Message-Id: <9210011820.AA23775@sc.zib-berlin.dbp.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
Date:         Thu, 1 Oct 92 14:15:15 EDT
From: Michael Barr <barr@TRIPLES.MATH.MCGILL.CA>
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To: Multiple recipients of <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
Subject:      How to get rid of most users of TeX
Status: R


Subject: Re: picture mode in LaTeX3/additional fonts in distribution

> >>> Not everyone has MF.
>
> While I agree that ``not everyone who has TeX has a PostScript printer'',
> surely the one thing that we _can_ assume is that everyone who has TeX
> has MetaFont?  If they haven't, they d@mn well ought to have!
>
> 					Philip Taylor, RHBNC.
>
Well I don't.  More precisely, since I have the full emtex
distribution, I had it but discarded it to save disk space.  That's
all I have time for, a new program that, from the mail that comes
about it, is *much* harder to use than TeX and for which the
documentation is much less satisfactory.

The TeX community seems bent on shooting itself in the foot.  I have
seen three proposals this week, each of which would have the effect
of getting rid of at least 80% of the TeX users: make PS the
standard output, let us stop supporting MS-DOS and now make the use
of MF required for all TeX users.  Let us think in terms of
enlarging, not drastically curtailing the use of TeX.

A propos of MS-DOS, I do have one suggestion to make.  Since MS-DOS
does allow only 11 chars in a filename, why do waste three of them
to convey exactly 2 bits of information.  A font or font related
file can have, if I have counted correctly, only 4 possible
extensions, tfm, gf, pxl or pk.  If there are any I haven't heard
of, they can be accomodated by what I suggest.  Which is that we use
only one byte for the type and the other two bytes of the extension
for the design size.  Thus cmr10.tfm would be renamed cmr.10m.  The
other three would be cmr.10g, cmr.10x and cmr.10k respectively.
This would require modification to mf and tex, as well as a couple
of conversion programs, but the modifications would be minor.  I
would use .07? for 7 point and so on.  The main objection would be
for fonts over 99 points, but they are not handled in the current
scheme anyway.  The upshot would be that all 8 bytes of the name
could be used descriptively.

Michael Barr