LATEX News
Issue 5, June 1996 (LATEX release 1996-06-01)

Welcome to LATEX News 5More input encodings supported

This issue of LATEX News accompanies the fifth releaseof the new standard LATEX, LATEX 2ε .

The inputenc package now supports the IBM
codepage 852 used in Eastern Europe, with theoption [cp852] contributed by Petr Sojka.
Also, the inputenc package now activates most‘control codes’ with ascii values below 32. Currently
none of the encodings in the standard distribution
makes use of these positions.

Extra possibilities for section headings
Most LATEX sectioning commands are defined using\@startsection. For example, the article classdefines:\newcommand\section{\@startsection{section}{1}{0pt}{-3.5ex plus-1ex minus-.2ex}%{2.3ex plus.2ex}{\normalfont\Large\bfseries}}

The last argument specifies the style in which thesection heading is to be typeset.
The new feature added at this release is that at theend of this argument you may specify a command thattakes an argument. This command will be applied tothe section number and heading. For example, one
could use the \MakeUppercase command to produce
uppercase headings. A package or class file could
contain:\renewcommand\section{\@startsection{section}{1}{0pt}{-3.5ex plus-1ex minus-.2ex}%{2.3ex plus.2ex}{\normalfont\Large\MakeUppercase}}to produce section headings using uppercase medium
weight text, rather than the bold text used by article.
Note that, like the font choice, the uppercasing applies
only to the actual heading (including any automaticallygenerated section number), not to the text as it may
appear in the running head or table of contents.

The ‘openany’ option in the ‘book’ class
The openany option allows chapter and similar openings
to occur on left hand pages. Previously this option only
affected \chapter and \backmatter. It now also affects\part, \frontmatter and \mainmatter.

More font (output) encodings
The font encoding name T3 has been allocated to theencoding used in the new 256-character IPA fonts (forthe phonetic alphabet) produced by Rei Fukui. His
package, tipa, gives access to these fonts and should
soon be available. (The encoding named OT3 is the128-character encoding used in the IPA fonts producedby Washington State University.)

Fixes and improvements
The LATEX kernel has only had minor changes, apartfrom \@startsection mentioned above. However, somesmall fixes have been incorporated removing thefollowing problems:• In tabular and array, previous versions of LATEX‘lost’ the inter-column space from an ‘l’-column,
when that column was completely empty.
• Previously, the use of the \nofiles command
could change the vertical spacing in a document.
A side effect of fixing this is that when \nofiles isused, \label puts a blank line in the log file.
• LATEX often loads fonts ‘on demand’. Previously,
this could happen inside the argument of an accentcommand and this would cause the accent toappear in the wrong place.

Changes to the ‘tools’ packages• The longtable package now uses a modified
algorithm, contributed by David Kastrup, to alignthe ‘chunks’ of a table. It is now unnecessary toedit the document to add \setlongtables before
the final run of LATEX. In certain cases ofoverlapping \multicolumn entries, the newalgorithm will produce better column widths thanthe old (at the price of extra passes throughLATEX).
• The dcolumn package now has the extra possibilityof specifying the number of digits both before andafter the ‘decimal point’. This makes it easy tocentre the column of numbers under a wideheading.

New copy of the LATEX bug database
http://www.tex.ac.uk/ctan/latex/bugs.html willsoon have links to a copy of the searchable LATEX bugs

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

database at Mainz (Germany) as well as the original
copy at Sussex (England).

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