[tex-live] Directory structure

Zdenek Wagner wagner at cesnet.cz
Fri Jan 20 13:33:44 CET 2006


Dear colleagues

There were several comments on the directory structure for Velthuis
Devanagari. I am afraid that I would mess the things if I tried to merger
the e-mails and quote them. I will therefore try to make some summary.

First I should  mention that non-member postings to
Devnag-general at lists.sarovar.org are not allowed and wait for moderator
approval. I approved all of them a few hours ago but we live in different
timezones. Some developers thus have not read the mails yet.

Velthuis Devanagari is based on Latin input because regular TeX cannot
read multibyte characters without use of active characters. This is not a
good solution. Previous versions of the package made use of active
characters but it caused conflicts with MusixTeX and ArabTeX. Reading
multibyte characters can be implemented with encTeX but I am not sure that
it is available in all distributions. Moreover, there are users of this
package in India. I know of a few of them who asked us for help.

The package provides both macros for language support and fonts. The fonts
themselves cannot be used without those macros and the preprocessor and
the macros are bound to the fonts. The LaTeX style emulates some babel
features, it defines Hindi texts for \contentsname, \chaptername, \today
etc. Everything is dokumented in a single document and a few samples are
added. It contains both plain TeX and LaTeX support, i.e. all macro files
must not be in the same directory. We should follow the search paths for
the formats.

Let's assume that XXX is the package name. We will decide whether it is
velthuis or devanagari or whatever.

The directories for font files would be:
fonts/map/dvips/XXX/dvng.map
fonts/afm/public/XXX/   (for .afm)
fonts/source/public/XXX/  (for .mf)
fonts/tfm/public/XXX/  (for .tfm)
fonts/type1/public/XXX/  (for .pfb)

LaTeX macro files will be in
tex/latex/XXX/

plain TeX macros in:
tex/plain/XXX/

documentation and samples in
doc/generic/XXX/

The LaTeX package may be devanagari.sty but I would implement dev.sty in
the following way (so that laTeX internals know what's going on):

\ProvidesPackage{dev}[YYYY/MM/DD Loading devanagari.sty]
\DeclareOption*{\PassOptionsToPackage{\CurrentOption}{devanagari}}
\ProcessOptions
\RequirePackage{devanagari}

Is this OK?

Question mainly for devnag developers:
Should XXX be:

1. velthuis
2. devanagari/velthuis

Zdenek Wagner
e-mail: wagner at cesnet.cz

see also http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
         http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz



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