Message-ID:  <199601121617.LAA07196@aleph.bu.edu>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
              <LATEX-L@URZINFO.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Date:         Fri, 12 Jan 1996 11:17:44 -0500
From: Matthew Swift <swift@BU.EDU>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
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To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
              <LATEX-L@URZINFO.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE>
Subject:      ALaTeX for the New Year
Status: R

Dear LaTeX folks,

Now at your corner CTAN archive is ALaTeX, a new TeX format which is a
small but significant modification of the latest release of LaTeX.  It
is functionally similar to the format fsfTeX that David Carlisle wrote
and included at the end of the most recent cfgguide.tex in the LaTeX
distribution, but ALaTeX is more general than fsfTeX.

The issues which motivated the creation of ALaTeX have been discussed
in detail on the LaTeX3 list in the past, so I am posting only the
abstract here and referring the interested reader to the full 3-page
paper "A Discussion of ALaTeX and its Standard Metaclass" in the file
metaclas.tex in the ALaTeX distribution.

\begin{abstract}
  \ALaTeX{} is a document preparation system that provides the user with all
  the functionality of \LaTeX{} and a general, legal way to override standard
  \LaTeX{} behavior without altering source files.  An important consequence is
  that \ALaTeX{} can interpret official \LaTeX{} markup in an abstract way.

  This discussion builds on the author's paper ``Modularity in \LaTeX''
  in the forthcoming TUGboat \textbf{16} (3).
\end{abstract}

I might add that a second important consequence is that it is easier
to keep formatting directives such as font and paper sizes out of
sources.

Versions of ALaTeX are keyed to versions of LaTeX by adding R1, R2,
etc. to the LaTeX release date.  The current release is therefore
named 95-12-01-R1 and is on CTAN in the directory

        tex-archive/macros/alatex/alatex-95-12-01-R1

If you happened to have downloaded ALaTeX before today, 12 Jan, the
distribution on CTAN was missing a file "amanifst.txt", so you'll need
that and should replace "Makefile" also.

Regards,

Matt Swift