LATEX News
Issue 12, December 1999 (LATEX release 1999-12-01)

LPPL update
Since the release of the LATEX Project Public Licenceversion 1.1, we have received a small number of queries
which resulted in some minor changes to improve thewording or explain the intentions better. As aconsequence this release now contains LPPL 1.2 in thefile lppl.txt and the previous versions as
lppl-1-0.txt and lppl-1-1.txt.

fixltx2e package
This package provides fixes to LATEX 2ε which aredesirable but cannot be integrated into the LATEX 2εkernel directly as they would produce a version
incompatible to earlier releases (either in formatting orfunctionality).
By having these fixes in the form of a package, users
can benefit from them without the danger that their
documents will fail, or produce unexpected results, atother sites; this works because a document will containa clear indication (the \usepackage line, preferablywith a required date) that at least some of these fixes
are required to format it.

Outcome of TUG ’99 (Vancouver)
The slides from the tug’99 presentation we gave on anew interface for LATEX class designers are available
from the LATEX Project website; look for the filetug99.pdf at:
http://www.latex-project.org/talks/
Please note that this document was intended only to
be informal “speaker’s notes” for our own use. We
decided to make them available (the speaker’s notes aswell as the slides that were presented) because several
people requested copies after the talk. However, they
are not in a polished copy-edited form and are notintended for publication.
Prototype implementations of parts of this interface
are now available from:xparse Prototype implementation of the interface fordeclaring document command syntax. See the .dtx files
for documentation.
template Prototype implementation of the templateinterface (needs parts of xparse).
The file template.dtx in that directory has a large
section of documentation at the front describing thecommands in the interface and giving a ‘worked
example’ building up some templates for caption
formatting.
xcontents Interface description for table of contents
data (no code yet). Coding examples have beenthoroughly discussed on the latex-l list.
xfootnote Working examples for generating footnotes,etc. Needs xparse and template.
All examples are organised in subdirectories andadditionally available as gzip tar files.
Please remember that this material is intended only
for experimentation and comments; thus any aspect ofit, e.g., the user interface or the functionality, maychange and, in fact, is very likely to change. For thisreason it is explicitly forbidden to place this material on
cd-rom distributions or public servers.
These concepts, as well as their implementation, areunder discussion on the list LATEX-L. You can join thislist, which is intended solely for discussing ideas andconcepts for future versions of LATEX, by sending mail tolistserv@URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE containing the line
SUBSCRIBE LATEX-L Your Name
This list is archived and, after subscription, you canretrieve older posts to it by sending mail to the above
address, containing a command such as:
GET LATEX-L LOGyymm
where yy=Year and mm=Month, e.g.
GET LATEX-L LOG9910
for all messages sent in October 1999.

http://www.latex-project.org/code/
experimental/
We are continuing to add new material at thislocation so as to stimulate further discussion of theunderlying concepts. As of December 1, 1999 thefollowing parts can be downloaded.
LATEX News, and the LATEX software, are brought to you by the LATEX Project Team; Copyright 1999, all rights reserved.