Message-Id: <9303011458.AA18162@sc.zib-berlin.dbp.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
Date:         Mon, 1 Mar 93 14:53:25 +0000
From: Paul Taylor <pt@DOC.IC.AC.UK>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
To: Multiple Recipients of <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
Subject:      Re: would a latex2.10 give a boost to latex3?
Status: R


I agree very strongly with Sebastian. In fact I was under the impression
that NFSS was going to be included in the "standard" LaTeX soon.

I sympathise with Frank & Rainer, but the existing situation causes
problems for writers of other macro packages, particularly those involving
fonts. I'm sure many people have added bits to the old lfonts and agree
with me that it's a can of worms and should be wiped off the face of
the earth as soon as possible. Unfortunatly it takes work for people to
change over as long as lfonts remains in the general release, and some
people will insist on keeping their old versions anyway. This causes
headaches for those who want to make available their own software using
extra fonts. In fact my policy nowadays is to build such things in to our
local LaTeX and tell people they simply cannot use them elsewhere.
I don't think this is very satisfactory.

Unfortunately there are incompatibilities. The worst is the change in the
meaning of \bf etc within maths.  This is a great pity.  It's not so much
that I have strong opinions that ${\bf fred}$ is better than $\mathbf{fred}$
(in fact I think there should be both, say \Bf{fred}, in text too), but
it is an incompatibility.

There's also programs like fig2dev which use \tenrm and so on. I have no
sympathy with them: they should be made to change.

Paul Taylor