LATEX News
Issue 10, December 1998 (LATEX release 1998-12-01)

Five years of LATEX 2εLATEX Project on the Internet

Since this is the 10th edition of LATEX News, the (nolonger) New Standard LATEX must have hit the streets
almost this long ago. In fact it was only thebeta-version that some people got just in time forChristmas 1993, and since then there has been a lot oftidying-up and smoothing of rough edges (not tomention a few bug fixes!).
Maybe it is time for something more radicallydifferent to emerge and be hungrily adopted by theworld; but don’t panic, we shall be maintaining what
you have now for a long time yet. Amongst the morepolite things that have been written about our efforts,
we found that this quote (somewhat censored to protectthe guilty) well reflects some of our feelings about
working on LATEX over the years: the mere existence of
LATEX 2ε is a great miracle.

A new latex-project.org domain has been registered.
The web site is not yet fully functional but the old
LATEX pages from CTAN are available at
http://www.latex-project.org/ and the LATEX bug
reporting address has been changed tolatex-bugs@latex-project.org.

Restructuring the LATEX distribution
Since the (once) ‘new’ standard LATEX has reached sucha venerable age, we are reviewing the way in which thesystem is presented to the world.
An early intention is to define, given the wide varietyof good packages now available, what now constitutes a
useful installation of LATEX. We also hope that such a
definition will help document portability if it leads to afuture in which a LATEX class designer can reasonably
assume that a known list of facilities will be there for allusers (so that each class need not supply them).
As a first small step towards this definition, we shall
replace the latex/packages subdirectory on CTAN.
This directory was a curious mixture of the important,such as the LATEX tools, that any self-respecting LATEX
installation ought to have, and the esoteric orexperimental.
The esoterica from packages will be moved to new
locations, as follows:
expl3 to latex/exptl/project
mfnfss to latex/contrib/supported/mfnfss
The subdirectory that replaces packages will be called
latex/required; all the other sub-directories ofpackages will be moved there.

Restructuring the LATEX package licenses
Several people have requested an easy mechanism forthe distribution of LATEX packages and other software“under the same conditions as LATEX”. The oldlegal.txt file was unsuitable as a general licence as it
referred to specific LATEX authors, and to specific files.
Therefore, in this release legal.txt contains just thecopyright notice and a reference to the new LATEX
Project Public License (LPPL) for the distribution andmodification conditions. The tools, graphics, and mfnfss
packages also now refer to this license in theirdistribution notices.

Support for Cyrillic encodings
Basic Cyrillic support, as announced in LATEX News 9,
is now finally an official part of LATEX. It includes
support for the following standard Cyrillic fontencodings (this list may grow): T2A T2B T2C X2.
It also includes various Cyrillic input encodings (20 intotal, including commonly used variants and Mongolian
Cyrillic encodings). This provides platform independentand sophisticated basic support for high-quality
typesetting in various Cyrillic-based languages.
For further information see the file cyrguide.tex.

Tools distribution
The varioref package has been extended to support
textual page references to a range of objects: e.g., if
eq-first and eq-last are the label names for the firstand last equation in a sequence, then you can now write
see~\vrefrange{eq-first}{eq-last}This results in different text depending on whether bothlabels fall on the same page.
Some additional user commands, as well asbuilding-blocks for writing private extensions, aredescribed in the accompanying documentation.

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