LATEX News
Issue 4, December 1995 (LATEX release 1995-12-01)

Welcome to LATEX News 4
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. This issue
accompanies the fourth release of LATEX 2ε .

LATEX getting smaller
The last release in June started a trend of LATEX
becoming smaller, we are pleased to announce that thishas continued with this release. In particular theexperimental ‘autoload’ version described inautoload.txt is much smaller as more parts of LATEX
are autoloaded.

New ‘concurrent’ docstrip
The time taken to ‘unpack’ this release from thedocumented sources should be much reduced (roughly
half the time, depending on installation conditions).
This is due to an improved version of the docstrip
program that has been contributed by Marcin Woliński.
This can write up to 16 files at once. The previous
version could only write one file at a time which meantthat it was very slow when producing many small files
from the same source file as the source needed to be
re-read for each file written.

New T1 encoded fontsThis year Jörg Knappen has completed a new release ofthe ‘Cork’ (T1) encoded Computer Modern fonts: thedc fonts release 1.2.
This release of the dc fonts fixes many bugs
(including the missing ?‘ (¿) and !‘ (¡) ligatures) andimproves the fonts in many other ways. It is strongly
recommended that you upgrade as soon as possible if
currently you are using the old dc fonts, release 1.1 orearlier. The new fonts are available from the CTAN
archives, in tex-archive/fonts/dc.
The names of the font files are different. This does
not affect LATEX documents but does affect theinstallation procedure as it assumes that you have thenew fonts, and will write suitable ‘fd’ files for those
fonts. If you have not yet upgraded your dc fonts then,after unpacking the distribution, you must
latex olddc.ins to produce ‘fd’ files for the old dc
fonts. This must be done before the format is made.
Running the test document at ltxcheck.tex the end of

the installation will inform you if the wrong set of ‘fd’files has been installed.
Note that this change does not affect the standard‘OT1’ Computer Modern fonts that LATEX uses bydefault.

More robust commands
The commands \cite and \sqrt are now robust.
Although most commands with optional arguments
are fragile, as documented, such commands definedusing the second optional argument of \newcommandand its derivatives are now robust.

New Interface to building ‘extension’ classes
The mechanism provided by \DeclareOption,\ProcessOptions and \LoadClass has proved to be a
powerful and expressive means of defining one class interms of another ‘base’ class. However there have beensome requests to simplify the declaration of thecommon case where you want the ‘base’ class to becalled with all the options that were specified to theextension class. This is now provided by the newcommand \LoadClassWithOptions. A similarcommand \RequirePackageWithOptions is provided
for package use. More details of this feature areprovided in clsguide.tex and ltclass.dtx.

More Input Encodings
The experimental inputenc package allows a morenatural style of input of accented and other characters.
Three new input encodings are now supported.
• ansinew the Windows ansi encoding, as used inMicrosoft Windows 3.x.
• cp437de a variant of cp437, which uses ß ratherthan β in the appropriate slot.
• next the encoding used on Next computers.

Further information
For more information on TEX and LATEX, get in touchwith your local TEX Users Group, or the international
TEX Users Group, 1850 Union Street, #1637, San
Francisco, CA 94123, USA, Fax: +1 415 982 8559,
EMail: tug@tug.org. The LATEX home page is
http://www.tex.ac.uk/ctan/latex/ and containslinks 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.