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Date:         Mon, 16 Jun 1997 16:26:14 +0100
From: Sebastian Rahtz <s.rahtz@ELSEVIER.CO.UK>
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Subject:      Re: use of e-tex
Status: R

Nice summary, Frank. I go along with it.

I get mail every day from LaTeX users trying to send us manuscripts;
they fall into 3 categories

 - those who don't know 2e exists
 - those who have a 1994 version and dont understand why it breaks
 - those who can't control it anyway (viz Scientific Word users)

and a very few who have the same setup that i do...

there is _no way_ these people will upgrade to get at the sort of extra
e-TeX provides. they _might_ upgrade to Omega, i suppose, if they are
typesetting Russian.

what they _do_ use is pdftex. I am amazed at how wide-spread
references to it are, in purely academic places, in `semi-commercial'
contexts (like the man redoing all the Debian Linux docs with pdftex)
and the publishing world, where it has undoubtedly struck a chord.

i am biased, of course, but my ideal future is the `NTS' box that takes the
Omega engine and uses DSSSL as its style language to format XML
documents. from that perspective, there is simply no place for `LaTeX'
at all.

Sebastian