[tex-live] ttex on TeXLive

[Werner LEMBERG]

[Erronously sent to ctan at dante.de, sorry.]


The current Thai bundle in TeXLive (ttex) is more than 10 years old!
Additionally, there are the following problems.

  . ttex uses the dbtt font family which is (a) a set of bad fonts
    (from the technical point of view) and (b) has an unknown license.

  . The cttex preprocessor needed for Thai isn't available as a binary
    in TeXLive.

For these reasons, I suggest the following.

  1. Remove ttex and dbtt completely.

  2. Install the recent thailatex bundle -- BTW, is this already on
     CTAN? -- but with a reduced set of fonts.  The norasi fonts are
     already in TeXLive, and I would like to use the garuda family as
     a replacement for dbtt.  Is this OK?  I'll update both norasi and
     garuda by myself, since I need it for my CJK package too (but
     with different metrics files).

  3. Make cttex a separate bundle (it is no longer part of thailatex)
     and update it to the recent version (the version on TeXLive is
     1.15).  Since it is a Unix filter it should be straightforward to
     compile it on all platforms.

     I wonder whether cttex should be replaced with another Thai
     preprocessor.  Please advise.

I volunteer to do the changes -- only for proper integration of cttex
I will probably need someone who checks whether I've done the
integration correctly.


    Werner