFSS outside of
LaTeXe (iref="latex2e"questionlatex2e),
because the command rm behaves differently there87Fancy enumeration listsSuppose you want your toplevel enumerates to be labelled I, II,
, then give these commands:
renewcommandtheenumiRomanenumirenewcommandlabelenumitheenumi
The possible styles of numbering are given in Section6.3 of Lamport's
book (see iref="Q-books"questionQ-books) Both
theenumi and labelenumi must be changed, since
theenumi is used in crossreferences to the listFor lower level enumerates, replace enumi by enumii, enumiii
or enumiv, according to the level If your label is much larger
than the default, you should also change leftmargini,
leftmarginii, etcIf you're running LaTeXe, the package enumeratesty (part of
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/required/tools"macroslatexrequiredtools) offers similar facilities With
enumeratesty, the example above would
be achieved simply by starting the enumeration
beginenumerateI88Unnumbered sections in the Table of ContentsThe easiest way to get headings of funny sections such as
prefaces in the table of contents is to use the
counter secnumdepth described in AppendixC of the
manual. For example:
setcountersecnumdepth1chapterPreface
Of course, you have to set secnumdepth back to its usual value
(which is2 in the standard styles) before you do
any section which you want to be numberedSimilar settings are made automatically in the book class by
the frontmatter and backmatter commands
This is why it works.
chapter without the star does
put something in the toc file;
if secnumdepth0,
increase the counter for the chapter and write it outwrite the chapter title
Other sectioning commands are similar, but with other values
used in the test89Footnotes in tablesThe standard footnote command doesn't work in tables; the table
traps the footnotes and they can't escape to the bottom of the pageIf your table is floating, your best bet is (unfortunately) to put the
table in a minipage environment and to put the notes
underneath the table, or to use Donald Arseneau's package
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/other/misc/threeparttable.sty"macroslatexcontribothermiscthreeparttable.styOtherwise, if your table is not floating (it's just a
tabular in the middle of some text), there are several
things you can do to fix the problemUse footnotemark to position the little marker
appropriately, and then put in footnotetext commands to fill in
the text once you've closed the tabular environment This is
described in Lamport's book, but it gets messy if there's more than
one footnoteStick the table in a minipage anyway This provides
all the ugliness of footnotes in a minipage with no extra effortUse Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/other/misc/threeparttable.sty"macroslatexcontribothermiscthreeparttable.sty anyway;
the package is intended for floating tables, and the result might
look odd if the table is not floating, but it will be reasonableUse tabularx or longtable from the tools
distribution (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/required/tools"macroslatexrequiredtools); they're noticeably less
efficient than the standard tabular environment, but they
do allow footnotesGrab hold of footnotesty from CTAN, lurking in
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/mdwtools"macroslatexcontribsupportedmdwtools Then put your tabular environment inside a savenotes
environment Alternatively, say makesavenoteenvtabular in
the preamble of your document, and tables will all handle footnotes
correctlyUse mdwtabsty from the same directory
(Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/mdwtools"macroslatexcontribsupportedmdwtools) This will handle footnotes properly, and has other facilities to
increase the beauty of your tables It may also cause other
tablerelated packages (not the standard tools ones, though) to
become very unhappy and stop working90Style of section headingsSuppose that the editor of your favourite journal has specified that section
headings must be centred, in small capitals, and subsection headings ragged
right in italic, but that you don't want to get involved in the sort of
programming described in The Companion
(iref="Q-books"questionQ-books; the programming itself is discussed in
iref="atsigns"questionatsigns)
The following hack will
probably satisfy your editor. Define yourself new commands
newcommandssection1section1centeringsc1newcommandssubsection1subsection1raggedrightit1
and then use ssection and ssubsection in place of
section and subsection. This isn't perfect: section numbers
remain in bold, and starred forms need a separate redefinition. Also,
this will not work if you are using the prototype NFSS with
LaTeXo, because the fontchanging commands behave differently
thereThe Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/sectsty"macroslatexcontribsupportedsectsty package provides an easytouse set of tools to
do this job, while the Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/titlesec"macroslatexcontribsupportedtitlesec package permits more
advanced usage as well (titlesec comes with a second package,
titletoc, which is used to adjust the format of table of contents
entries.)The headings of chapter and part commands are produced by a
different mechanism; sectsty deals with both, but titlesec deals
only with chapter The Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/fncychap"macroslatexcontribsupportedfncychap package provides a
nice collection of customised chapter heading designs91Indent after section headings implements a style that doesn't indent the first paragraph
after a section heading There are coherent reasons for this, but not
everyone likes it
The package indentfirststy (part of Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/required/tools"macroslatexrequiredtools)
suppresses the mechanism, so that the first paragraph is
indented92Footnotes in section headingsThe footnote command is fragile, so that simply placing the
command in section's arguments isn't satisfactory Using
protectfootnote isn't a good idea either: the arguments of a
section command are used in the table of contents and (more
dangerously) potentially also in page headings Unfortunately,
there's no mechanism to suppress the footnote in the heading while
allowing it in the table of contents, though having footnotes in the
table of contents is probably unsatisfactory anywayTo suppress the footnote in headings and table of contents:
Take advantage of the fact that the mandatory argument doesn't
move if the optional argument is present:
sectiontitletitlefootnotetitleftntUse the Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/footmisc"macroslatexcontribsupportedfootmisc package, with package option
stablethis modifies footnotes so that they softly and silently
vanish away if used in a moving argument93Changing the margins in Don't do it. Learn some , produce some
documents, and then ask again.You can never change the margins of a document by software,
because they depend on the actual size of the paper What you can change
are the distances from the apparent top and left edges of the paper,
and the width and height of the text. Changing the last two requires
more skill than you might expect. The height should bear a certain
relationship to baselineskip. And the width should not be more
than 75characters. Lamport's warning in his section on
Customizing the Style really must be taken seriously. Oneinch
margins on A4 paper are fine for 10 or 12pitch typewriters, but not
for 10pt type (or even 11pt or 12pt) because so many
characters per line will irritate the reader HoweverPerhaps the easiest way to get more out of a page in is to
get Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex209/contrib/misc/fullpage.sty"macroslatex209contribmiscfullpage.sty which sets the margins of the page identical
to those of plain, i.e., 1inch margins at all four
sides of the
paper. It also contains an adjustment for A4 paperSomewhat more flexible is Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/other/misc/vmargin.sty"macroslatexcontribothermiscvmargin.sty, which has a canned set of
paper sizes (a superset of that provided in LaTeXe), provision for
custom paper, margin adjustments and provision for twosided printingFor details of 's page
parameters, see sectionC.5.3 of the
manual (pp.181182)
The origin in DVI coordinates is one inch
from the top of the paper and one inch from the left side; positive
horizontal measurements extend
right across the page, and positive vertical measurements extend down
the page. Thus, for margins closer to the left and top edges of the
page than 1 inch, the corresponding parameters, i.e.,
evensidemargin, oddsidemargin, topmargin, can be set to
negative valuesYou cannot simply change the margins of part of a document within the
document by
modifying the parameters shown in Lamport's figureC.3. They
should only be changed in the preamble of the document, i.e., before
the begindocument statement. To adjust the margins within a
document we define an environment:
newenvironmentchangemargin2beginlistsetlengthtopsep0ptsetlengthleftmargin1setlengthrightmargin2setlengthlistparindentparindentsetlengthitemindentparindentsetlengthparsepparskipitemendlist
This environment takes two arguments, and will indent the left
and right margins by their values, respectively. Negative values
will cause the margins to be narrowed, so
beginchangemargin1cm1cm narrows the left and right margins
by 1cm94Finding the width of a letter, word, or phrasePut the word in a box, and measure the width of the box. For example,
newdimenstringwidthsetbox0hboxhistringwidthwd0
Note that if the quantity in the hbox is a phrase, the actual
measurement only approximates the width that the phrase will occupy in
running text, since the interword glue can be adjusted in paragraph
modeThe same sort of thing is expressed in by:
newlengthgnatsettowidthgnattextbfsmall
This sets the value of the length command gnat to the width of small
in boldface text95Changing the space between lettersA common technique in advertising copy (and other text whose actual
content need not actually be read) is to alter the space
between the letters (otherwise known as the tracking) As a general
rule, this is a very bad idea: it detracts from legibility, which is
contrary to the principles of typesetting (any respectable font you
might be using should already have optimum tracking built into it)The great type designer, Eric Gill, is (possibly apocryphally)
credited with saying he who would letterspace lowercase text, would
steal sheep (stealing sheep was, before Gill's time, a capital
offence in Britain) As the remark suggests, though, letterspacing of
uppercase text is less awful a crime; the technique used also to be
used for emphasis of text set in gothic (or similar) fontsStraightforward macros (usable, in principle, with any macro
package) may be found in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/generic/letterspacing.tex"macrosgenericletterspacing.texA more comprehensive package is Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/soul"macroslatexcontribsupportedsoul (which is optimised for
use with , but also works with Plain Soul also
permits hyphenation of letterspaced text; Gill's view of such an
activity is not (even apocryphally) recorded96Excluding blocks of text from the DVI fileRainer Schopf's verbatimsty provides a comment environment which
excludes everything between begincomment and endcomment.
This package is available as part of Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/required/tools"macroslatexrequiredtoolsA more general environment for doing the job is Victor Eijkhout's
commentsty, which lets you define environments for inclusion
or exclusion in a document, thus offering a primitive configuration
structure It is available from the CTAN sites in
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex209/contrib/misc/comment.sty"macroslatex209contribmisccomment.sty97Setting bold Greek letters in The simple solution (mathbf) doesn't always work, because
lowercase Greek letters behave differently from uppercase Greek
letters (due to Knuth's esoteric font encoding decisions) However,
mathbfcan be used for uppercase Greek letters in
ordinary circumstances, but the AMSLaTeX package amsmathsty
disables this fontswitching and you must use one of the techniques
outlined belowThe plain solution does work, in a limited way:
boldmaththeta
but boldmath may not be used in maths mode, so this solution
requires arcana such as:
mboxboldmaththeta
which then causes problems in superscripts, etcThese problems may be addressed by using a bold mathematics packageThe package bmsty, which is part of the tools
distribution (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/required/tools"macroslatexrequiredtools), defines a command bm which
may be used anywhere in maths modeThe package amsbsysty, which is part of AMSLaTeX
(Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/required/amslatex"macroslatexrequiredamslatex) defines a command boldsymbol, which
(though slightly less comprehensive than bm) covers almost all
common casesAll these solutions cover all mathematical symbols, not merely Greek
letters98Defining a new loglike function in Use the mathop command, as in:
newcommanddiagmathoprmdiagSubscripts and superscripts on diag will be placed exactly as they
are on lim If you want your subscripts and superscripts always
placed to the right, do:
newcommanddiagmathoprmdiagnolimitsThis works in LaTeXo and in LaTeXe, but not under NFSS alone
(see iref="rmnonsense"questionrmnonsense)
However, the canonical method for doing this in LaTeXe is to use
the the DeclareMathOperator command of amsopnsty (which is
part of the AMSLaTeX package: Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/required/amslatex"macroslatexrequiredamslatex)(It should be noted that loglike was reportedly a joke on
Lamport's part; it is of course clear what was meant.)
99Typesetting all those related logosKnuth was making a particular point about the capabilities of
when he defined the logo Unfortunately, many believe, he thereby
opened floodgates to give the world a whole range of rather silly
bumpy road logos such as AMSTeX, PiCTeX, BibTeX, and so on,
produced in a flurry of different fonts, sizes, and baselines indeed,
everything one might hope to cause them to obstruct the reading process
In articular, Lamport invented
(silly enough in itself)
and marketing input from AddisonWesley led to the even
stranger current logo
LaTeXeSensible users don't have to follow this stuff wherever it goes, but, for those who insist, a large collection of logos is defined in
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/eplain/texnames.sty"macroseplaintexnames.sty (but note that this set of macros isn't entirely
reliable in LaTeXe)
The MF and MP logos can be set in fonts that LaTeXe
knows about (so that they scale with the surrounding text) using the
package Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/mflogo"macroslatexcontribsupportedmflogo; but be aware that boobytraps surround the
use of the Knuthian font for MP (you might get
META O T in the font used to set MFReworded for the GELLMU edition)
You needn't despair, however the author himself uses just MetaPostFor those who don't wish to acquire the proper logos, the canonical
thing to do is to say AMSTeX
(AMS)
for AMSTeX, PicTeX
(Pic)
for PiCTeX, BibTeX
(Bib)
for BibTeX, and so onWhile the author of this FAQ list can't quite bring himself to do away
with the bumpyroad logos herein, he regularly advises everyone else
to1001column abstract in 2column documentOne often requires that the abstract of a paper should appear across
the entire page, even in a twocolumn paper The required trick is:
documentclasstwocolumnarticlebegindocumentauthoretctwocolumnbegintwocolumnfalsemaketitlebeginabstractendabstractendtwocolumnfalse
Unfortunately, with the above thanks won't work in the
author list If you need such speciallynumbered footnotes, you
can make them like this:
titleDemonstrationauthorMeYouthankstwocolumnasaboverenewcommandthefootnotefnsymbolfootnotefootnotetext1Thanksfornothing
and so on101Changing babel's ideas of words to use uses symbolic names for many of the automaticallygenerated
text it produces (specialpurpose section headers, captions, etc.)
For example, the special section produced by the tableofcontents
command is always called contentsname (or rather, what
contentsname is set to)When babel is selecting a new language, it ensures that these symbolic
names are translated appropriately for the language in question In
particular, babel selects the document's main language at the point
that begindocument is executed, which means that any changes
to these symbolic names made in the prologue of a document that uses babel
will be lostTherefore, babel defines a command to enable users to change the
definitions of the symbolic names, on a perlanguage basis:
addtocaptionslanguage is the thingFor example:
addtocaptionsdanishrenewcommandcontentsnameIndholdsfortegnelse102Code listings in Pretty code listings are sometimes considered worthwhile by the
neurotically sthetic programmer, but they have a serious place in
the typesetting of dissertations by computer science and other
students who are expected to write programs Simple verbatim listings
are commonly useful, as wellVerbatim listings are dealt with elsewhere (see
iref="Q-verbfile"questionQ-verbfile)Pretty listings are generally provided by means of a precompiler,
but the listings package (Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/listings"macroslatexcontribsupportedlistings) manages to do the
job within The lgrind system (CTAN Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/lgrind"supportlgrind) is a wellestablished
precompiler, with all the facilities one might need and a wide
repertoire of languagesThe tinyc2l system (CTAN Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/tinyc2l"supporttinyc2l) is more recent:
users are encouraged to generate their own driver files for languages
it doesn't already deal withPart OMacros for Particular Types of Documents103Setting papers for journalsPublishers of journals have a wide range of requirements for the
presentation of papers, and while many publishers do accept electronic
submissions in AllTeX, they don't often submit recommended macros to
public archivesNevertheless, there are considerable numbers of macros of one sort or
another available on CTAN; searching for your journal name in
the CTAN catalogue
http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/catalogue.html
may well turn up what you're seekingFailing that, you may be well advised to contact the prospective
publisher of your paper; many publishers have macros on their own web
sites, or otherwise available only upon applicationCheck that the publisher is offering you macros suitable to an
environment you can use: a few still have no macros for current
, for example, claiming that LaTeXo is good enoughSome publishers rekey anything sent them anyway, so that it doesn't
really matter what macros you use Others merely encourage you to use
as few extensions of a standard package as possible, so that they will
find it easy to transform your paper to their own internal form104A report from lots of articlesThis is a requirement, for example, if one is preparing the
proceedings of a conference whose papers were submitted in There's no canned solution, but Matt Swift's includex and
moredefs packages (both part of the Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/frankenstein"macroslatexcontribsupportedfrankenstein
bundle) offer a possible way forwardincludex enables you to includedoc complete articles
(in the way that you include chapter files in an ordinary
report) It doesn't do the whole job for you, though You need to
analyse the package use of the individual papers, and ensure that a
consistent set is loaded in the preamble of the main reportAnother tedious problem to address is that suppresses all
titlerelated commands after maketitle has been used once in a
document: thus you need to define replacements for all of them, for
use in the papersMore work is plainly needed in this area, but at least a start has
been made105Curriculum Vitae (Resume)A framework class for Curricula Vitae, provided by Andrej
Brodnik, is available from Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/other/vita"macroslatexcontribothervitaThe class can be customised both for subject (example class option
files are offered for both computer scientists and singers), and for
language (both the options provided are available for both English and
Slovene) Extensions may be written by creating new class option
files, or by using macros defined in the class to define new entry
types, etcPart PThings are Going Wrong106Weird hyphenation of wordsYou may have a version mismatch problem. 's hyphenation system changed
between version2.9 and3.0 If you are using (plain)
version3.0 or later, make sure your plaintex file has a
version number which is at least3.0 If you are using LaTeXo you
should consider upgrading to LaTeXe; if for some reason you can't, the
last version of LaTeXo, released on 25 March 1992, is available
(for the time being at least) from Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/obsolete/macros/latex209/distribs/latex209.tar"obsoletemacroslatex209distribslatex209.tar and ought
to solve this problemIf you're using LaTeXe, the problem probably arises from your
hyphencfg file, which has to be created if you're using a
multilingual versionFor the curious, here's what happened:
before 3.0 the hyphenation algorithm would not
break a word if the part before the break was not at least two
characters long, and the part after the break at least three
characters long. Starting with version 3.0 the parameters
lefthyphenmin and righthyphenmin control the length of these
fragments. These are set to 2 and 3, respectively, in the new
plain and lplain formats They can be set to any value, of course,
but if lefthyphenminrighthyphenmin is greater than 62, all
hyphenation is suppressedA further source of oddity can derive from the 1995 release of
Corkencoded fonts (iref="ec-fonts"questionec-fonts),
which introduced an alternative hyphen character The LaTeXe
configuration files in the font release specified use of the
alternative hyphen, and this could produce odd effects with words
containing an explicit hyphen The font configuration files in the
December 1995 release of LaTeXe do not use the alternative
hyphen character, thus removing this source of problems107(Merely) peculiar hyphenationYou may have found that 's famed automatic worddivision does
not produce the breakpoints recommended by your dictionary. This may be
because is set up for American English, whose rules for word
division (as specified, for example, in Webster's Dictionary) are
completely different from the British ones (as specified, for example,
in the Oxford Dictionaries). This problem is being addressed by the UK
User community (see Baskerville, issue4.4) but an entirely
satisfactory solution will take time An interim hyphenation file is
available in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/language/hyphenation/ukhyphen.tex"languagehyphenationukhyphen.tex108Accented words aren't hyphenated's algorithm for hyphenation gives up when it encounters an
accent command; there are good reasons for this, but it means
that quality typesetting in nonEnglish languages can be difficultFor itself, avoiding this effect means using Corkencoded fonts
(iref="ec-fonts"questionec-fonts) which contain accented letters as
single glyphs In the future, perhaps,
Omega (iref="Q-omega"questionQ-omega)
will provide a rather different solution109Enlarging The error message capacity exceeded covers a multitude of
problems What has been exhausted is listed in brackets after the
error message itself, as in:
TeXcapacityexceededsorrymainmemorysize263001
Most of the time this error can be fixed
without enlarging . The most common causes are unmatched braces,
extralong lines, and poorlywritten macros. Extralong lines are
often introduced when files are transferred incorrectly between
operating systems, and lineendings are not preserved properly (the
telltale sign of an extralong line error is the complaint
that the bufsize has overflowed)If you really need to extend your 's capacity, the proper method
depends on your installation There is no need (with modern
implementations) to change the defaults in Knuth's WEB source;
but if you do need to do so, use a change file to modify the values set in
module 11, recompile your and regenerate all format filesModern implementations allow the sizes of the various bits of 's
memory to be changed semidynamically Some (such as em) allow
the memory parameters to be changed in commandline switches when
is started; most frequently, a configuration file is read which
specifies the size of the memory On web2cbased systems,
this file is called texmfcnf: see the documentation that comes
with the distribution for other implementations Again, in many
cases, the format files need to be regenerated after changing the
memory parameters110Moving tables and figures in Tables and figures have a tendency to surprise, by floating
away from where they were specified to appear This is in fact
perfectly ordinary document design; any professional typesetting
package will float figures and tables to where they'll fit without
violating the certain typographic rules Even if you use the
placement specifierh for here, the figure or table will not be
printed here if doing so would break the rules; the rules themselves
are pretty simple, and are given on page198, sectionC.9 of the
manual In the worst case, 's rules can cause the
floating items to pile up to the extent that you get an error message
saying Too many unprocessed floats; this means that the limited
set of registers in which stores floating items is full
What follows is a simple checklist of things to do to solve these
problems (the checklist talks throughout about figures, but applies
equally well to tables)Are the placement parameters on your figures right The
default (tbp) is reasonable; you should never simply say h,
for example, since that says if it cant go here, it cant go
anywhere, and as a result all subsequent floats pile up behind itCan you perhaps prevent your figures from floating by adjusting
's placement parameters Again, the defaults are
reasonable, but can be overridden in case of problems The
parameters are described on pages199200, sectionC.9 of the
manualAre there places in your document where you could naturally
put a clearpage command If so, do: the backlog of floats is
cleared after a clearpage (Note that the chapter
command implicitly executes clearpage, so you can't float past
the end of a chapter.)Have a look at the LaTeXeafterpage package (part of
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/required/tools"macroslatexrequiredtools) Its documentation gives as an example the idea
of putting clearpageafter the current page (where it
will clear the backlog, but not cause an ugly gap in your text), but
also admits that the package is somewhat fragile (though it's improving)As a last resort, try the package Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex209/contrib/misc/morefloats.sty"macroslatex209contribmiscmorefloats.sty; this
simply increases the number of floating inserts that can
handle at one time (from18 to36), but that may suit your needsIf you actually wanted all your figures to float to the
end (e.g., for submitting a draft copy of a paper), don't
rely on 's mechanism: get the package Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/endfloat"macroslatexcontribsupportedendfloat to do
the job for you111pagestyleempty on first page in If you use pagestyleempty, but the first page is numbered anyway,
you are probably using the maketitle command too. This is not a bug
but a feature The standard styles are written so that
initial pages (pages containing a maketitle, part, or
chapter) have a different page style from the rest of the document;
Hence, the commands internally issue thispagestyleplain. This is
usually not acceptable behaviour if the surrounding page style is
emptyPossible workarounds include:
Put thispagestyleempty immediately after the maketitle
command, with no blank line between themUse fancyhdrsty, which allows you to customise the
style for initial pages independently of that for body pages It is
available in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/fancyhdr"macroslatexcontribsupportedfancyhdrUse nopagenosty, which suppresses this behaviour It is
available in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/carlisle/nopageno.sty"macroslatexcontribsupportedcarlislenopageno.sty112Underlined text won't breakKnuth made no provision for underlining text: he took the view that
underlining is not a typesetting operation, but rather one that
provides emphasis on typewriters, which typically offer but one
typeface The corresponding technique in typeset text is to switch
from upright to italic text (or viceversa): the command
emph does just that to its argumentNevertheless, typographically illiterate people (such as those that
specify doublespaced
thesis stylesiref="Q-linespace"questionQ-linespace)
continue to require underlining of us, so as distributed
defines an underline command that applies the mathematical
underbar operation to text This technique is not entirely
satisfactory, however: the text gets stuck into a box, and won't break
at line endThe solution is the package Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/other/misc/ulem.sty"macroslatexcontribothermisculem.sty, which redefines the
emph command to underline its argument; the underlined text thus
produced behaves as ordinary emphasised text, and will break over the
end of a line (The package is capable of other peculiar effects,
too: read its documentation, contained within the file itself.)
113Odd behaviour of rm, bf, etc.If commands such as rm and bf have suddenly stopped working in
in the way that you expect, it is likely that your system
administrator has installed a version of LaTeXo with a prototype
version of the NFSS
(iref="latex2e"questionlatex2e)
Complain loudly; ask
your system administrator to replace this version with
LaTeXe (iref="latex2e"questionlatex2e),
in which commands such as rm and bf work just as before if you
are using one of the standard classesarticle, report and book
(among others) In the meantime, use the option
oldlfontsty, which should have been installed at the same time
as NFSS114Old font references such as tenrmLaTeXo defined a large set of commands for access to the fonts
that it had built in to itself For example, various flavours of
cmr could be found as fivrm, sixrm, sevrm,
egtrm, ninrm, tenrm, elvrm, twlrm,
frtnrm, svtnrm, twtyrm and twfvrm
These commands were never documented, but certain packages
nevertheless used them to achieve effects they neededSince the commands weren't public, they weren't included in LaTeXe;
to use the unconverted LaTeXo packages under LaTeXe, you need
also to include the package rawfontssty (which is part of the
LaTeXe distribution)115Missing symbolsIf some symbols, such as Box and lhd, no longer appear to
exist, then your system administrator has probably upgraded your
version of to either use the prototype NFSS or
LaTeXe itself
(iref="latex2e"questionlatex2e)
In the former case, use
oldlfontsty, iref="rmnonsense"as in the questionrmnonsense
In the latter, use the package latexsym, which is part of the
LaTeXe distribution, or the package amsfonts, if
it is available116 gets crossreferences wrongSometimes, however many times you run , the crossreferences
are just wrong. Remember that
the label command must come after the caption command, or
be part of it. For example,
lll
beginfigurebeginfigure
captionAFigureorcaptionAFigure
labelfiglabelfig
endfigureendfigure
117 and in macro namesA common source of problems in a document is the diagnostic
about the appearance of the command , or about other commands
containing the character The most common complaint is You
cant use spacefactor in vertical mode, but others occurSuch problems are usually caused by including a LaTeXe class or
package file into a document by some means other than
documentclass or usepackage defines internal
commands whose names contain the character ; this enables it to
avoid clashes between its internal names and names that we would
normally use in our documents In order that these commands may work
at all, documentclass and usepackage play around with the
meaning of Solve this problem by using the correct command to
include the fileBut, you will say, The Companion tells me to use
commands containing Indeed; for example, there's a lengthy section about
startsection and how to use it to control the appearance of
section titles Page15 of The Companion explains this; and
suggests that you make such changes in the document preamble, between
makeatletter and makeatother So the definition of
subsection on page26 could be:makeatletterrenewcommandsubsectionstartsectionsubsectionnamenormalfontnormalsizeitshapestylemakeatother118Where are the msx and msy fonts?The msx and msy fonts were designed by the American Mathematical
Society in the very early days of , for use in typesetting
papers for mathematical journals They were designed using the oldMF, which wasn't portable and is no longer available; for a long
time they were only available in 300dpi versions which only
imperfectly matched modern printers The AMS has now redesigned the
fonts, using the current version of MF, and the new versions are
called the msa and msb families; they are available from
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/fonts/ams/amsfonts-symbols"fontsamsamsfontssymbolsNevertheless, msx and msy continue to turn up to plague us There
are, of course, still sites that haven't got around to upgrading; but,
even if everyone upgraded, there would still be the problem of old
documents that specify themIf you have a tex source that requests msx and msy, the best
technique is to edit it so that it requests msa and msb (you only
need to change the single letter in the font names)If you have a DVI file that requests the fonts, there is a package
of
virtual fonts (iref="virtualfonts"questionvirtualfonts)
to map the old to the new series; it's available in Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/fonts/vf-files/msx2msa"fontsvffilesmsx2msa119Where are the am fonts?One still occasionally comes across a request for the am
series of fonts The initials stood for Almost [Computer] Modern,
and they were the predecessors of the Computer Modern fonts that we
all know and love (or hate)The fonts acquired their label Almost following the realisation
that their first implementation in MF79 still wasn't quite right;
Knuth's original intention had been that they were the final answer
There's not a lot one can do with these
fonts; they are (as their name implies) almost (but not quite) the
same as the cm series; if you're faced with a document that requests
them, all you can reasonably do is to edit the document The
appearance of DVI files that request them is sufficiently rare that
noone has undertaken the mammoth task of creating a translation of
them by means of virtual fonts; however, most drivers let you have a
configuration file in which you can specify font substitutions. If you
specify that every am font should be replaced by its corresponding
cm font, the output should be almost correct120String too long in BibTeXThe BibTeX diagnostic Warningyouve exceeded 1000, the
globalstringsize, for entry foo usually arises from a very
large abstract or annotation included in the database The diagnostic
usually arises because of an infelicity in the coding of
abstractbst, or styles derived from it (One doesn't
ordinarily output annotations in other styles.)The solution is to make a copy of the style file (or get a clean copy
from CTANHref="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/biblio/bibtex/contrib/abstract.bst"bibliobibtexcontribabstract.bst), and rename it (e.g., on a
long filename system to abstractlongbst) Now edit it: find
function outputnonnull and
change its first line (line 60 in the version on CTAN)
from s to swap, anddelete its last line, which just says s (line 84 in the
version on CTAN)
Finally, change your bibliographystyle command to refer to the
name of the new fileThis technique applies equally to any bibliography style: the same
change can be made to any similar outputnonnull functionIf you're reluctant to make this sort of change, the only way forward
is to take the entry out of the database, so that you don't encounter
BibTeX's limit, but you may need to retain the entry because it
will be included in the typeset document In such cases, put the body
of the entry in a separate file:
articlelongboringauthorFredVerboseabstractinputabstractslongtex
In this way, you arrange that all BibTeX has to deal with is the
file name, though it will tell (when appropriate) to include
all the long textPart QWhy does it do that?121What's going on in my include commands?The original provided the include command to address the
problem of long documents: with the relatively slow computers of the
time, the companion includeonly facility was a boon With the
vast increase in computer speed, includeonly is less valuable
(though it still has its place in some very large projects)
Nevertheless, the facility is retained in current , and causes
some confusion to those who misunderstand itIn order for includeonly to work, include makes a separate
aux file for each included file, and makes a checkpoint of
important parameters (such as page, figure, table and footnote
numbers); as a direct result, it must clear the current page
both before and after the include command What's more, this
mechanism doesn't work if a include command appears in a file
that was included itself: diagnoses this as an errorSo, we can now answer the two commonest questions about include:
Why does throw a page before and after include
commands Answer: because it has to If you don't like it, replace the
include command with input you won't be able to use
includeonly any more, but you probably don't need it anyway, so
don't worryWhy can't I nest included files? I always used to be able to under LaTeXo Answer: in fact, you couldn't, even under LaTeXo, but the failure
wasn't diagnosed However, since you were happy with the behaviour
under LaTeXo, replace the include commands with input
commands (with clearpage as appropriate)122Why does it ignore paragraph parameters?When is laying out text, it doesn't work from word to word, or
from line to line; the smallest complete unit it formats is the
paragraph The paragraph is laid down in a buffer, as it appears, and
isn't touched further until the endparagraph marker is processed
It's at this point that the paragraph parameters have effect; and it's
because of this sequence that one often makes mistakes that lead to
the paragraph parameters not doing what one would have hoped (or
expected)Consider the following sequence of :
raggedrightdeclarationforraggedtextHerestexttoberangedleftinouroutputbutitstheonlysuchparagraphsowenowendthegroupHeresmorethatneedntberagged will open a group, and set the raggedsetting parameters within
that group; it will then save a couple of sentences of text and
close the group (thus restoring the previous value of the
raggedsetting parameters) Then it encounters a blank line, which it
knows to treat as a par token, so it typesets the two sentences;
but because the enclosing group has now been closed, the parameter
settings have been lost, and the paragraph will be typeset normallyThe solution is simple: close the paragraph inside the group, so that
the setting parameters remain in place An appropriate way of doing
that is to replace the last three lines above with:
endthegroupparHeresmorethatneedntberagged
In this way, the paragraph is completed while the setting parameters
are still in force within the enclosing groupAnother alternative is to define an environment that does the
appropriate job for you For the above example, already
defines an appropriate one:
beginflushleftHerestexttoberangedleftendflushleft123What's the reason for protection?Sometimes saves data it will reread later. These data are
often the argument of some command; they are the socalled moving
arguments (Moving because data are moved around.) Places to look for
are all arguments that may go into table of contents, list of figures,
etc.; namely, data that are written to an auxiliary file and
read in later Other places are those data that might appear in head
or footlines Section headers and figure captions are the most
prominent examples; there's a complete list in Lamport's book
(see iref="Q-books"questionQ-books)What's going on really, behind the scenes? The commands in the moving
arguments are already expanded to their internal structure during the
process of saving. Sometimes this expansion results in invalid
code when processed again. protectcmd tells to save
cmd as cmd, without expansionWhat is a fragile command It's a command that expands into illegal
code during the save processWhat is a robust command It's a command that expands into legal
code during the save processNoone (of course) likes this situation; the 3 team have
removed the need for protection of some things in the production of
LaTeXe, but the techniques available to them within current
mean that this is an expensive exercise It remains a
longterm aim of the team to remove all need for these things124Why doesn't verb work within?The verbatim commands work by changing category codes Knuth
says of this sort of thing Some care is needed to get the timing
right, since once the category code has been assigned to a
character, it doesn't change So verb has to assume that it is
getting the first look at its parameter text; if it isn't, has
already assigned category codes so that verb doesn't have a
chance For example:
verberror
will work (typesetting error), but
newcommandunbrace11unbraceverberror
will not (it will attempt to execute error) Other errors one
may encounter are verb ended by end of line, or even verb
illegal in command argumentThis is why the book insists that verbatim
commands must not appear in the argument of any other command; they
aren't just fragile, they're quite unusable in any command parameter,
regardless of
protection (iref="Q-protect"questionQ-protect)125Casechanging oddities provides two primitive commands uppercase and
lowercase to change the case of text; they're not much used, but
are capable creating confusionThe two commands do not expand the text that is their parameter
the result of uppercaseabc is ABC, but uppercaseabc
is always abc, whatever the meaning of abc The commands
are simply interpreting a table of equivalences between upper and
lowercase characters
They have (for example) no mathematical sense, and
uppercaseAboutyfx
will produce
ABOUTYFX
which is probably not what is wantedIn addition, uppercase and lowercase do not deal very well
with nonAmerican characters, for example uppercaseae is the
same as ae provides commands MakeUppercase and MakeLowercase
which fixes the latter problem These commands are used in the
standard classes to produce upper case running heads for chapters
and sectionsUnfortunately MakeUppercase and MakeLowercase do not solve
the other problems with uppercase, so for example a section
title containing begintabularendtabular will
produce a running head containing beginTABULAR The simplest
solution to this problem is using a userdefined command, for
example:
newcommandmytablebegintabularendtabularsectionAsectiontitleprotectmytablewithatable
Note that mytable has to be protected, otherwise it will be
expanded and made upper case126Why are signs doubled in macros?The way to think of this is that gets replaced by in just the
same way that 1 gets replaced by whatever is the first argumentSo if you define a macro and use it as:
defa1111ab
the macro expansion produces bbb,
which people find normal However, if we now replace part of the macro:
defa11defx1xxx1ab will expand to bdefxbxxxb This
defines x to be a macro delimited by b, and taking no
arguments, which people may find strange, even though it is just a
specialisation of the example above If you want a to
define x to be a macro with one argument, you need to write:
defa11defx1xxx1
and ab will expand to
bdefx1xxx1, because 1 gets replaced by b
and gets replaced by To nest a definition inside a definition inside a definition then
you need 1, as at each stage is replaced by
At the next level you need 8s each time, and so on127Why does split footnotes across pages? splits footnotes when it can think of nothing better to do
Typically, when this happens, the footnote mark is at the bottom of
the page, and the complete footnote would overfill the page
could try to salvage this problem by making the page short of both the
footnote and the line with the footnote mark, but its priorities told
it that splitting the footnote would be preferableAs always, the best solution is to change your text so that the
problem doesn't occur in the first place Consider whether the text
that bears the footnote could move earlier in the current page, or on
to the next pageIf this isn't possible, you might want to change 's perception
of its priorities: they're controlled by
interfootnotelinepenalty the larger it is, the less willing
is to split footnotesSetting
interfootnotelinepenalty10000
inhibits split footnotes altogether, which will cause Underfullvbox messages unless you also specify raggedbottom The
default value of the penalty is 100, which is rather mildAn alternative technique is to juggle with the actual size of the
pagesenlargethispage changes the size of the current page by
its argument (for example, you might say
enlargethispagebaselineskip to add a single line to the page,
but you can use any ordinary length such as 15mm or 20pt
as argument) Reducing the size of the current page could force the
offending text to the next page; increasing the size of the page may
allow the footnote to be included in its entirety It may be
necessary to change the size of more than one page128Getting marginpar on the right sideIn twoside documents, makes stirling attempts to put
marginpars in the correct margin (the outer or the gutter margin,
according to the user's command) However, a boobytrap arises
because runs its page maker asynchronously If a
marginpar is processed while page n is being being built, but
doesn't get used until page n1, then the marginpar will turn
up on the wrong side of the pageThe solution to the problem is for to remember which side
of the page each marginparshould be on The package
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/mparhack"macroslatexcontribsupportedmparhack does this, using marks stored in the aux file129Why does PiCTeX run out of
dimens?PiCTeX uses a lot of 's counter and length registers Since
only has 256 of each, it's therefore often impossible to load
PiCTeXThe Cont modules mpictextex (for plain and
variants) or mpictexsty (for both files are
available from Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/context-tmf"macroscontexttmf)mpictextex provides
an ingenious solution to the problem based on hacking the code of
newdimen itselfAn alternative is Andreas Schrell's pictexwd packages (from
Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/graphics/pictex-addon"graphicspictexaddon, which replaces PiCTeX itself and simply
uses less registers130Why won't fixed names stay changed? has many commands that define the names that are used for
common functions in document for example, chaptername,
figurename, and so on These names allow users to adjust the
appearance of their documents, most notably when the document itself
is being written in a language other than 's default EnglishThe babel package, of course, uses this mechanism
extensively, setting up a new set of names whenever the user declares
that the current language is changing However, babel's
defaults are not to everyone's liking, so users often want to change
names after they've loaded babelThe simplest approach:
usepackagefrenchbbabelrenewcommandrefnameBibliographie
doesn't work: babel actually performs its
selectlanguage operation at the start of the document, and so the
renewcommand is lost For a singlelanguage document, the
sequence:
usepackagefrenchbbabelAtBeginDocumentrenewcommandrefnameBibliographie
will overcome this problem, but this solution is not stable if the
document later becomes a multilanguage one, the original version of
refname will be restored every time the language switches back to
French The solution is to use the babel command
addto, as follows:
usepackagefrenchbbabeladdtocaptionsfrenchbrenewcommandrefnameBibliographieThis last code will establish the new name for use at every
change of to the language, and is the recommended way for defining new
names The captionsfrenchb shown above is an example: in general
the name to use is captionsyourlanguage, where
yourlanguage is the language option given to babel
in the first placePart RCurrent Projects131LaTeXe (the new standard )LaTeXe is the version of prepared and supported by the
3 project team (iref="LaTeX3"questionLaTeX3)
With the advent of LaTeXe, users gained a formal support structure,
and the knowledge that bug fixes would be incorporated into the
distribution on a fairly regular basis (new releases appear at
approximately 6month intervals)LaTeXe is so structured that significant enhancements may be added
using macro addons, rather than by the different formats that
were the bane of the LaTeXo worldLaTeXe is upwardly compatible with LaTeXo, but has new
features In the latest (June 1999) release, these include:
The font selection scheme is different (based on the New Font
Selection Scheme (NFSS) described by Frank Mittelbach and
Rainer Schopf in TUGboat 10(2) The NFSS the user may
select a font by specifying an array of required properties (such as
size, weight and series); commands that provide the LaTeXo syntax
remainSliTeX is now merely a different document class, so that
there is no longer a need for a separate formatBetter control of floating environments, such as figuresThere is a documented interface for package and class writers
(though not yet for designers)The box commands have been enhanced, with e.g., options to
specify the height of a minipageSeveral standard commands are no longer
fragile (iref="Q-protect"questionQ-protect);
they can therefore be included in the argument of commands such as
caption without being protectednewcommand can define commands with one optional argument;
such commands are automatically robust; there is also a separate
command to define robust commandsThere are standard packages for graphics inclusion and colour
typesettingThere is standard support for typesetting in cyrillic132The 3 projectThe 3 project team (see http://www.latex-project.org/latex3.html)
is a small group of volunteers whose aim is
to produce a major new document processing system based on the
principles pioneered by Leslie Lamport in the current It
will remain freely available and it will be fully documented at
all levelsThe 3 team's first product,
LaTeXe (iref="latex2e"questionlatex2e),
was delivered in 1994, and the team undertakes its maintenance133The Omega projectOmega
()
is a program built as an extension of the sources which works
internally with 16bit
characters (Unicode); this allows it to work with most scripts in the
world with much reduced coding scheme complications Omega also has a
powerful concept of input and output filters to allow the user to work
with existing transliteration schemes, etc Omega is an
ongoing project by John Plaice (plaicecseunsweduau) and
Yannis Haralambous (YannisHaralambousunivlille1fr) An
email discussion list is available: subscribe by sending a message
subscribeomegayour name to listservensfrThe base distribution of
was released in November 1996; it is available via Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/omega"systemsomegaImplementations of Omega are available as part of the te,
mik, fp and CMac distributions
(QrefTeXsystems)134The NTS projectThe NTS project first saw the light of day at the Hamburg meeting
of DANTE during 1992, as a response to an aspiration to
produce something even better than The project is not simply
enhancing , for two reasons: first, that itself has been
frozen by Knuth
(see iref="tex-future"questiontex-future), and second,
even if they were allowed to develop the program, some members
of the NTS team feel that in its present form is simply
unsuited to further development While all those involved in the
project are involved with, and committed to, , they recognise
that the end product may very well have little in common with
other than its philosophyInitially, and despite the reservations expressed at the inaugural meeting,
the group is concentrating on extending per se: members are
implementing extensions and enhancements to through the standard
medium of a changefile These extensions and enhancements, together
with proper, form a system called eTeX, which is 100
compatible with furthermore, it is possible during format
creation to construct a format that is: no extensions or
enhancements are presentThe final aim of the project will be to produce an entirely new
typesetting system, building on the experience gained in the earlier
phases This system is intended to provide a stable basis
for typesetting in the future, in the way that has since it was
first offered to the worldA distribution of eTeX was made available in November 1996 It is
available via Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/e-tex"systemsetex; eTeX is also distributed on the
Live CDROM
(see iref="Q-CD"questionQ-CD)135The PDF projectPDF (formerly known as 2PDF) arose from Han
The Thanh's postgraduate research at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech
Republic The basic idea is very simple: to provide a version of
that can output PDF as an alternative format to
DVI PDF implements a small number of new
primitives, to switch to PDF output, and to control various
PDF features Han The Thanh is continuing work on the project;
the latest version is available from Href="ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/systems/pdftex"systemspdftex, and a version
was distributed on the Live CDROM
(see iref="Q-CD"questionQ-CD)Part SPerhaps There isn't an Answer136What to do if you find a bugFor a start, make entirely sure you have found a bug
Doublecheck with books about , , or whatever you're using;
compare what you're seeing against the other answers above; ask every
possible person you know who has any related expertise
The reasons for all this caution are variousIf you've found a bug in itself, you're a rare animal indeed
Don Knuth is so sure of the quality of his code that he offers real
money prizes to finders of bugs; the cheques he writes are
such rare items that they are seldom cashed. If you
think you have found a genuine fault in itself (or MF, or the
CM fonts, or the book), don't immediately write to Knuth,
however. He only looks at bugs once or twice a year, and even then
only after they are agreed as bugs by a small vetting team. In the
first instance, contact Barbara Beeton at the AMS
(bnbmathamsorg), or contact
TUG (iref="Q-TUG"questionQ-TUG)If you've found a bug in LaTeXe, look in the bugs database to see if it's already been reported If not you should submit details of
the bug to the 3 team To do this, you should
process the file latexbugtex with (the file is part
of the LaTeXe distribution The process will give you instructions
about what to do
with your bug report (it can, for example, be sent to the team by
email) Please be sparing of the team's time; they're
doing work for the good of the whole community, and any time
they spend tracking down nonbugs is time not available to write or
debug new code Details of the whole process, and an interface to the
database, are available via
http://www.latex-project.org/help.htmlIf you've found a bug in LaTeXo, or some other such unsupported
software, there's not a lot you can do about it You may find help or
de facto support on a newsgroup such as
comptextex or on a mailing list such as
texhaxtexacuk, but posting nonbugs to any of these forums
can lay you open to ridicule Otherwise you need to go out and find
yourself a willing consultant TUG maintains a
register of consultants (see
http://www.tug.org/consultants.html)