LATEX News
Issue 15, December 2003 (LATEX release 2003-12-01)

Anniversary release

Fixing font sizes

Yes, it’s now 10 years since the first release in this series
and, for Knuthists, this release also contains Issue 16 !
Meanwhile this Issue 15 describes the major newfeatures in the current release whilst Issue 16 looks
a little way into the future of LATEX.

The new fix-cm package, by Walter Schmidt, changes
the CM font definition (.fd) files so that similar design
sizes are used in both the OT1 and T1 encodings.

LPPL – new version
Most importantly, there is now a new version, 1.3, ofthe LATEX Project Public Licence. Many of you willbe thrilled to know that, following the exchange of over
1600 e-mail messages dissecting various aspects of its
philosophy such as ‘how many angels can appear in thename of a file before it becomes non-free’, this version
is now officially a DFSG (Debian Free Software
Guidelines) approved license. The discussions start at
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/
debian-legal-200207/threads.html with hightraffic throughout August to October 2002
and further heated discussions starting in
April 2003 and concluding around June at
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/
debian-legal-200306/msg00206.html.
The important features of the new version are usefulclarifications in the wording, and revised procedures
for making a change to the Current Maintainer of apackage. Special thanks to all those people from
Debian Legal who worked constructively with uson this onerous task, especially but not exclusively
Jeff Licquia and Branden Robinson.

Small updates to varioref
The English has been corrected in \reftextbefore (anincompatible change). There are other extensions such
as \labelformat, \Ref, \Vref and \vpagerefnum.
Some Dutch text has also been changed and two
new options added: slovak and slovene.

New and more robust commands
Many of the math mode commands for compound
symbols have been made robust and a new robustcommand has been added: \nobreakdashes. This lastis a low-level command, borrowed from the amsmathpackage, for use only before hyphens or dashes. It
prevents the line break that is normally allowed
after the following sequence of dashes.

Font encodingsA number of options have been added to the textcomp
package, enabling only available glyphs to be used.
Also, the ‘NFSS font families’ are now divided into fivedifferent groups according to the subset of glyphs eachprovides from the full collection of symbols in the TS1
encoding. Given sufficient information about a fontfamily textcomp will use this in order to limit thetypesetting to those glyphs that are available.
Use of this mechanism has also enhanced\oldstylenums to use the current font if possible.

Displaying font tables
With the nfssfont package you can now specify the font
to display by giving its ‘NFSS classification’, ratherthan needing to know its external font file’s name. It isalso now possible to generate large collections of font
tables in batch mode by providing a suitable input file.

New input encodings
The inputenc package has been extended as follows:
macce input encoding (Apple Central European),thanks to Radek Tryc and Marcin Wolinski; cp1257
for Baltic languages; latin10, thanks to Ionel Ciobı̂că.
The euro symbol has by now been added to severalencodings: ansinew, cp1250 and cp1252 (which alsohas another addition), whilst cp858 adds it to cp850.

Unicode input
Partial, experimental support for text files that use theUnicode encoding form UTF-8 is now provided by theoption utf8 for the inputenc package.
The only Unicode text file characters supported by
the current version are those based on the mostcommon inputs for glyphs from the small collectionof standard LATEX Latin encodings.

And finally . . . pict2e
The old, non-functional version of this package has been
removed as there is now a fully working version from
Hubert Gäßlein and Rolf Niepraschk. It is described in
The LATEX Manual.

LATEX News, and the LATEX software, are brought to you by the LATEX Project Team; Copyright 2003, all rights reserved.