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Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
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In-Reply-To:  Your message of "Thu, 17 Dec 1998 19:48:16 EST." 
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Date:         Sat, 19 Dec 1998 12:14:32 +0000
From: Robin Fairbairns <Robin.Fairbairns@CL.CAM.AC.UK>
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To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
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Subject:      Re: portable LaTeX
Status: R

> There was the `DVI standards' committee. It refused to address the
> real issues including \special{...} at a point where it might actually have made
> some difference.   Hence lost a great chance to prevent a huge mess.
> (They did however discuss how many angels can fit into one scaled point).

i think they were overawed with the effort required to write a
standard.  i told 'em so when they started: i also told 'em about the
angels/pin head danger...

the standard they produced was intended to be extended into areas
where it might actually have been useful (in berthold's sense) but i
guess they were `whacked' after what they did do.  i'm not surprised:
writing standards (with any degree of rigour) requires stamina -- it's
not something i would undertake as a voluntary, spare-time, project.

incidentally, i would contest william hammond's curious assertion that
dvi is in some sense a `higher level' format than pdf or ps.  in any
document modelling i've ever read (e.g., oda, for which i gave a
reference a while back), all three fit at the bottom of the tree,
being non-revisable[*] forms.  that no package exists to create dvi
from pdf or ps merely represents the futility of making such a
transformation -- it doesn't suggest that the transformation is
impossible.

i agree with berthold: let's stay at the top level -- the revisable
(la)tex input file.  arguing about output formats, whether they be
aimed at the dot-matrix printer or reasonably generic gets us
absolutely nowhere imo.

robin

[*] which is not to say they _couldn't_ be edited, merely that no-one
in their right mind _would_ edit them in the ordinary course of
events.