LATEX News
Issue 8, December 1997 (LATEX release 1997-12-01)

New supported font encodings

Graphics

Two new font encodings are supported as options to thefontenc package:

The special oztex.def driver file has been removed, andOzTEX support has been merged with dvips, following
advice from Andrew Trevorrow about OzTEX 3.x.
The keyval package has had some internal
improvements: to use LATEX format error messages; andto avoid ‘# doubling’. This latter change means that thecommand key for the graphicx version of\includegraphics should now be used with one #rather than two. For example, command = ‘gunzip #1.
Fortunately this key is almost never used in practice, sofew if any documents should be affected by this change.

OT4 This is a seven-bit encoding designed for Polish.
The LATEX support was developed by Mariusz Olko.
TS1 This is the ‘Text Companion Encoding’; itcontains symbols designed to be used in text, as opposed
to mathematical formulas, and some accents designed
for uppercase letters. It is currently supported by the‘tc’ fonts, which match the T1 encoded ‘ec’ text fonts.
A subset of the glyphs in this encoding is supported byvirtual fonts distributed with the PostScript fontmetrics on the ctan archives. (This is the ‘8c’ encodingin Karl Berry’s fontname scheme.) The textcomp
package provides access to this encoding but here is awarning to current users of that package: some of theinternal names for the characters have changed.

New input encodings
These additions to the inputenc package are decmulti(the DEC Multinational Character Set, contributed byM. Y. Chartoire) and cp1250 (an MS-Windows
encoding for Central and Eastern Europe, contributedby Marcin Woliński). There is also a cp1252 encodingthat is identical to ansinew.

Tools
The calc package (used in many examples in The LATEXCompanion) has been contributed to this distribution
by Kresten Krab Thorup and Frank Jensen. This isessentially the same as the version that has been
available from the ctan archives for some time, with
one minor change: to use LATEX-style error messages. It
enables the use of arithmetic expressions withinarguments to standard LATEX commands where a length
or a counter value is required. For example:\setcounter {page} { \value{page} * 2 + 1 }\parbox { 3in - ( 2mm + \textwidth / 9 ) }There have also been some improvements to several
other packages in this collection. In particular, bm now
works correctly with constructions such as \bm{f’}involving ’ or other characters which use TEX’s special“\mathcode"8000” feature. Also, multicol sets thelength \columnwidth to an appropriate value; thisenables it to work with classes that support two-column
setting, e.g., the AMS classes.

LATEX3 experimental programming conventions
As announced at the TEX Users Group meeting(Summer 1997), a group of highly experimental
packages will soon be released to allow experienced
TEX programmers to experiment with, and comment
on, a proposed set of syntax conventions and basic
data-types that might form the basis for programminglarge scale projects in TEX. They will be located inthis CTAN directory:
CTAN:macros/latex/packages/expl3
The documentation of this material is as follows:
individual package files provide outline, draft
documentation; there is an article that gives anoverview of the syntax and related concepts; there is areadme.txt file containing a brief description of thecollection.
All aspects of these packages are liable, indeed likely,
to change. They should not be used at this stage foranything that requires a stable system. However, we do
encourage people to experiment with these packages,
and to send comments on them to the LaTeX-L mailinglist. To subscribe to this list, mail to:listserv@urz.uni-heidelberg.de
the following one line message:
subscribe LATEX-L <first-name> <second-name>

LATEX News, and the LATEX software, are brought to you by the LATEX Project Team; Copyright 1997, all rights reserved.