DLV@CUNYVMS1.BITNET (08/31/90)
We've been playing eith emTeX drivers, and I'm very very happy with them. In particular, they work with PK fonts (we haven't had any PXL files around our disks for quite some time). It doesn't bother me that there are a few extra instructions in the driver that will make use of PXL fonts if PK files can't be found. But it evidently bothers Don Hosek so much that he said: >The emTeX drivers have one great weakness: they use PXL files (or >at least the last release I looked at did). Arguments against PXL >files: they're big (PK files average around 17% the size of PXL >files. Maybe some of you have gobs of disk space to blow on this >sort of thing, but most micro people I know don't), they only >support 128 characters in a font (a big problem for the new >generations of fonts being created with ISO 8859 coding). Unless my understanding of written English is worse than I believe, you seem to imply that emTeX drivers work ONLY with PXL fonts, and because of this dismiss the entire package. The truth is that em's drivers work fine with PK files, and his TeX itself is on par with commercial implementations that sell for hundreds of dollars, and yet it's free. Many thanks to Eberhard Mattes for making the results of his work available to the people! In my opinion, your posting illustrates the bigger problem that TUG leadership seems to have. TUG is closely associated with a few unscrupulous individuals that peddle commercial implementations of TeX, your TUGBoat pushes these commercial implementations in every issue, and practically never mentions the existence of free, yet equally good, TeX implementations for MS-DOS, and now you stoop to posting a falsehood in comp.text.tex to denigrate one of the better free TeXs. Frankly, I am growing disgusted with TUG, and am seriously considering not renewing my TUG membership next year. Regards, Dimitri Vulis