LATEX News
Issue 9, June 1998 (LATEX release 1998-06-01)

New math font encodings

Tools distribution

A joint working group of the TEX Users Group and theLATEX Project is developing a new 8-bit math fontencoding for TEX. It is designed to overcome several
limitations and implementation problems of the oldmath font encodings and to simplify switching between
different sets of math fonts, much as the LATEX fontselection interface has simplified switching between text
fonts.
Since the work on this project relies entirely on
volunteer work, we cannot give a specific release dateyet. However, a prototype implementation alreadyexists. This contains several sets of virtual fonts, someLATEX packages and a kernel module; we hope tointegrate it into the main LATEX distribution for thenext release.
Documents using only standard LATEX commands formath symbols should not be affected by switching to
the new math font encodings However, documents,
classes or packages making specific assumptions about
the encoding of math symbol fonts are likely to break.
Further information about the Math Font Groupmay be found on the World Wide Web at
http://www.tug.org/twg/mfg/.

The multicol package now supports the production ofmultiple columns without balancing the last page. To
get this effect use the multicols* environment.
The layout package was partly recoded by Hideo
Umeki to display page layout effects in a better way.
As suggested by Donald Arseneau, the calc package
was extended to support the new commands\widthof{text}, \heightof{text}, and \depthof{text}
within a calc-expression. At the same time we modified
a few kernel commands so that calc-expressions can now
be used in various useful places such as the dimension
arguments to the tabular environment and the \rulecommand. For many other standard LATEX commands
this was already possible.

A new math accent
A new math accent, \mathring, has been added. Thisis a math mode version of the ring accent (˚) which isavailable in text mode with the command \r.

Extended \DeclareMathDelimiter
The command \DeclareMathDelimiter has beenextended. Normally this command takes six arguments.
Previously, when being used to declare a character(such as [) as a delimiter, a variant form was used with
only five arguments. The argument specifying thedefault ‘math class’ was omitted. Now the fullsix-argument form may be used in this case. The extra
information is used to implicitly declare the character
via \DeclareMathSymbol for use when the symbol is
not used with \left or \right.
The old five-argument form is detected and will work
as before.

Support for Cyrillic encodings
We are very pleased that, after a lengthy period ofdevelopment, a set of fonts, encodings and support files
for using LATEX with Cyrillic characters will soon beavailable.
Test versions of the ‘LH’ fonts for these Cyrillic
encodings, based on the Computer Modern design, areavailable from CTAN archives in the directory
fonts/cyrillic/lh-test. The LATEX support files (byWerner Lemberg and Vladimir Volovich) are alsoavailable from CTAN archives inmacros/latex/contrib/supported/t2

Default docstrip header
Many LATEX users now distribute packages indocumented source form using the docstrip system.
Docstrip allows a header to be placed on generated
package files, suitable for giving copyright information,or distribution conditions.
We have changed the default version of this header sothat it allows stripped files to be distributed inready-to-run installations such as the TEXLive CD. If
you use the default header for distributing your files you
should check that the new copyright text is acceptable
to you. The file docstrip.dtx explains how to produce
your own header if you wish to do so.

LATEX News, and the LATEX software, are brought to you by the LATEX Project Team; Copyright 1998, all rights reserved.