furuta (11/16/82)
I would like to bring unix-wizards readers up to date with what's happening with TeX for Unix. TeX is Knuth's text formatting system, intended to produce beautiful books. It is particularly able to handle text with much mathematical material. The new second edition of the Art of Computer Programming, volume 2, was produced with this system. There is a TeX Users Group (often referred to as the TUG) which produces a newsletter called the TUGBoat. Professor Pierre MacKay and I have taken over the duties of TeX Users Group Unix coordinators. We welcome communications from those of you with interest in Unix TeX. I can be reached via the uucp pathnames ...decvax!microsoft!uw-beaver!uw-june!furuta and ...ucbvax!lbl-unix!uw-beaver!uw-june!furuta. From the Arpanet or CSNET, my address is Furuta@Washington. U.S. Mail may be addressed to Department of Computer Science, FR-35/University of Washington/Seattle, WA 98195. Pierre's mailing addresses are similar--substitute "mackay" for "furuta" in the electronic addresses. At present, there are two TeXs of interest. The status of the older TeX implementation (now referred to as TeX80) is basically unchanged from my note of a few months back. The software mostly runs, although it fails for some legal inputs, and we have working drivers for Versatecs and Varians. This TeX80 is written in Pascal (Berkeley Unix's pc) and runs on Vaxen under 4.1 BSD. Most of the support programs are written in C. The TeX port was carried out by Calvin Jackson at Cal Tech and many of the support programs came from Janet Incerpi at Brown University. We have not organized this material into a form suitable to be called a "distribution" but are willing to make dumps of our working directories available to others. Contact me for details. Please be aware, however, that this software will be on a "as-is" basis. In particular, most efforts are now going to work on the newer version of TeX, TeX82, and TeX80 on Unix will probably not be further maintained. The newer TeX, TeX82, is still being ported to Unix. We have reports of two successful ports, one by Howard Trickey at Stanford, and the other by Pavel Curtis at Cornell. Both are on Vaxen running 4.1 BSD and use a modified Berkeley Pascal. This software will probably be ready for distribution towards the beginning of the year. We have not yet worked out details of how this distribution will take place. I have established a new mailing list, Unix-TeX@Washington, for discussions relating to TeX82 on Unix. If you want to be on this list, please send mail to Furuta@Washington from CSNet or Arpanet. I will probably not be able to make this list available to uucp at present due to the unavailability of general uucp<-->Arpanet gateways. If you are working on a TeX implementation and I haven't been in touch with you, please drop me a line. --Rick ...decvax!microsoft!uw-beaver!uw-june!furuta (uucp) ...ucbvax!lbl-unix!uw-beaver!uw-june!furuta or Furuta@Washington (ARPAnet)