[115] in Release_7.7_team
[yandros@MIT.EDU : Meeting Minutes, 6/30/94 ]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dorothy Bowe)
Wed Jul 6 09:26:56 1994
To: release-77-mtg@menelaus.local
In-Reply-To: [114]
Date: Wed, 06 Jul 1994 09:26:48 EDT
From: Dorothy Bowe <dot@MIT.EDU>
------- Forwarded Message
From: yandros@MIT.EDU
To: Dorothy Bowe <dot@MIT.EDU>
Date: Mon, 04 Jul 1994 08:53:42 -0400
Subject: Re: Meeting Minutes, 6/30/94
Hi there... just a couple things:
b) LaTeX
A very open issue at this point is the new version of LaTeX
installed as part of release 7.7. Dot is trying to track down
information on what changed and figure out if pieces are really
missing or not. Bert, the sipb member who did the work, is
currently in Yugoslavia, and is reading email but not consistently.
This may or may not become a major problem.
bert did that work for DCNS, not for SIPB; he'll be doing it again for
SIPB in the fall. :-) He's currently in Croatia, not Yugoslavia, and
is reading mail pretty consistently, but his network access is having
problems lately, so..
[Note: In a worse-case scenario, any .sty files which really are
missing could be installed in a locker and users told to modify
their TEXINPUTS path. I'd rather not have to resort to that,
though.]
Since most of the problem seems to be one of user education; a locker
won't won't help; users merely need to put `:' at the end of their
TEXINPUTS env variable (and ads for this should include mention of the
new goodies installed) and checks need to be made to see what common
current practices will need to change. I think I can summarize the
major changes:
o style files updated
most of the athena style files were *very* old (there were some
SHAR archives in /usr/athena/lib/tex/macros, I believe!!!); this
is one of the things that made sipb/consult/tex-contrib so used.
The power users will want to look at the new stuff; most users
will want to be able to ask OLC about the changes and be told how
to change their .environment file that their hallmate helped them
set up a couple years ago. The major addition is a new AMSLaTeX.
Your friends in course 18/8 should love you for this. :-)
o style files moved
Users will *need* to have either /usr/athena/lib/tex/macros//
(note the double slash) or a single `:' by itself in $TEXINPUTS to
get to the style files.
o dvis2ps dumped in favor of dvips
dvi2ps was finally replaced with dvips. dvips is a generally
better program, but there are some differences:
- you don't pipe it's output to the printer; it does that for you
- naming convention for fonts is different (newcen vs. ncs, times
vs timrom, etc.). The new names could be published or the old
names could be added to the new fonts temporarily or something.
The consultants are pretty much all familiar with dvips, since
they have to recomend it over dvi2ps so often (at least, that was
the case when I worked there).
o xdvi
xdvi also got upgraded, but I'm unclear what all was involved in
this change.
chad
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