OBRIEN%OBRIEN@VENUS.YCC.YALE.EDU ("James A. O'Brien 432-4382", 203) (09/28/89)
Keywords: MSDOS SBTEX An upgraded version of sbtex contained in SB26TEX.ARC is now available from SIMTEL20 (EARN sites use TRICKLE) in the pd1:<MSDOS.TEX> directory and by anonymous FTP from VENUS.YCC.YALE.EDU. sbtex is a "vanilla" MSDOS application and therefore will run on any MSDOS machine. Improvements over the previously released sb08: 1. It is faster; it requires about 30% less time to process tex files. 2. It has greater capacity: up to 3050 multiletter control sequences may be used (2400 for sb08). 3. Environment variables are provided to override the defaults for inputs, formats, and tfm directories. 4. User-adaptable support for 8-bit byte input files is provided. Byte values above 127 are replaced in the input buffer by strings from the pool file. These strings can be changed by editing the pool file. 5. The size of the main exe files has been reduced. TEX.EXE (including stats) is smaller than 150Kb. 6. Font swapping to disk has been implemented to cater for macro packages which preload extensive font data. Main mem swapping is not implemented: a CHKDSK value of 562,000 bytes of available RAM is required for a full sized 32-bit mword TeX, but most TeX files can be processed with less available RAM.