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% Filename: ltnews14.tex
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% This is issue 14 of LaTeX News.
\documentclass
% [lw35fonts] % uncomment this line to get Palatino
{ltnews}[2001/07/12]
% \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\publicationmonth{June}
\publicationyear{2001}
\publicationissue{14}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\raisefirstsection
\section{Future releases}
We are currently exploring how to best support the very large
community of individuals, organisations and enterprises that depend on
the robustness and availability of the current standard \LaTeX{}
distribution. The results of this may lead to some changes in the
regular release schedule and the handling of bug reports during the
next year.
\section{New release of \textsf{Babel} (required)}
Earlier this year a new release of \textsf{Babel} (3.7) became
available. You can read about its new features in
\begin{latexonly}
\file{http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/}\\
\hspace*{4em}\file{latex/required/babel/announce.txt}
\end{latexonly}
\begin{htmlonly}
\url{http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/required/babel/announce.txt}
\end{htmlonly}
One of the bugs that got fixed in this release deals with how labels
are handled by \LaTeX{}. Because this part of the kernel is modified
by \textsf{babel}, the relevant changes need to be coordinated.
Therefore to use \textsf{Babel} with this release of \LaTeX{} you will
need to update your version of \textsf{babel} to at least 3.7.
\section{New input encoding \package{latin9}}
The package \package{inputenc} has, thanks to Karsten Tinnefeld, been
extended to cover the \package{latin9} input encoding. The
ISO-Latin~9 encoding is a useful modern replacement for ISO-Latin~1
that contains a few characters needed for French and Finnish. Of wider
interest, it also contains the euro currency sign; this could be the
killer argument for many 8-bit texts to use Latin-9 in the future.
According to a Linux manpage, ISO~Latin-9 supports Albanian, Basque,
Breton, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish,
French, Frisian, Galician, German, Greenlandic, Icelandic, Irish
Gaelic, Italian, Latin, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Portuguese,
Rhaeto-Romanic, Scottish Gaelic, Spanish and Swedish.\\
The characters added in \package{latin9} are (in \LaTeX{} notation):\\
\begin{small}
\verb| \texteuro \v S \v s \v Z \v z \OE \oe \" Y |
\end{small}\\
They displace the following characters from \package{latin1}:\\
\begin{small}
\verb| \textcurrency \textbrokenbar \"{} \'{} \c{} |\\
\verb| \textonequarter \textonehalf \textthreequarters |
\end{small}
\section{New tools}
The new package \package{trace} provides many commands to control
\LaTeX{}'s tracing and debugging output, including the excellent new
information available with \eTeX{} such as the extremely useful
tracing of local assignments. You will find it in the tools
distribution.
It offers the command \verb|\traceon|, which is similar to
\verb|\tracingall| but suppresses uninteresting stuff such as font
loading by NFSS (which can go on for pages if you are unlucky). It
also offers \verb|\traceoff| to \ldots\ guess what! Full details are
in the documented source file, \file{trace.dtx}.
In the base \package{ifthen} package we have added
the uppercase synonyms \verb|\NOT| \verb|\AND| and \verb|\OR|.
\section{New experimental code}
In \textit{\LaTeX{} News~12} we announced some ongoing work towards a
`Designer Interface for \LaTeX' and we presented some early results
thereof. Since then, at Gutenberg\,2000 in Toulouse and TUG\,2000 in
Oxford, we described a new output routine and an improved method of
handling vertical mode material between paragraphs. In combination
these support higher quality \emph{automated}\footnote
{The stress here is on automated!}
page-breaking and page make-up\latex{\\}
for complex pages---the best yet achieved with \TeX{}!
More recently we have added material to handle the complex front
matter requirements of journal articles; this was presented at
Gutenberg\,2001 in Metz.
A paper describing the new output routine is
\begin{latexonly}
at\\
\begin{small}
\file{http://www.latex-project.org/papers/xo-pfloat.pdf}\\
\end{small}
\end{latexonly}
\begin{htmlonly}
at \url{http://www.latex-project.org/papers/xo-pfloat.pdf}.
\end{htmlonly}
All code examples and documentation are available
\begin{latexonly}
at\\
\begin{small}
\file{http://www.latex-project.org/code/experimental}
\end{small}
\end{latexonly}
\begin{htmlonly}
at \url{http://www.latex-project.org/code/experimental/}.
\end{htmlonly}
This directory has been extended to contain the following.
\begin{description}
\item[galley] Prototype implementation of the interface\latex{\\}
for manipulating vertical material in galleys.
\item[xinitials] Prototype implementation of the interface\latex{\\}
for paragraph initials (needs the \texttt{galley} package).
\item[xtheorem] Contributed example using the \texttt{template}
package to provide a designer interface for theorem environments.
\item[xor] A prototype implementation of the new output routine
as described in the \texttt{xo-pfloat.pdf} paper.
\item[xfrontm] A prototype version of
the new font matter interface.
\end{description}
\end{document}