LATEX News
Issue 3, June 1995 (LATEX release 1995-06-01)

Welcome to LATEX News 3
An issue of LATEX News will accompany every future
release of LATEX. It will tell you about important
events, such as major bug fixes, newly available
packages, or any other LATEX news.

experimenting with an option to remove the picture
and tabbing environments from the LATEX kernel, andto load them from a file the first time they are used.
This should help LATEX to run on machines with limited
memory. See autoload.txt for details.

June 1995 release of LATEXDistribution and modification

June 1995 sees the third release of LATEX 2ε . We are onschedule to deliver a release of LATEX every six months,
in December and June.
In the last LATEX News, we said “we don’t expect somuch activity in the next six months,” which hasturned out not to be true!

One topic of discussion that has kept us busy is thedistribution and modification conditions of LATEX. We
are committed to keeping LATEX as free reliable
software, and ensuring that (as far as possible) LATEX
documents will produce the same results on all systems.
The modification conditions are currently underdiscussion, and we would like to hear from anyone
interested. Please read modguide.tex for more
information.

Additional input encodings
In the last release of LATEX we distributed a test versionof the inputenc package which allows the use of input
characters other than just a–z and A–Z. The package
has proved to be robust, so we are now distributing an
expanded version. The new release comes with anumber of input encodings:

AMS-LATEX full release• ascii the standard encoding,

The AMS-LATEX packages were still in beta test in theDecember 1994 release of LATEX, and the full releasecame out in January 1995.
AMS-LATEX is described in the User’s Guide(amsldoc.tex) and in The LATEX Companion.

• latin1 the ISO Western European alphabet,

PostScript fonts• latin2 the ISO Eastern European alphabet,• cp437 the IBM codepage 437,
• cp850 the IBM codepage 850, and• applemac the Apple Macintosh encoding.
These can be used by specifying an option to theinputenc package, for example:\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
The new input encodings are currently being tested, butwe don’t expect any major changes.

LATEX getting smaller
In the past releases of LATEX 2ε , the amount of memory
LATEX requires has increased, but we are pleased to saythat this trend has been reversed. We hope that future
releases of LATEX will continue to get smaller.
For example, on this document, the December 1994
release used 52,622 words of memory, and the June 1995
release uses 51,216 words of memory, which is a 2.7%
reduction.
We are currently experimenting with other ways of
reducing the size of LATEX. For example, we are

There is a new test release of the PSNFSS packages foraccessing PostScript fonts in LATEX 2ε . This includes anupdate to all of the fonts, to remove many of theunderfull and overfull \hbox warnings, and improve thesetting of non-English languages.
The new release of LATEX removes all of the ‘hidden’uses of Computer Modern mathematics. For example,
the footnote markers used to use math mode, so always
used Computer Modern digits rather than ones fromthe current text font. This has now been fixed.

Further information
For more information on TEX and LATEX, get in touchwith your local TEX Users Group, or the international
TEX Users Group, P. O. Box 869, Santa Barbara,
CA 93102-0869, USA, Fax: +1 805 963 8358,
EMail: tug@tug.org.
The LATEX home page is
http://www.tex.ac.uk/ctan/latex/ and contains
links to other WWW resources for LATEX.

LATEX News, and the LATEX software, are brought to you by the LATEX Project Team; Copyright 1995, all rights reserved.