% \iffalse meta-comment % % Copyright 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 % The LaTeX3 Project and any individual authors listed elsewhere % in this file. % % For further copyright information, and conditions for modification % and distribution, see the file legal.txt, and any other copyright % notices in this file. % % This file is part of the LaTeX2e system. % ---------------------------------------- % This system is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, % but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of % MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. % % For error reports concerning UNCHANGED versions of this file no % more than one year old, see bugs.txt. % % Please do not request updates from us directly. Primary % distribution is through the CTAN archives. % % % IMPORTANT COPYRIGHT NOTICE: % % You are NOT ALLOWED to distribute this file alone. % % You are allowed to distribute this file under the condition that it % is distributed together with all the files listed in manifest.txt. % % If you receive only some of these files from someone, complain! % % % Permission is granted to copy this file to another file with a % clearly different name and to customize the declarations in that % copy to serve the needs of your installation, provided that you % comply with the conditions in the file legal.txt. % % However, NO PERMISSION is granted to produce or to distribute a % modified version of this file under its original name. % % You are NOT ALLOWED to change this file. % % % % \fi \documentclass[a4paper]{article} % Commands and environments: \newcommand \eg {e.g.~} \newcommand \ie {i.e.~} \newenvironment{citations}{% \list{}{% \renewcommand{\makelabel}[1]{\normalfont\itshape ##1}% }% }{% \endlist } % Some logos: \newcommand\NFSS {NFSS} \newcommand\LaTeXNews {\LaTeX~News} \newcommand\AW {Addison Wesley} \newcommand\SGML {{\sc SGML}} \newcommand\DSSSL {{\sc DSSSL}} \newcommand\PS {{\sc Post\-Script}} \newcommand\AmSTeX{$\mathcal A$\lower.4ex\hbox{$\!\mathcal M\!$}$\mathcal S$-\TeX} \newcommand\AmSLaTeX{$\mathcal A$\lower.4ex\hbox{$\!\mathcal M\!$}$\mathcal S$-\LaTeX} \newcommand\MF{{\sc Meta\-font}} % sections \setcounter{secnumdepth}{-2} % Front matter: \title{\Large The \LaTeX3 Project} \author{\copyright 1995 \ Frank Mittelbach and Chris Rowley} \date{21 November 1995} \begin{document} \thispagestyle{empty} \maketitle \begin{abstract} This article describes the motivation, achievements and future of the \LaTeX3 Project, which was established to produce a new version of \LaTeX{}, the widely-used and highly-acclaimed document preparation system. It also describes how you can help us to achieve our aims. \textbf{For Authors, Publishers and Distributors }% The project team request that, whenever possible, you include this article in any of the following: \begin{itemize} \item Books about \TeX{} and \LaTeX{}. \item Instructions for authors on using \LaTeX{}. \item The printed documentation of CD-ROM collections that contain \LaTeX. \end{itemize} \end{abstract} \section{Outline} The purposes of the \LaTeX3 system can be summarized thus: it will greatly increase the range of documents which can be processed; and it will provide a flexible interface for typographic designers to easily specify the formatting of a class of documents. The \LaTeX3 Project Team is a small group of volunteers whose aim is to produce this major new document processing system based on the principles pioneered by Leslie Lamport in the current \LaTeX. The major work of the team during 1994 and 1995 was the release and maintenance of the new \emph{standard} version of \LaTeX{}: the one you have just acquired. They will continue to maintain this system, releasing updated versions every six months and recording these activities in the \LaTeX{} bugs database (see below). Although \LaTeX{} may be distributed freely, the production and maintenance of the system does require expenditure of reasonably large sums of money. The \LaTeX3 Project Fund has therefore been set up to channel money into this work. We know that some users are aware of this fund as they have already contributed to it---many thanks to all of them! If you want to know more about how you can help the project, see page \pageref{fund}---and thanks in advance for your generosity in the future. \section{Background} With \TeX{}, Knuth designed a formatting system that is able to produce a large range of documents typeset to extremely high quality standards. For various reasons (\eg quality, portability, stability and availability) \TeX{} spread very rapidly and can nowadays be best described as a world-wide de facto standard for high quality typesetting. Its use is particularly common in specialized areas, such as technical documents of various kinds, and for multi-lingual requirements. The \TeX{} system is fully programmable. This allows the development of high-level user interfaces whose input is processed by \TeX{}'s interpreter to produce low-level typesetting instructions; these are input to \TeX{}'s typesetting engine which outputs the format of each page in a device-independent page-description language. The \LaTeX{} system is such an interface; it was designed to support the needs of long documents such as textbooks and manuals. It separates content and form as much as possible by providing the user with a generic (\ie logical rather than visual) mark-up interface; this is combined with style sheets which specify the formatting. Recent years have shown that the concepts and approach of \LaTeX{} are now widely accepted. Indeed, \LaTeX{} has become the standard method of communicating and publishing documents in many academic disciplines. This has led to many publishers accepting \LaTeX{} source for articles and books; and the American Mathematical Society now provides a \LaTeX{} package making the features of \AmSTeX{} available to all users of \LaTeX{}. Its use has also spread into many other commercial and industrial environments, where the technical qualities of \TeX{} together with the concepts of \LaTeX{} are considered a powerful combination of great importance to such areas as corporate documentation and publishing. With the spreading use of \SGML{}-compliant systems, \TeX{} again is a common choice as the formatting engine: a widely used such system is {\em The Publisher\/} from ArborText, whilst a more recent development is the object-oriented document editor Grif. The latter is used for document processing in a wide range of industrial applications; it has also been adopted by the Euromath consortium as the basis of their mathematician's workbench, one of the most advanced of the emerging project-oriented user environments. Typeset output from \SGML{}-coded documents in these systems is obtained by translation into \LaTeX{}, which will therefore also be a natural choice for the output of \DSSSL-compliant systems. Because a typical \SGML{} Document Type Definition (DTD) uses concepts similar to those of \LaTeX{}, the formatting is often implemented by simply mapping document elements to \LaTeX{} constructs rather than directly to `raw \TeX'. This enables the sophisticated analytical techniques built into the \LaTeX{} software to be exploited; and it avoids the need to program in \TeX{}. \section{Motivation} This increase in the range of applications of \LaTeX{} has highlighted certain limitations of the current system, both for authors of documents and for designers of styles. In addition to the need to extend the variety of classes of document which can be processed by \LaTeX{}, substantial enhancements are necessary in, at least, the following areas: \begin{itemize} \item the command syntax (attributes, short references, etc); \item the layout specification interface (style design); \item the level of robustness (error recovery, omitted tags); \item the extendability (package interface); \item the layout specification of tabular material; \item the specification and inclusion of graphical material; \item the positioning of floating material, and other aspects of page layout; \item the use of documents in hypertext systems. \end{itemize} Further analysis of these deficiencies has shown that some of the problems are to be found in \LaTeX{}'s internal concepts and design. This project to produce a new version therefore involves thorough research into the challenges posed by new applications and by the use of \LaTeX{} as a formatter for \SGML{} documents. This will result in a major re-implementation of large parts of the system. The recently released New Standard \LaTeX{} already incorporates some of the results of such rethinking of the fundamentals, notably in the following areas: \begin{itemize} \item Font declaration and selection; \item Font and glyph handling within mathematical formulas; \item Handling multiple font glyph encodings within a document; \item Allowing multiple input character encodings within a document; \item A uniform interface for graphics inclusion; \item Support for coloured text; \item Building and interfacing new classes and extension packages. \end{itemize} \section{Description} The strengths of the present version of \LaTeX{} are as follows: \begin{itemize} \item excellent standard of typesetting for text, technical formulas\\ and tabular material; \item separation of generic mark-up from visual formatting; \item ease of use for authors; \item portability of documents over a wide range of platforms; \item adaptability to many languages; \item widespread and free availability; \item reliable support and maintenance by the \LaTeX3 project team. \end{itemize} These will be preserved and in many cases greatly enhanced by the new version which is being developed to fulfill the following requirements. \begin{itemize} \item It will provide a syntax that allows highly automated translation from popular \SGML{} DTDs into \LaTeX{} document classes (these will be provided as standard with the new version). The syntax of the new \LaTeX{} user-interface will, for example, support the \SGML{} concepts of `entity', `attribute' and `short reference' in such a way that these can be directly linked to the corresponding \SGML{} features. \item It will provide a straightforward style-designer interface to support both the specification of a wide variety of typographic requirements and the linking of entities in the generic mark-up of a document to the desired formatting. These two parts of the design process will be clearly separated so that it is possible to specify different layouts for the same DTD. The language and syntax of this interface will be as natural as possible for a typographic designer. As a result, this language could easily be interfaced to a visually-oriented, menu-driven specification system. \item It will provide an enhanced user-interface that allows expression of the typesetting requirements from a large range of subject areas. Some examples are listed here. \begin{itemize} \item The requirements of technical documentation (\eg offset layout,\\ change bars, etc). \item The requirements of academic publishing in the humanities\\ (critical text editions, etc). \item The requirements of structural formulas in chemistry. \item Advanced use of the mathematical-typesetting features of \TeX{}. \item The integration of graphical features, such as shading, within text. \end{itemize} Special care will be taken to ensure that this interface is extensible: this will be achieved by use of modular designs. \item It will provide a more robust author-interface. For example, artificial restrictions on the nesting of commands will be removed. Error handling will be improved by adding a more effective, interactive help system. \item It will provide access to arbitrary fonts from any family (such as the \PS{} and TrueType fonts) including a wide range of fonts for multi-lingual documents and the specialist glyphs required by documents in various technical and academic areas. \item The new interfaces will be documented in detail and the system will provide extensive catalogues of examples, carefully designed to make the learning time for new users (both designers and authors) as short as possible. \item The code itself will be thoroughly documented and it will be designed on modular principles. Thus the system will be easy to maintain and to enhance. \end{itemize} The resulting new \LaTeX{} will, like the present version, be usable with any standard \TeX{} system and so will be freely available on a wide range of platforms. \section{The \LaTeX3 Project Fund} \label{fund} No money from this fund has gone towards salaries but there are many necessities that do need financing: examples are new, or enhanced, computing equipment and travel to team meetings (the volunteers come from many different countries, so getting together occasionally is a non-trivial exercise). This is why we are appealing to you for contributions to the fund. Any sum will be much appreciated; the amount need not be large, small contributions add up to very useful amounts. Contributions of suitable equipment and software will also be of great value. We are also asking commercial organisations to assess the benefits they gain from using, or distributing, a well-supported \LaTeX{} and to make appropriate contributions to the fund in order that we can continue to maintain and improve the product. If you work for, or do business with, such an organisation, please bring to the attention of the relevant people the existence and needs of the project. In particular, we ask that all the large number of organisations and businesses that distribute \LaTeX{} on a CD-ROM should consider pricing all products containing \LaTeX{} at a level that enables them to make regular donations to the fund from the profit on these items. We also ask all authors and publishers of books about \LaTeX{} to consider donating part of the royalties to the fund. Contributions, or enquiries, should be sent to one of the following addresses: \begin{quote}\small \TeX{} Users Group, 1850 Union Street \#1637, San~Francisco, CA~94123, USA\\ Fax:~+1~415~982~8559 \ Email: \texttt{tug@tug.org} UK TUG, 1 Eymore Close, Selly Oak, Birmingham B29~4LB, UK\\ Fax: +44 121 476 2159 \ Email: \texttt{uktug-enquiries@tex.ac.uk} \end{quote} Cheques should be payable to the user group (TUG or UKTUG) and be clearly marked as contributions to the \LaTeX3 fund. Many thanks to all of you who have contributed in the past and thanks in advance for your generosity in the future. \section{\LaTeX{} on the internet} \LaTeX{} has its own home page on the World Wide Web, with the URL: \begin{verbatim} http://www.tex.ac.uk/CTAN/latex/ \end{verbatim} This page describes \LaTeX{} and the \LaTeX3 project, and contains pointers to other \LaTeX{} resources, such as the user guides, the \TeX{} Frequently Asked Questions, and the \LaTeX{} bugs database. The electronic home of anything \TeX-related is the Comprehensive \TeX{} Archive Network (CTAN). This is a network of cooperating ftp sites, with over a gigabyte of \TeX{} material: \begin{verbatim} ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/ ftp://ftp.shsu.edu/tex-archive/ ftp://ftp.dante.de/tex-archive/ \end{verbatim} For more information, see the \LaTeX{} home page. \section{\LaTeX{} documentation} \setlength{\parindent}{0pt} A complete description of the New Standard \LaTeX{} can be found in: \begin{citations} \item[\LaTeX: A Document Preparation System] Leslie Lamport, \AW, 2nd ed, 1994. \item[The \LaTeX{} Companion] Goossens, Mittelbach and Samarin, \AW, 1994. \end{citations} This \LaTeX{} distribution comes with documentation on the new features: \begin{citations} \item[\LaTeXe{} for authors] describes the new features of \LaTeX{} documents, in the file \texttt{usrguide.tex}; \item[\LaTeXe{} for class and package writers] describes how to produce \LaTeX{} classes and packages, in the file \texttt{clsguide.tex}; \item[\LaTeXe{} font selection] describes the new features of \LaTeX{} fonts for class and package writers, in the file \texttt{fntguide.tex}. \end{citations} For more information on \TeX{} and \LaTeX{}, get in touch with your local \TeX{} Users Group, or the international \TeX{} Users Group; information about these groups can also be found in the CTAN. \end{document}