LATEX News
Issue 13, June 2000 (LATEX release 2000-06-01)

Yearly release cycle
We announced in LATEX News 11 that we intended toswitch to a 12-monthly release schedule. With thepresent (June 2000) release, this switch is being made:thus the next release of LATEX will be dated June 2001.
We shall of course continue, as in the past, to releasepatches as needed to fix significant bugs.

PSNFSS: Quote of the Month
You should say in the LATEX News that Walter
Schmidt has taken over PSNFSS from me. It
gives me a certain pleasure to be able to drawa line under that part of my life. . .
Sebastian Rahtz
The PSNFSS material, which supports the useof common PostScript fonts with LATEX, has beenthoroughly updated. Most noticeably, the mathpple
package, which used to be distributed separately, is now
part of the basic PSNFSS bundle; this package provides
mathematical typesetting with the Palatino typeface
family. In addition, numerous bugs and flaws have been
fixed and the distribution has been ‘cleaned up’. The filechanges.txt contains a detailed list of these changes.
The documentation (in psnfss2e.pdf) has been
completely rewritten to provide a comprehensive
introduction to the use of PostScript fonts.
Notice that the new PSNFSS needs updated files for
font metrics, virtual fonts and font definitions. If you
received the new version (8.1) as part of a complete TEX
system then these new font files should also have been
installed. However, if you intend to install or update
PSNFSS yourself, please read the instructions in thefile 00readme.txt of the new PSNFSS distribution.
Support for commercial PostScript fonts, such as
Lucida Bright, has been removed from the basic
distribution; it is now available from CTAN:
http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/supported/psnfssx.

New AMS-LAT X
E

Version 2.0 of AMS-LATEX was released on
December 1, 1999. It can be obtained
via ftp://ftp.ams.org/pub/tex/ or
http://www.ams.org/tex/amslatex.html,
as well from CTAN:
http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/required/amslatex.
This release consists chiefly of bug fixes andconsolidation of the existing features. The division ofAMS-LATEX into two main parts (the math packages;
the AMS document classes) has been made more
pronounced. The files diffs-m.txt, diffs-c.txt,
amsmath.faq, and amsclass.faq describe thechanges and address some common questions.
The primary documentation files remain
amsldoc.tex, for the amsmath package, andinstr-l.tex, for the AMS document classes.
The documentation for the amsthm package,
however, has been moved from amsldoc.tex
to a separate document amsthdoc.tex.

New input encoding latin4
The package inputenc has, thanks to Hana Skoumalová,been extended to cover the latin4 input encoding; thiscovers Baltic and Scandinavian languages as well asGreenland Inuit and Lappish.

New experimental code
In LATEX News 12 we announced some ongoing work
towards a ‘Designer Interface for LATEX’ and we
presented some early results thereof. Since then, at
Gutenberg 2000 in Toulouse and TUG 2000 in Oxford,
we described a new output routine and an improved
method of handling vertical mode material between
paragraphs. In combination these support higher
quality automated 1 page-breaking and page make-up
for complex pages—the best yet achieved with TEX!
A paper describing the new output routine is at
http://www.latex-project.org/papers/xo-pfloat.pdf
All code examples and documentation are available at
http://www.latex-project.org/code/experimental/.
This directory has been extended to containgalley Prototype implementation of the interface
for manipulating vertical material in galleys.
xinitials Prototype implementation of the interface
for paragraph initials (needs the galley package.
xtheorem Contributed example using the template
package to provide a designer interface for theorem
environments.
xoutput A prototype implementation of the newoutput routine as described in the xo-pfloat.pdf
paper. Expected availability: at or shortly after
the TUG 2000 conference.
1 The stress here is on automated!

LATEX News, and the LATEX software, are brought to you by the LATEX Project Team; Copyright 2000, all rights reserved.