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Date:         Sun, 6 Mar 2011 21:48:54 +0000
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From: Joseph Wright <joseph.wright@MORNINGSTAR2.CO.UK>
Subject: Re: format?
To: LATEX-L@listserv.uni-heidelberg.de
In-Reply-To:  <4D73D6AA.9080806@gmx.de>
Precedence: list
Status: R

On 06/03/2011 18:47, Arno Trautmann wrote:
> Stability cannot be a point here as l2x will never be considered a
> stable format. (At least I hope so, in contrary to l2ε)
> Before starting, it should be clear who would be the users/testers of
> l2x – is a manual needed? l2x does not do anything more than 2ε + expl3
> does and both are well documented …

To be clear here, I'm with Arno. We are taking about a *strictly
experimental* format which is LaTeX2e + packages bundled together for
ease of testing.

>> expl3 already loads the luatex package. Maybe Heiko should be made a
>> honorary member of the L3 team, then the L2x format could include the
>> whole oberdiek bundle...
> 
> If they are useful and often used? In the end, it should be rewritten
> and added to the kernel, no?

As we need things, they are added. Of course, others should feel free to
write things and send them along :-) (I have some more serious thoughts
on that, but need to work some other items through yet. Perhaps next
month if I work hard at it.)

> Yes, right.
> One question here: Having fontspec loaded in the format, what happens if
> a package \Requires fontspec? Is it loaded again? Or can loading then be
> prevented?

As I said above, I'm imagining we're taking here about a bundle which is
really just LaTeX2e but with some additional stuff built in. So the
appropriate \ver@<package>.sty  material will be set, and LaTeX2e won't
load fontspec, expl3, etc., twice.

>> If we think even further, the L3 team might choose to lift several
>> popular and high-quality packages to semi-official status by including
>> them in the format, e.g. Philipp Lehman's packages, mathtools, the
>> oberdiek bundle, xcolor, TikZ, siunitx...
> 
> I was thinking about this, but that would go too far. At least for a
> short-term test version, that would be too much packages.
> For long-term considerations, they would be nice to have in the format –
> but this would blow up the size strongly, wouldn't it? We could imagine
> a "plain LaTeX" format without them and a "bloated LaTeX" including … ;)
> 
>> Fixltx2e has already been mentioned and would probably the first
>> candidate for inclusion in the format.
> 
> Yes.

For the moment, I think LaTeX3 'release' packages + fontspec + fixltx2e
will do :-) (Long-term I would like to imagine most of the material
listed above being part of LaTeX3. However, that is a way off and we
should probably not overdo things just at the moment.)
-- 
Joseph Wright