LATEX News
Issue 17, December 2005 (LATEX release 2005-12-01)

Project licence news

Updates of required packages

The LATEX Project Public License has been updated
slightly so that it is now version 1.3c. In the warranty
section the phrase “unless required by applicable law”
has been reinstated, having got lost at some point.
Also, it now contains three clarifications: ofthe difference between “maintained” and“author-maintained”; of the term “Base Interpreter”;
and when clause 6b and 6d shall not apply.
Following requests, we now also provide the text ofthe licence as a LATEX document (in the file lppl.tex).
This file can be processed either as a stand-alone
document or it can be included (without anymodification) into another LATEX document, e.g., as anappendix, using \input or \include.

Several of the packages in the tools bundle have been
updated for this release.
The xspace package has some new features. One is aninterface for adding and removing the exceptions it
knows about and another is that it works with active
characters. These remove problems of incompatibility
with the babel system.
In LATEX News 16 we announced that some packages
might begin to take advantage of ε-TEX extensions onsystems where these are available: and the latest
version of xspace does just that. Note also that fixltx2e
will make use of the facilities in ε-TEX whenever theseare present (see below).
The calc package has also been given an update witha few extra commands. The commands \maxof and\minof, each with two brace-delimited arguments,
provide the usual numeric max and min operations. Thecommands \settototalheight and \totalheightof
work like \settoheight and \heightof. There are also
some internal improvements to make calc work withsome more primitive TEX constructs, such as \ifcase.
The varioref package has acquired a few more default
strings but there are still a number of languages forwhich good strings are still missing.
The showkeys package has also been updated slightly
to work with more recent developments in varioref.
Also, it now provides an easy way to define the lookof the printed labels with the command\showkeyslabelformat.

New guide on font encodings
Way back in 1995 work was started on a guide to
document the officially allocated LATEX font encoding
names. However, for one reason or another this guide(named LATEX font encodings) was, until now, notadded to the distribution. It describes the major 7-bit
and 8-bit font encodings used in the LATEX world andexplains the restrictions required of conforming text
font encodings. It also lists all the ‘encoding specificcommands’ (the LICR or LATEX Internal Character
Representation) for characters supported by theencodings OT1 and T1.
When the file encguide.tex is processed by LATEX, it
will attempt to typeset an encoding table for each
encoding it describes. For this to be possible, LATEX
must be able to find .tfm files for a representative
example font for each encoding. If LATEX cannot findsuch a file then a warning is issued and thecorresponding table is omitted.

Robust commands in math
The font changing commands in text-mode have been
robust commands for years, but the same has not beentrue for the math versions such as \mathbf. While themath-mode commands worked correctly in section
heads, they could cause problems in other places suchas index entries. With this release, these math-mode
commands are now robust in the same way as theirtext-mode counterparts.

Work on LATEX fixes
The package known as fixltx2e has three new additions.
A new command \textsubscript has been added as acomplement to the command \textsuperscript in thekernel. Secondly, a new form of \DeclareMathSizes
that allows all of its arguments to have a dimension
suffix. This means you can now use expressions such as\DeclareMathSizes{9.5dd}{9.5dd}{7.4dd}{6.6dd}.
The third new addition is the robust command\TextOrMath which takes two arguments and executes
one of them when typesetting in text or math mode
respectively. This command also takes advantage of
ε-TEX extensions if available; more specifically, whenthe ε-TEX extensions are available, it does not destroy
kerning between previous letters and the text to be

LATEX News, and the LATEX software, are brought to you by the LATEX Project Team; Copyright 2005, all rights reserved.

typeset. The command is also used internally in fixltx2e
to resolve a problem with \fnsymbol.
Also, further work has been done on reimplementing
the command \addpenalty, which is used internally inseveral places: we hope it is an improvement!

The graphics bundle
The graphics bundle now supports the dvipdfmx
post-processor and Jonathan Kew’s XETEX program.
By support we mean that the graphics packages
recognize the new options xetex and dvipdfmx but we
do not distribute the respective driver files.
This leads elegantly to a description of the new policy
concerning such driver files in the graphics bundle. Most
driver files for our graphics packages are maintained bythe developers of the associated post-processor or TEXprograms. The teams developing these packages areworking very hard: their rapid development offers astark contrast to the current schedule of LATEX releases.
It is therefore no longer practical for the LATEX Team tobe responsible for distributing the latest versions ofthese driver files.
Therefore the installation files for graphics have been
split: there is now graphics.ins to install the package
files and graphics-drivers.ins for the driver files(located in drivers.dtx). There is no need to install
all those provided in the file drivers.dtx.
Please also note that, as requested by the maintainers
of PStricks, we have removed the package pstcol ascurrent versions of PSTricks make it obsolete.

Future development
The title of this section is a little misleading as it
actually describes current development. In 1998 theexpl3 bundle of packages was put on CTAN todemonstrate a possible LATEX3 programming
environment. These packages have been lying dormant
for some time while the LATEX Project Team werepreoccupied by other things such as developing theexperimental packages xor, template, etc., (and also
writing that indispensable and encyclopaedic volume,
The LATEX Companion – 2nd edition).
In October 2004 work on this code base was resumed
with the goal of some day turning it into a kernel for
LATEX3. This work can now also make full use of thewidely accepted ε-TEX extensions. Currently two areas
are central to this work.
• Extending the kernel code of LATEX3.
• Converting the experimental packages such as xor,
template to use the new syntax internally.
Beware! Development of expl3 is happening so fastthat the descriptions above might be out of date when
you read this! If you wish to see what’s going on then
go to http://www.latex-project.org/code.html
where you can download fully working code (we hope!).

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