david (11/13/82)
We now have a new formatting package, called "ms" (the standard abbre-
viation for "manuscript"). It was created to deal with the lingering
problems in the current document-formatting package.
There are a few things it doesn't do yet (like mailing labels), and we
will probably be turning up minor problems for a little while yet, but
it already does many things better than the old package. Many of its
formatting commands are substantially more powerful than those of the
old package. It also does a number of things the old package didn't,
such as automatic footnote numbering, multi-column text, better han-
dling of tables and equations, and a much-improved form-letter facili-
ty.
The old formatting package ("format") is NOT going away, but we expect
that most new documents will use the new package. Unless there is
some special reason, it's probably not worthwhile to try to convert
old documents to the new package.
See following news articles regarding documentation and mini-courses.