LATEX NewsIssue 16, December 2003 (LATEX release 2003-12-01)

Anniversary news

LPPL certification

This anniversary Issue 16 takes a brief look into thefuture work of the LATEX Project Team, both short andlonger range. Please let us know if you want to get
involved with us in any of this work (see below).
An overview of the 10th Anniversary Release, dated
2003/12/01, is can be found in Issue 15.

There are still some outstanding diplomatic tasks
around the LATEX Project Public Licence: these include
e.g., getting it ‘OSF certified’ and ensuring that it gainsmore support and wider use, even in the FSF world
where it has long been tolerated.

TLC2: The LAT X Companion – 2nd edition!

We expect that within the next two years, releases ofLATEX will change modestly in order to run best underan extended TEX engine that contains the ε-TEX
primitives, e.g., ε-TEX or pdfTEX. The details of thispossible upgrade need further work so we are notmaking a definite announcement yet.
Although the current release does not require ε-TEXfeatures, we certainly recommend using an extended
TEX, especially if you need to debug macros.

ESince you are reading this newsletter, there is a goodchance that you, or a friend, has already bought thisencyclopedic volume: the incomparable Second
Edition of this work that is every LATEXie’s
ultimate lucky charm.
If by some chance you have not yet purchased yourown copy then get into training, get shopping, and get
flexing your muscles (both physical—it’s 1100+ pages,and intellectual) by using it to discover masses ofinvaluable ‘insider information’ about:• the latest release of Standard LATEX;• over 200 extension packages;• plus related software and systems.
For more information on this all new (??. . . OK,
not all, but over 90%!!), all accurate (we hope!)
10th Anniversary Edition, check out
http://www.awprofessional.com/titles/0201362996.

Future maintenance
We are currently exploring how best to support the verylarge and rapidly growing community of individuals,organisations and enterprises that depend on therobustness and availability of the current standard
LATEX distribution. Although we remain firmly
resolved not to make changes in the base distribution(the kernel) of Standard LATEX, there is still much thatneeds doing to maintain its reliability and utility and tokeep up the necessary level of communication with users
and supporters. Also, as with all advanced softwaresystems, bugs are still turning up occasionally so somefixes are still essential.
One major impediment to providing adequate service
levels in this area is, of course, the difficulties inherent
in obtaining the time and commitment of skilled
minds—hence the appeal above to anyone interested ingetting involved.

Use of ε-TEX/pdfTEX

End of ‘autoload’ support
As computer systems generally grow in capacity,requirements change and so we believe that theautoload variant of LATEX is no longer required. Thus,
although the code remains it is no longer supported.
We hope this does not cause any problems.

New models, new code
In the period 1999–2001 we published many results of
our work over the previous decade on the developmentof new concepts and models for automated typesetting
based on TEX as the underlying platform. These can befound at http://www.latex-project.org/papers/ andhttp://www.latex-project.org/code/experimental/.
Since then a very large proportion of The Team’s
efforts have been diverted to provide the core author
team for TLC2, which provides over 1000 pages ofcarefully researched and tested documentation of many
aspects of the vast world of LATEX related software thatwas developed over that same time period and that
continues to grow and improve prodigiously.
Completion of that task . . . until TLC3!! . . . presents
the possibility of getting back to this more exciting
development work, or even to more radical work on
non-TEX-based models and implementations.
Of course, any such ideas are predicated on ourability to organise (with you, we hope) an efficient
but responsive maintenance and support system
for Standard LATEX.

LATEX News, and the LATEX software, are brought to you by the LATEX Project Team; Copyright 2003, all rights reserved.