========================================================================= Date: Sun, 10 Jun 90 13:04:07 -0700 Reply-To: The TUG DVI driver standards discussion list Sender: The TUG DVI driver standards discussion list From: Pierre MacKay Subject: PXL files In-Reply-To: DHOSEK%HMCVAX.BITNET@UWAVM.ACS.WASHINGTON.EDU's message of Sun, 13 May 90 22:36:00 PDT <9005140543.AA14858@june.cs.washington.edu> I most strongly endorse Don Hosek's rejection of PXL format. Don Knuth has been trying to get it killed for years. It is the existence of PXL files that accounts for a lot of the erroneous statements about TeX fonts being limited to 128 characters. I would also like to weed out of diagnostic messages all the evaluations which start from the PXL base of 1000 and leave users baffled and furious when they are told that they cannot have a font Magnification of 1728 when they believe they never asked for it. Messages based on magsteps, fine. Messages based on floating point reformatting to 1.728 better Messages of the form Font xxxxx.nnnpk ( NNN dpi at 1.728 magnification) not found best of all. Pierre MacKay ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 10 Jun 90 13:31:19 -0700 Reply-To: The TUG DVI driver standards discussion list Sender: The TUG DVI driver standards discussion list From: Pierre MacKay Subject: TUG meeting attendence I will be there, even though I have only just got to this piece of mail Pierre MacKay ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 11 Jun 90 10:49:51 -0700 Reply-To: The TUG DVI driver standards discussion list Sender: The TUG DVI driver standards discussion list From: Pierre MacKay Subject: delayed answers to mail I am temporarily unable to answer your messages in a timely manner. If you are interested in getting TeX 3.0 in a normal distribution, please send your request to elisabet@max.acs.washington.edu If you have technical questions about the distribution, or about compilation etc., forward your message to the same address, and Elisabeth will relay them to me. I must ask you please not to overwhelm Elisabeth with messages. My mail has been averaging 150 messages a week, which is one of the reasons I must take this slightly drastic step. Email: mackay@cs.washington.edu Pierre A. MacKay Smail: Northwest Computer Support Center TUG Site Coordinator for Lewis Hall 35F, Mail Stop DW10 Unix-flavored TeX University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195 (206) 543-6259 ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 23 Jun 90 01:01:00 PDT Reply-To: The TUG DVI driver standards discussion list Sender: The TUG DVI driver standards discussion list From: Don Hosek Subject: Notes on the TUG meeting THIS IS AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE. IF YOU ARE A VOTING MEMBER OF THE DRIVER STANDARDS COMMITTEE READ THIS NOW. I presented a draft of the standard to the TUG membership at large. This was largely what we voted on last month with some editing in response to the comments received from the list. Anyone interested in seeing the details of that particular draft may obtain the file by anonymous FTP from ymir.claremont.edu in the file [anonymous.tex.dvi-standard]level0-draft-002.tex. If you do not have FTP access, the file may be retrieved by sending a message to mailserv@ymir.claremont.edu with the line SEND [TEX.DVI-STANDARD]LEVEL0-DRAFT-002.TEX I will not be sending this particular draft to the list since I will be editing it somewhat further for the final review. Here's what will be happening in the next couple of months. There is a deadline of September 11th for the text of level 0 as will be explained shortly (1) I will make a few more minor changes to the driver standard to reflect comments of the conference attendees (the draft incidentally was well received from all directions. Most vendors seemed eager to get the final draft of the standard to become compliant as quickly as possible). This will include adding the appendices with the descriptions of the DVI, GF, PK, and TFM format as well as the enumeration of the level 0 rounding mechanism (the wording of that particular section of the standard will be changed to indicate that higher levels of the standard may specify a more sophisticated rounding mechanism than that given in DVItype). (2) This revision (which will be 0.03) will be distributed to comp.text.tex, DRIV-L, UKTeX, TeXhax and TeX-Euro for further review by the TeX community at large. I will incorporate any mundane suggestions into the standard and submit anything fairly radical to DRIV-L for discussion before deciding whether to incorporate it into the next draft (0.04). (3) At the same time, we need to _quickly_ get a working WEB implementation of DVIASM running. I need a volunteer for this. Pierre Mackay had offered his assistance on this at Stanford last year, but he has been too busy to get to it. I'm fairly certain that I too will be short on time for this sort of endeavor. Tom Reid has a C implementation and the WEB translation should not be too difficult. (4) Draft 0.04 will be submitted to DRIV-L for discussion. I will take motions for ammendments to this specification which we will vote on as quickly as possible. I will set a time limit of 10 days for returning votes on ammendments after the initial announcement of each announcement. Now that I've worked out the details of running mail reminder batch jobs on VMS you can be certain that you will get a daily reminder for each ammendment for which you haven't voted. There will _not_ be a vote on the standard as a whole. I assume that every one accepts the basic principles laid down in it. (5) On September 11, the final draft (1.0) will be sent to TUGboat to appear in TUGboat 11#4 (I'm assuming that 11#3 is the proceedings issue since Christina claims that will be out first). Shortly thereafter, a mailing will be sent to all driver developers in the TUG DVI driver list notifying them of the existence of the standard. A verification suite consisting of a DVIASM input file to create the nasty DVI file, the output from printing that DVI file (probably produced by Tom Reid's TeXrox since that is nearly compliant already), DVIASM and change files for as many systems as we can get it running on and a printed copy of the driver standards report will be made available. I don't know if we'll be able to plan on getting any sort of TUG funding for the distribution of the test suite (which will involve the printing and mailing of around 20 sheets of paper plus an IBM PC floppy disk). -dh ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 23 Jun 90 01:15:30 -0700 Reply-To: The TUG DVI driver standards discussion list Sender: The TUG DVI driver standards discussion list From: Pierre MacKay Subject: delayed answers to mail I am temporarily unable to answer your messages in a timely manner. If you are interested in getting TeX 3.0 in a normal distribution, please send your request to elisabet@max.acs.washington.edu If you have technical questions about the distribution, or about compilation etc., forward your message to the same address, and Elisabeth will relay them to me. I must ask you please not to overwhelm Elisabeth with messages. My mail has been averaging 150 messages a week, which is one of the reasons I must take this slightly drastic step. Email: mackay@cs.washington.edu Pierre A. MacKay Smail: Northwest Computer Support Center TUG Site Coordinator for Lewis Hall 35F, Mail Stop DW10 Unix-flavored TeX University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195 (206) 543-6259