[tex-live] texlive 8

Nelson H. F. Beebe beebe at math.utah.edu
Wed Feb 5 06:29:49 CET 2003


Sebastian asks ``is there anything people think *must* be done for TL8?''

What about getting Don's latest fixes incorporated in the
distribution?  It would be a shame to delay them for another 1.5 years
(until fall 2004, when TL9 CDs might be in hand).

I agree with Karl Berry: the TeXbook and Metafontbook sources
(texman.tex and mfman.tex) should be retained in the TeXLive
distribution.

Don spoke at a TUG meeting long ago about his desire to have them
available for inspection, even though the publisher was reticent.  I'm
certainly glad that he prevailed, and I seriously doubt that the
publisher has lost any significant amount of revenue.  I use them for
benchmarking, and for answering the `how did he do that?'  questions
that pop up from time to time.  It is also fun to turn up comments
like this one from Shaw at the end of Chapter 21 of the TeXbook that
didn't make it into the book:

	% "Even dashes, cherished as they are by authors who cannot punctuate,
	% spoil a page. They are generally merely ignorant substitutes for colons."

or the comment after this remark from Chapter 26:

	\answer Radix 10 notation is used for numeric constants and for the output
	of numeric data. The first 10 |\count| registers are displayed at each
	|\shipout|, and their values are recorded on the |dvi| file at such times.
	% Also, TeX was first implemented on a DEC-10.
	% The \catcode for <space> is 10.
	% My birthday is January 10.

[plus the associated index entry for Bo Derek].

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