jbw@cisunx.UUCP (Jingbai Wang) (04/30/89)
There have been many postings about nightmares reading TeXbook and the
such. If you happen to read Scribe Manual, it is even worse.
Most of manuals are hard to read -- good designers or programmers are not
usually good writers, and document preparers are not familiar with the
software.
As I announced earlier on this board that I've written up a guide on TeX/LaTeX
and some device drivers of about 110 pages, viewable on-line or hardcopy
(printed on PostScript printers). As of today, it is in ~/tmp/TeXGuide.arc,
june.cs.washington.edu, and people there expressed interests in accepting
it. You can ftp it and "arc -x " it (ftp should be in binary mode). There
is a README. If you got an ANSI terminal, type "$cdoc" to view everything.
As for the device drivers I mentioned about in the previous posting,
o dvi2ps will be ready and forworded to june.cs.washington.edu soon, but
since I added a few good things into Scribe lately, I also want to
incorporate them into dvi2ps. Therefore, it will take a while (2 weeks,
say), before you see the followup.
o GTeX for VMS -- after I posted the message, three people responded to it.
Two of them were interested in it, and the other was the original GTeX
author who posted a note on this board. He essentially said that,
1. Newer version of GTEX could be ftped from godot.psc.edu in anonymous,
and he hoped the older version were dead. His version was now called
gplot.
2. He requested users not to hack and re-distribute, and he asserted
legal rights on it (because it was copyrighted).
I checked the new version of gplot/gtex (version 4.0e) which was supposed
to work on VMS, UNIX and Ultrix. Since he does not want hacking, the unix
part is hopeless to most of the sites. PostScript part is not much
far from version 2.0 before I hacked. The asked for features (like psfig,
adobe fonts, etc.) are not there. The thing which tickles most, of course,
is the legal issue (how to interpret that copyright).
I think I will input my hackings into Beebe's dvialw from science.utah.edu,
and submit to him for distribution. Beebe's stuffs are good for 6 systems
including VMS, unix, and DOS.
I also copyright my files if they are over 90% developed by myself but I will
not threaten anybody with legal issues unless he tries to start a business
with it without permission.
JB Wang