X-VM-v5-Data: ([nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil] ["1979" "Mon" "7" "December" "1998" "16:57:07" "+0000" "Robin Fairbairns" "Robin.Fairbairns@CL.CAM.AC.UK" nil "53" "Re: What is \"base\" LaTeX" "^Date:" nil nil "12" nil "What is \"base\" LaTeX" nil nil nil] nil) Received: from listserv.gmd.de (listserv.gmd.de [192.88.97.1]) by mail.Uni-Mainz.DE (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA26835; Mon, 7 Dec 1998 17:57:18 +0100 (MET) Received: from lsv1.listserv.gmd.de (192.88.97.2) by listserv.gmd.de (LSMTP for OpenVMS v1.1a) with SMTP id <9.7D9E6E43@listserv.gmd.de>; Mon, 7 Dec 1998 17:57:16 +0100 Received: from RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE by RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8b) with spool id 412916 for LATEX-L@RELAY.URZ.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE; Mon, 7 Dec 1998 17:57:11 +0100 Received: from heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk (exim@heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk [128.232.32.11]) by relay.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA10858 for ; Mon, 7 Dec 1998 17:57:09 +0100 (MET) Received: from dorceus.cl.cam.ac.uk (cl.cam.ac.uk) [128.232.1.34] (rf) by heaton.cl.cam.ac.uk with esmtp (Exim 1.82 #1) id 0zn3y8-0005Io-00; Mon, 7 Dec 1998 16:57:08 +0000 Message-ID: Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 06 Dec 1998 10:42:17 EST." <4.1.19981206103413.01e099b0@pop.tiac.net> Date: Mon, 7 Dec 1998 16:57:07 +0000 From: Robin Fairbairns Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L Subject: Re: What is "base" LaTeX Status: R X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 3052 someone at y&y wrote: > At 10:13 AM 98/12/06 , tim murphy wrote: > > >Ps If xdvi worked as advertised it would itself be a TeX browser. > > Maybe this is something that merits more discussion. DVIWindo > can be launched when a browser hits a DVI file. xdvi can be launched when a browser hits a dvi file (we do it here). > It also supports > hyper-text linkage, so does xdvi, i'm told (i've never used that facility). note that the linkage specials are almost certainly different... > including the ability to launch applications to > deal with included file references to say PDF, HTML, TIFF files etc. > (although it can also display TIFF directly). you beat xdvi there, though it does cope with most .eps inclusions quite well. > And since DVI files are > compact it is very fast. xdvi's quite nippy too. > But there are obstacles to making this sort of thing a reasonable alternative. > One is that the DVI files are compact in part because they do not include > fonts, so this works only if everyone has the fonts that are used. > That probably means using CM fonts for everything. the same problem applies, of course. this is the real killer for dvi distribution: as tim murphy says, fonts _could_ be retrieved on demand, but i imagine one wouldn't ordinarily want to do that for anything but free fonts. > Included figures > are an obstacle since these are not included in the DVI file, so would > have to be fetched in a separate interaction. And different DVI previewer > support very different collections of graphics (TIFF, BMP, GIF, JPEG, PICT, > WMF, EPS, EPSI, TPIC, EEPIC, etc. etc.). And unless several `DVI browsers' > support the some basic set of features (which may have big differences > in implementation costs on different platforms), there won't be much of > an incentive for people to use this as a medium for document distribution. in short, nice format, shame about the lack of portability (for anything remotely non-trivial). robin