LATEX News
Issue 14, June 2001 (LATEX release 2001-06-01)

Future releases
We are currently exploring how to best support the verylarge community of individuals, organisations andenterprises that depend on the robustness andavailability of the current standard LATEX distribution.
The results of this may lead to some changes in theregular release schedule and the handling of bug reports
during the next year.

It offers the command \traceon, which is similar to\tracingall but suppresses uninteresting stuff such as
font loading by NFSS (which can go on for pages if you
are unlucky). It also offers \traceoff to . . . guess
what! Full details are in the documented source file,
trace.dtx.
In the base ifthen package we have added theuppercase synonyms \NOT \AND and \OR.

New release of Babel (required)

New experimental code

Earlier this year a new release of Babel (3.7) became
available. You can read about its new features in
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/required/babel/announce.txt
One of the bugs that got fixed in this release deals
with how labels are handled by LATEX. Because thispart of the kernel is modified by babel, the relevantchanges need to be coordinated. Therefore to use Babelwith this release of LATEX you will need to update yourversion of babel to at least 3.7.

In LATEX News 12 we announced some ongoing work
towards a ‘Designer Interface for LATEX’ and we
presented some early results thereof. Since then, atGutenberg 2000 in Toulouse and TUG 2000 in Oxford,
we described a new output routine and an improved
method of handling vertical mode material between
paragraphs. In combination these support higherquality automated 1 page-breaking and page make-up
for complex pages—the best yet achieved with TEX!
More recently we have added material to handle thecomplex front matter requirements of journal articles;
this was presented at Gutenberg 2001 in Metz.
A paper describing the new output routine is at

New input encoding latin9
The package inputenc has, thanks to Karsten Tinnefeld,
been extended to cover the latin9 input encoding. TheISO-Latin 9 encoding is a useful modern replacement forISO-Latin 1 that contains a few characters needed forFrench and Finnish. Of wider interest, it also contains
the euro currency sign; this could be the killer argument
for many 8-bit texts to use Latin-9 in the future.
According to a Linux manpage, ISO Latin-9 supports
Albanian, Basque, Breton, Catalan, Danish, Dutch,English, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, Frisian,Galician, German, Greenlandic, Icelandic, Irish Gaelic,Italian, Latin, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Portuguese,
Rhaeto-Romanic, Scottish Gaelic, Spanish and Swedish.
The characters added in latin9 are (in LATEX notation):\texteuro\v S\v s\v Z\v z\OE\oe\" Y

They displace the following characters from latin1:\textcurrency \textbrokenbar\textonequarter \textonehalf\"{}\’{}\c{}\textthreequarters

http://www.latex-project.org/papers/xo-pfloat.pdf

All code examples and documentation are available at
http://www.latex-project.org/code/experimental

This directory has been extended to contain thefollowing.
galley Prototype implementation of the interface
for manipulating vertical material in galleys.
xinitials Prototype implementation of the interface
for paragraph initials (needs the galley package).
xtheorem Contributed example using the template
package to provide a designer interface for theorem
environments.
xor A prototype implementation of the new output
routine as described in the xo-pfloat.pdf paper.
xfrontm A prototype version of the new font matterinterface.

New tools
The new package trace provides many commands tocontrol LATEX’s tracing and debugging output, including
the excellent new information available with ε-TEX suchas the extremely useful tracing of local assignments.
You will find it in the tools distribution.

1 The stress here is on automated!

LATEX News, and the LATEX software, are brought to you by the LATEX Project Team; Copyright 2001, all rights reserved.