TeXhax Digest Wednesday, October 7, 1987 Volume 87 : Issue 80 [SCORE.STANFORD.EDU]TEXHAX80.87 Editor: Malcolm Brown Today's Topics: Immoderate notes (TEX-L's "digestus interruptus") Strange Line Break Comments on TeX - The Program enlarging TeX's buffer sizes TeX on VAX/VMS 4.5 -- a problem \footnote problem in \tabular-environment More questions about TeX fonts Need documents on TEX Library files. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 07-Oct-87 18:18:10-PDT,1200;000000000000 From: Malcolm Date: 6 Oct 87 Subject: Immoderate notes (TEX-L's "digestus interruptus") %% It appears that issues 74 through 78 didn't make it to the TEX-L %% BITNET server. Glenn Vandenburg reports that this problem has %% been fixed. Glenn also nabbed the missing digests from Score %% and arranged for their distribution. %% %% So those of you receiving TeXhax via TEX-L should have %% received issue 79 by now. %% %% This is why this digest has been somewhat delayed. The fact that %% Score was inaccessible via the network for a few days also %% contributed to the delay. %% fun fun fun %% Malcolm ------------------------------ From: VARDI%ALMVMA.BITNET@forsythe.stanford.edu Date: 28 Sep 87 15:34 PDT To: TEXHAX@score.stanford.edu Subject: Strange Line Break The following Latex file \documentstyle[12pt]{article} \begin{document} \parbox{2.5in}{Chuangtse and Hueitse had strolled on to the bridge over the Hao, when the former observed, ``See how the small fish are darting about! That is the happiness of the fish.'' ``You are not a fish yourself,'' said Hueitse. ``How can you know the happiness of the fish?'' ``And you not being I,'' retorted Chuangtse, ``how can you know that I do not know?''} \end{document} causes a line break immediately after "Chuangtse". I have not been able to emulate the problem in Tex. Is that a bug or a feature? Moshe Vardi IBM Almaden Research Center ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 28 Sep 87 10:00:57 PDT From: blia.UUCP!forrest@cgl.ucsf.edu (Jon Forrest) To: texhax@score.stanford.EDU Subject: Comments on TeX - The Program I recently bought "TeX - The Program" and have spent a fair amount of time reading it. What strikes me is the extent to which Knuth had to lower himself in order to accomodate Pascal and the state of the art in Pascal compilers back in the early 80's. It appears to me after a much too brief period of study that TeX could be a lot smaller and probably simplier if Knuth had been able to use a environment containing the function of something like the Unix Standard I/O Library. (This is only a hypothetical example; I'm not actually proposing this.) It is said that a convey can travel no faster than its slowest ship. With TeX as it is, we'll eventually reach our destination but what a long, strange trip it will be. I'm hope that this posting will stimulate discussion of this topic. It is in no way intended to belittle Knuth or TeX. Jon Forrest ucbvax!mtxinu!blia!forrest {pyramid|voder}!blia!forrest ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 29 Sep 87 13:39:15 EDT From: Peter Galvin To: texhax@score.stanford.edu Subject: enlarging TeX's buffer sizes I'm afraid I'm finding that self-documenting code leaves something to be desired. I'm trying to increase the buf_size variable in tex since a user is getting the error: ! TeX capacity exceeded, sorry [buffer size=500]. So, I look in initex.ch, change the apropriate @y line to replace buf_size with a larger value (as indicated in the tex.web source code) and rebuild to get a new initex and virtex. Try loading in the old .fmt files, and I get the same out-of-buffer-space error with the same buffer size. Being random, I try generating a new lplain.fmt file and running the new virtex with that... same error. The TeXbook says a user should ask the "local guru" to increase the buffer space, but since I'M supposed to be the local guru, I ask you. Thanks for any help. --Pete ------------------------------ Date: Tue 29 Sep 87 16:22:42-EDT From: Barbara Beeton Subject: TeX on VAX/VMS 4.5 -- a problem To: texhax@SCORE.STANFORD.EDU We have encountered a problem when recompiling TeX on a VAX under VMS 4.5. Tangle and Pascal (3.5) and the link run with no apparent errors, but TeX experiences a run-time error, apparently when it tries to open the .dvi file (but it may be on some other condition). Although the problem was initially encountered in attempting to install a changed version of TeX, it was verified by recompiling from the same files used to install TeX successfully last March under VMS 4.4 and Pascal 3.4. We're using the K&S implementation, with a few of the parameter settings boosted a bit higher. The following file, test.tex, produces the error: hello, world. This is the log of the failed run: This is TeX, VAX/VMS Version 2.1.0 (AMS) (preloaded format=plain 87.9.29) (DSK:[USER]TEST.TEX;1) *\end %SYSTEM-F-ACCVIO, access violation, reason mask=04, virtual address=000C0BDC, PC=000A0DE4, PSL=03C00000 %TRACE-F-TRACEBACK, symbolic stack dump follows module name routine name line rel PC abs PC 000A0DE4 000A0DE4 000B971B 000B971B 000B98FA 000B98FA 000BA63F 000BA63F 000BD45F 000BD45F Has anyone else encountered this problem? Or does anyone have any suggestions for getting around it? -- Barbara Beeton bnb@xx.lcs.mit.edu ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 29 Sep 87 17:28:55 EDT From: yetti!oz@uunet.UU.NET (Ozan Yigit) To: texhax@score.stanford.edu Subject: Copyright status of Ctex and Common-Tex: whose copyright ??? Keywords: tex, translation, derivative-work, copyrights | | The following is an article I originally posted to several | newsgroups on usenet. I think, however, this mailing list is | probably the best place to get the discussion going, and | hence, I am forwarding the article. | I would appreciate all comments/clarifications on this issue, | which I think is serious. | | oz I have been following, with great interest, the recent chatter surrounding the C implementation (Ctex) of tex. Many institutions may have now discovered that the copies of Ctex obtained from Texas A&M is not (somehow) legal, as indicated by Tomas Rokiki, who has a copyright notice on Ctex sources. I would like to suggest that there has possibly been an abuse of the US copyright laws, and both Ctex and CommonTex cannot, in fact, carry anyone else's copyright except that of Don Knuth, and hence, carry the same distribution rights/restrictions [if any] of the original TeX. Why: If I am not mistaken, US copyright laws suggest that a translation of an originally copyrighted work carries the same copyright of the original - in other words, mechanical and/or hand translation does not obliterate the original copyright. Here is the header of tex.web: % This program is copyright (C) 1982 by D. E. Knuth; all rights are reserved. % Copying of this file is authorized only if (1) you are D. E. Knuth, or if % (2) you make absolutely no changes to your copy. (The WEB system provides % for alterations via an auxiliary file; the master file should stay intact.) One lawyer, Jordan J. Breslow, did address the issue of "derivative works" in his most enlightening paper [may be found under the doc directory of news 2.11 distribution]. He indicates that the translation of, say a copyrighted COBOL program to BASIC would be the infringement of the copyright owner's exclusive right to make derivative works. Is there something missing ?? Did Don Knuth drop his copyright on TeX ?? Now, it is possible that there exists a license arrangement between Tomas Rokiki and Don Knuth, which allows Tomas to claim copyright on Ctex. If such is the case, I would like to know about it, so that I can understand a request to flush all binaries and sources of Ctex obtained from Texas A&M. Same issue, of course, applies to the "copyleft" notice of Pat Monardo, for the CommonTex implementation. NOTE: This article is not meant to insult the authors of Ctex and CommonTex, and is not in any way meant to invalidate the appreciation they deserve for the substential amount of work to generate C versions of TeX. It is merely meant to encourage a discussion and/or clarification of the legal statues of such implementations, and to hopefully produce a better understanding of the copyright issues with regards to "derivative" works. Hence, any flames should be directed to /dev/null. oz ------------------------------------- You see things, and you say "WHY?" Usenet: [decvax|ihnp4]!utzoo!yetti!oz But I dream things that never were; ......!seismo!mnetor!yetti!oz and say "WHY NOT?" Bitnet: oz@[yusol|yulibra|yuyetti] [Back To Methuselah] Bernard Shaw Phonet: [416] 736-5257 x 3976 ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 30 Sep 87 11:31 N From: Subject: \footnote problem in \tabular-environment To: texhax@score.stanford.edu Together with some collegues I am writing a book about LaTeX in Dutch. In a LaTeX-input-file I have the following lines of text: --------------------------------------------------------------- Van klein naar groot kent {\LaTeX} de volgende eenheden: % \begin{quote} \begin{tabular}{ll} sp&scaled point (65536 sp = 1 pt)\\ pt&point (het corps van deze letter is 12 pt\footnote{Na het afdrukken van de tekst is deze nog tot 85\% verkleind, zodat het feitelijke corps 15\% kleiner is})\\ bp&big point (72 bp = 1 inch)\\ dd&didot point (1157 dd = 1238 pt)\\ pc&pica (1 pc = 12 pt)\\ cc&cicero (1 cc = 12 dd = 1 augustijn)\\ mm&millimeter (10 = 1 cm)\\ cm¢imeter (2,54 cm = 1 inch)\\ in&inch (1 inch = 72,27 pt)\\ \end{tabular} \end{quote} % De fontmaten in {\LaTeX} worden altijd in pt uitgedrukt. Gerelateerd aan de fontmaat zijn er nog twee eenheden: \verb+ex+ is de x-hoogte van het font, \verb+em+ is ongeveer de `M-breedte' van het font, ------------------------------------------------------------ Please don't try to understand my Dutch text. As you can see, I try to make a footnote to a line inside the tabular environment. When I translate this text with LaTeX, I don't get any error messages, but after printing I detect that my footnote has disappeared: after the words " letter is 12 pt" I do get a small superscripted 1, but the bottom of the page only shows the pagenumber. Am I making a mistake by trying to create a \footnote inside a tabular-environment, or is this a bug? I can't say I understand Lamport's remarks about \footnote being fragile completely, but I did try to \protect the \footnote, and that did not do any good. Herman F. Vogt University of Groningen Computing Centre Earn/Bitnet: VOGT@HGRRUG5 ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 30 Sep 87 01:02:37 PDT From: Greg Earle To: TeXhax@Score.Stanford.edu Subject: More questions about TeX fonts Ken Yap asked about using \mode `adobe' vs. \mode `imagen' with METAFONT. I'd be interested in this answer too. Also, I have some naive questions; for information purposes I have a UNIX TeX distribution with TeX 2.1, METAFONT 1.3, and LaTeX 2.09. To preface: I put all of the distributed pxl fonts in /usr/lib/tex/fonts. I also went to ./cmfonts/gf and ran gftopxl on all the gf fonts present; I moved the resulting pxl files to the above (I have plenty of disk, so using pk not necessary). It appears that (as Ken mentioned) the existing gf fonts were made for 300 dpi. (a) For my LaserWriter, is it advisable to (assuming these are 300 dpi fonts) run METAFONT on all the existing mf fonts with \magstep 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 4, & 5 ? I'd like to make it idiot-proof so that I'll never get (Stephan Bectholsheim's) `dvipr' (really dvi2ps) to barf because it couldn't find a font; what is the best way to deal with this problem? (b) I am using the modified `texview' version of the `dvisun' Sun previewer; unfortunately there are little existing 118 dpi pxl files in the distribution. I made pxl versions of all of the ./cmfonts/gf/gf118 entries, but the previewer almost always barfs due to missing fonts (presumably all the gf118 entries are \magstep=1, and the dvi is asking for other magsteps). My problem is that I haven't got the vaguest idea how to make 118 dpi fonts with non-1 magstep. Should I add another mode for 118 dpi to the waits.mf file, and remake METAFONT with this preloaded, then choose "\mode=preview" on the command line to mf? I can't seem to get XXXgf output files where the XXX is not a 300 dpi size ... (c) There is a shell script (makecm.sh) in ./cmfonts; it invokes METAFONT successively with cmmf "\mode:=localfont;" "mag:=magstep($ms);" "batchmode;" input whereas the METAFONT book says use "\mode=localfont" "mag=magstep($ms)" i.e., nothing about Pascalish `:=' assignments, nor semicolons. Is this implementation dependant, or a Pascal notational necessity, or what? - Greg Earle earle@mahendo.JPL.NASA.GOV (name server) earle%mahendo@jpl-elroy.ARPA [aka:] (static hosts) earle%mahendo@elroy.JPL.NASA.GOV ...!cit-vax!elroy!jplgodo!mahendo!earle (UNIX UUCP) ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 30 Sep 87 15:43 CDT From: Mark Roseman To: TEXHAX@SCORE.STANFORD.EDU Subject: (La)TeX for MS-DOS systems, ".sty" format Greetings! I'll apologize in advance... I am a relatively new TeX user, have no LaTeX experience, and am new to this digest so my questions may seem rather trivial or redundant. Having said that... I am wondering about a TeX and LaTeX system for my PC-XT clone at home. Is there any public domain versions of the programs available, and if so, what would be the easiest ways to obtain them? As well, I would like the option of both previewing the generated DVI on my monitor (using a Hercules graphics card), or do a "low-quality" printout on my Gemini 10X printer (similar to Epson). Are there drivers around which would handle those tasks? Next... I am the editor of a small newsletter -- the last issue being produced in plain TeX. It was done in two columns, the macro being a modification of the one in Appendix E of the TeXbook. The macro had several limitations for the type of application, mainly that there was no way to do an "end of column" operation. Now, I'd like to be able to produce something along the lines of the following format, where small letters indicate the text of an article, and the caps letters indicate the titles of the articles: -------------------------------------------- | AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA | | aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa | | aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa | | aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa | | | | BBBBBBBBBBB CCCCCCCCC | | bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb cccccccccccccccccc | | bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb cccccccccccccccccc | | bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb cccccccccccccccccc | | bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb cccccccccccccccccc | -------------------------------------------- In other words, I'd like to be able to do something like: \onecolumn \title$AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA \twocolumn % text of article 'a' \onecolumn % to cause the necessary break or whatever \twocolumn \title$BBBBBBBBBBBBB % text of article 'b' \endcolumn \title$CCCCCCCCCCCC % text of article 'c' \endpage or similar, either using Plain TeX, or preferably LaTex. Thanks in advance. -- Mark ------------------------------ Date: 30 Sep 87 18:03:00 EDT From: "ROBAX::KANG" Subject: Need documents on TEX Library files. To: "texhax" Reply-To: "ROBAX::KANG" Hello TEXHAXers, I requesteds some files from the Tex Library at Rochester. I don't know how to use them because they are not documented. For example, CTEX and TRADEMARK, can someone help? -- Kang sun-kang@yalecs.bitnet sun-kang@yale.edu ------------------------------ %%% %%% subscriptions, address changes to: texhax-request@score.stanford.edu %%% %%% submissions to: texhax@score.stanford.edu %%% please send a valid arpanet address!! %%% %%% BITNET redistribution: TEX-L@TAMVM1.BITNET (list server) %%% %%%\bye %%% ------------------------------ End of TeXhax Digest ************************** -------