LATEX News
Issue 11, June 1999 (LATEX release 1999-06-01)

Back in sync
The last release of LATEX was delayed even longer thanyou have come to expect. We hope that it proved worth
waiting for. It required a major integration of the codefrom several people and, independently, theintroduction of the LPPL (see LATEX News 10) plus
several related changes to our internal systems. It
therefore seemed sensible to wait until everything wascomplete rather than do things in too much hurry.
This seem to have been a successful strategy as therecent patch release was related to an isolated changethat was done many months previously. If this release
does not appear a lot closer to its nominal date then. . . well, you will not be reading this sentence!

Yearly release cycles
With the year 2000 rapidly approaching, we intend toswitch to a release frequency of just one per year (withpatches if necessary) for the core of LATEX 2ε . Thesedays the system is sufficiently stable that the original
update policy is costing everybody more time than is
now warranted.

LPPL update
Thanks to extensive and valuable input from Matt
Swift (swift@alum.mit.edu) we now have a clearer andmore detailed form of the LATEX Project Public Licence.
This release contains both the original version (inlppl-1-0.txt) and the updated version, LPPL 1.1.

The future of SliTEX
We still get a very small trickle of reports about thispart of the system (if you are no longer able to recall
LATEX 2.09 then you will know it as the slides class).
We have not classified them (in our minds at least) as
bugs since we have always known that there are many
problems with this class. It is clear to us that the only
sensible action would be to redesign the systemcompletely; in particular, to remove much of its
complexity whose purpose is to support 10-year-old
overlay technology. However, this would take a lot too
much time and would be completely out of proportion
to its current usage.
We are therefore planning to make the slides classunsupported in the sense that any problem related tothe use of invisible fonts is considered to be a feature(The LATEX 2ε manual by Leslie Lamport doesn’t evendescribe this part of the class any more). Of course, if it
still has its enthusiasts then we are happy to cede it totheir loving care (somewhat like a preserved steam
locomotive, in some parts of the world).

Fontenc package peculiarities
The \usepackage interface normally ensures that apackage is loaded only once. The fontenc package has
become an exception to this rule: it can be loaded
several times using different options, e.g., allowing theuser to add a font encoding in the preamble. This
comes at a price for package writers: the low-levelcommands (see ltclass.dtx) used to check if apackage was loaded, and with which options, do notwork for the fontenc package.

New math font encodings
As we announced in LATEX News 9, a joint working
group of the TEX Users Group and the LATEX Project
has developed a new 8-bit math font encoding for TEX.
The reason why this work is not yet released is becauseof other exciting developments in the world of mathfonts and math characters. It is obviously wise toensure that the encoding work is fully integrated withthe available fonts.
Those interested are reminded that further
information about the Math Font Group may be foundon the World Wide Web at:
http://www.tug.org/twg/mfg/.

Tools distribution
The multicol package has now got a small but usefulextension which allows you to force a column breakwhere this is really necessary. This is done with thecommand \columnbreak, which can be used like
\pagebreak (e.g., within paragraphs) except that it
cannot have an optional argument and thus it always
forces a new column.

Coming soon
Major work on a new class file structure to support
flexible designs is well under way; some of this work willbe presented at the TUG’99 conference in Vancouver,
Canada. With a bit of luck much of this work could beready for integration into the next release—so watch
this space!

LATEX News, and the LATEX software, are brought to you by the LATEX Project Team; Copyright 1999, all rights reserved.