LATEX News
Issue 6, December 1996 (LATEX release 1996-12-01)

Welcome to LATEX News 6
This issue of LATEX News accompanies the sixth releaseof the new standard LATEX, LATEX 2ε .

Mono-case file names
Previously LATEX has used some files with ‘mixed-case’
file names such as T1cmr.fd and T1enc.def.
These file names cause problems on some systems (inparticular they are illegal on the ISO 9660 CDROM
format) and so in this release all file names have been
made lowercase (for example t1cmr.fd and t1enc.def).
This change should not affect any document. Within
LATEX, encodings still have the usual uppercase names
in uses such as \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} and\fontencoding{T1}. LATEX will automatically convert
to the lowercase form while constructing the file name.
LATEX will input the ‘fd’ file under the old name if it
fails to find the file with the new name, so existingcollections of fd files should still work with this newrelease.
The change does affect the configuration files that
may be used to make the LATEX format with initex. Forexample, the file fonttext.ltx previously specified\input{T1cmr.fd}. It now has \input{t1cmr.fd}. If
you use a local file fonttext.cfg you will need to makesimilar changes, as \input{T1cmr.fd} will not work as
T1cmr.fd is no longer in the distribution.
The files affected by this change all have names of theform *.fd or *enc.def.

Another input encoding
Thanks to work by Søren Sandmann, the inputenc
package now supports the IBM codepage 865 used in
Scandinavia.

Better user-defined math display environments
Suppose that you want to define an environment fordisplaying text that is numbered as an equation. A
straightforward way to do this is as follows:\newenvironment{texteqn}{\begin{equation}\begin{minipage}{0.9\linewidth}}{\end{minipage}\end{equation}}
However, if you have tried this then you will probably
have noticed that it does not work perfectly when usedin the middle of a paragraph because an inter-word
space appears at the beginning of the first line after theenvironment.
There is now an extra command (with a very longname) available that you can use to avoid this problem;
it should be inserted as shown here:\newenvironment{texteqn}{\begin{equation}\begin{minipage}{0.9\linewidth}}{\end{minipage}\end{equation}\ignorespacesafterend}

Docstrip improvements
The docstrip program that is used to unpack the LATEX
sources has undergone further development. The newversion should be able to process all old ‘batchfiles’ but
it allows a simpler syntax in new ‘batchfiles’ (no need todefine \def\batchfile{. . . ).
It also allows ‘target’ directories to be specified whenwriting files. This directory support is disabled bydefault unless activated in a local docstrip.cfg
configuration file. See docstrip.dtx for details.

AMS LATEX update
Since the last LATEX release in June, the American
Mathematical Society have re-issued the ‘AMSLATEX’classes and packages, fixing several reported problems.

Graphics package update
The LATEX color and graphics packages have been
updated slightly, principally to support more dvi
drivers, see the readme file in the graphics distribution.

EC Fonts released
The first release of the Extended Computer Modern
fonts has just been made. (In January 1997.)
This release of LATEX does not default to these ‘ec’
fonts as its T1 encoded fonts. By default it will use the‘dc’ fonts if the T1 encoding is requested.
As noted in install.txt you may run TEX on theinstall file ec.ins after unpacking the base distribution
but before making the LATEX format. This will produce
suitable ‘fd’ files making LATEX (including, for the firsttime, the slides class) use the ‘ec’ fonts as the default
T1 encoded font set.

LATEX News, and the LATEX software, are brought to you by the LATEX Project Team; Copyright 1996, all rights reserved.