Date: 04 Jan 1999 17:37:42 -0800 Subject: PUBSW: TeX Upgrade TeX Upgrade Notification and Details An upgrade of the site-wide TeX installation has been completed and has just been released. A summary of changes follow; see below for information for local system administrators as well as a comprehensive list of changes. If you have your own .fmt files or have installed your own fonts, please see the Compatibility section below. For those unfamiliar with TeX, it is a typesetting and document preparation system suitable for producing nearly anything from essays to books and particularly well-suited for typesetting technical or mathematical manuscripts. Summary The TeX installation has been upgraded to web2c release 7.2 on all platforms, which includes an upgrade of the core Kpathsea path searching library to 3.2 and a significant number of new programs or programs that had previously been installed but which had previously not worked well with TeX's standard path searching. makeindex, many of the various DVI file manipulation utilities, and the utility program for MusixTeX are now part of the web2c distribution and should generally work better with the rest of the TeX installation. The major additional feature of this release is the inclusion of pdftex and pdflatex, versions of TeX and LaTeX which, rather than generating DVI files, instead generate PDF files directly. Also added with this release is omega, a new version of TeX with better support for international character sets and typography (including right-to-left text) and its associated programs lambda (the omega version of LaTeX), odvips, and oxdvi. At the same time, the PostScript versions of the Computer Modern fonts and the AMS fonts are now installed and are used by default by dvips rather than the bitmap fonts generated from METAFONT. This should result in considerably better PostScript print quality, particularly when fonts have to be scaled. This also makes it possible to generate PDF files using pdftex and pdflatex for documents that use the standard Computer Modern fonts and AMS mathematical fonts, not just for documents using only the standard PostScript fonts. In addition, LaTeX has been upgraded to the June of 1998 release, the latest release at this time, and several new LaTeX packages have been installed (and some old ones upgraded). Compatibility TeX's internal output format has again changed, so once again old .fmt files generated before this upgrade WILL NOT WORK with this new release. This means that if you have generated any .fmt files (used along with a link to tex to create versions of TeX with certain macros preloaded), you will need to regenerate them before they will work with this release. If you attempt to use old .fmt files, TeX will say "Fatal format file error; I'm stymied." If you are not getting this message, this problem does not affect you. dvips everywhere except on the Sweet Hall workstations and compute servers now defaults to generating a PostScript file as output with the same name as the input DVI file but with .dvi replaced with .ps. On the Sweet Hall, dvips retains its old default behavior of sending the generated PostScript file to lpr and printing it to the default printer. This change was made by request because a default printer (and lpr) may not be available on a non-Sweet Hall computer. Program and Library Changes All of the TeX binaries have been upgraded to the versions shipped with web2c 7.2. In this case, this doesn't involve version changes of any of the core binaries, but this does upgrade the version of METAPOST. There should be no functionality changes in the core binaries. A number of new programs are now installed, including versions of TeX and LaTeX that produce PDF output as mentioned above. To generate a PDF file from a TeX file, use: pdftex file.tex instead of tex, and you should get a PDF file as output rather than a DVI file. Similarly, to generate a PDF file from a LaTeX file, use: pdflatex file.tex Note that pdftex and pdflatex only support a limited range of fonts; in particular, they do *not* support the EC font set (T1 encoding). To get PDF output, you'll need to use either straight Computer Modern (possibly including the AMS mathematical symbols) or a standard PostScript font such as Times Roman (with \usepackage{times}). Note also that the resulting PDF output will not be readable in xpdf; this is due to a bug in xpdf, not in the PDF output. acroread will display the documents without problems. Please also note that the PDF versions of TeX and LaTeX do *not* support PostScript figures. The only type of figure that can be included at the present time is a PNG image. The documentation for pdftex and pdflatex is very sparse and these programs should be considered BETA. If you have any questions about how to use them, your best bet may be to post your query to the newsgroup comp.text.tex. A number of binaries that previously weren't part of web2c now are, and accordingly have been modified to use the standard Kpathsea path searching library. This includes makeindex, ps2pk, dvibook, dviconcat, dviselect, dvitodvi, and dvidvi as well as a handful of more obscure programs. Again, there shouldn't be any functionality changes in these programs apart from their new ability to find their configuration and auxiliary files more easily. omega (and its supporting programs lambda, odvips, oxdvi, and a few others) are also now installed, but again these are new packages and there isn't much documentation available. These are extended versions of TeX, LaTeX, dvips, and xdvi that can support larger character sets and therefore can better support various international character sets and encodings. The Kpathsea path search library have been upgraded to version 3.2, and have been installed in /usr/pubsw/lib (the include files are in /usr/pubsw/include) in case other programs would like to link against the library. There aren't any major functionality changes over the previous version, but you may notice that kpsewhich is now more intelligent about file types and doesn't warn nearly as much about unknown file extensions. A new, largely rewritten version of the PK font generation program, mktexpk, has been installed with this upgrade. This change should be largely transparent to users, but is preliminary to improving the way font generation is handled for the site-wide TeX installation. Documentation for the web2c distribution and all included packages can be found in /usr/pubsw/doc/Text/tex/web2c. Format, Macro, and Package Changes LaTeX and all associated packages have been upgraded to the June 1998 release (two releases better than the previous installed version). For information on what's changed since the previous releases, see /usr/pubsw/doc/Text/tex/latex/base/ltnews08.dvi (changes to the December 1997 release) and /usr/pubsw/doc/Text/tex/latex/base/ltnews09.dvi (changes to the June 1998 release). All LaTeX documentation is in /usr/pubsw/doc/Text/tex/latex. E-TeX, an extended version of plain TeX with an associated extended version of LaTeX, is now installed as it is now part of the web2c distribution. Documentation is in /usr/pubsw/doc/Text/tex/etex. An updated version of the suthesis2e style from Emma Pease for Stanford theses using LaTeX 2e has been installed. For documentation, see /usr/pubsw/doc/Text/tex/latex/suthesis. The following packages have been installed. Documentation can be found in /usr/pubsw/doc/Text/tex/latex/. algorithms Macros for typesetting algorithms. foiltex Improved macros for typesetting foils and slides. listings Macros for typesetting program listings. In addition, the build and installation system for packages has been improved to make it easier to install them in the future, and the documentation directories have been reorganized to hopefully make it easier to find things. Font Changes The primary font changes are the installation of the PostScript versions of both the Computer Modern fonts and the AMS mathematical fonts. These are used both by the PDF versions of TeX and LaTeX and for the use of dvips in creating PostScript output. Several of the fonts installed were also updated to the latest released versions (there should be no user-visible changes there except for the correction of some bugs in particular characters). I should now be caught up on all font requests, so users can delete any PK files they had lingering around in their directories. As always, if you have any requests for new packages, support programs, fonts, or other TeX-related packages, or any problems with the TeX installation, please let me know at action@leland.stanford.edu. -- Russ Allbery (eagle@windlord.stanford.edu) --- http://spider.stanford.edu/ System and News Administrator - Leland Systems Group - Stanford University