TeXhax Digest Saturday, April 23, 1988 Volume 88 : Issue 39 [SCORE.STANFORD.EDU]TEXHAX39.88 Editor: Malcolm Brown Today's Topics: Immoderate notes: Score had some disk problems PiCTeX Bug (Unix-) TeX redistribution Page numbering question Re: WARNING: Unix TeX in C writes to file descriptors > 2 Last Message Concerning Cross-Referencing PKtoGF dvi-to-text and printers high-speed Postscript printers Re: /magsteps allowed WARNING: Unix TeX in C writes to file descriptors > 2 female and male FTP'ing DVI files to VAXen hello! Re: easter AAAI-88 styles Plain TeX vs LaTeX TeXtoC - checksun problem Two BibTex questions/requests DVItoVDU terminal drivers Your questions about TeX versions. Re: \obeylines and MPSX input files SchemeTeX---Simple support for literate programming in Lisp. v88#36 (answer macro) tex driver for xerox 3700 in vms RE: Computing Sines in TeX ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 23 April 88 From: Malcolm Subject: Immoderate notes: Score had some disk problems %%% The reason why this digest is only being sent out now is that %%% Score suffered a failed disk drive. I fear that some submissions %%% made to TeXhax over the past few days may have been lost. %%% I will try to crank out some digests in rapid succession over %%% the next few days, in an attempt to catch up. Keep on the %%% lookout for your submissions. If you don't see them by %%% the end of week, I'm afraid you'll have to re-submit them. %%% Malcolm ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 14 Apr 88 14:07:59 PST From: Peter Scott Subject: PiCTeX Bug I have discovered a minuscule, and easily correctable bug in PiCTeX: Line 2717 of PICTEX.TEX reads \!dimenA=#1\relax \edef\!xmidpt{\the\!dimenA}% which is a copy of the preceding line; it should read: \!dimenA=#2\relax \edef\!ymidpt{\the\!dimenA}% Peter Scott (pjs%grouch@jpl-mil.jpl.nasa.gov) ------------------------------ Subject: (Unix-) TeX redistribution From: David Chase Date: Thu, 14 Apr 88 14:31:06 -0700 I am forwarding to TeXhax a question that was forwarded to me. In this letter, "we" is Olivetti Research Center. These tapes will be sent to other parts of Olivetti. From: Mike Kupfer Do you know if there are any licensing restrictions on TeX? That is, if I include /usr/local/tex in the .... tapes that we send out, would we be in any sort of legal trouble? mike David Chase Olivetti Research Center, Menlo Park ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 14 Apr 88 15:05:49 PDT From: darrell%cs@ucsd.edu (Darrell Long) Subject: Page numbering question Hi. I need to number pages for my dissertation according to this rule: the first page of a chapter will have the number centered at the bottom, subsequent pages will have the number in the upper right-hand corner. I am using plain, and I have a simple macro for beginning a chapter. I had tried modifying \advancepageno but it seemed to have no effect. Any help will be greatly appreciated. Darrell Long Department of Computer Science & Engineering University of California, San Diego La Jolla, CA 92093 ------------------------------ Subject: Re: WARNING: Unix TeX in C writes to file descriptors > 2 Date: Thu, 14 Apr 88 14:29:08 -0700 From: Tim Morgan I'm unable to test an undump'ed C TeX on other than Sun-3's. Under both SunOS 3.2 and 3.5, an undumped TeX behaves exactly as Phil describes, while a non-undumped TeX does not exhibit the problem. I've concluded that it's a bad interaction between the standard I/O system and undump, because, if you use the commands in the Makefile C TeX which does NOT have the problem (again, under both 3.2 and 3.5). I would therefore encourage people to upgrade to this release, which will be available from Pierre within a few days of the date of this message. Briefly, the commands in the make file to create the core file do it all from the command line, so the stdio system doesn't get started up. Apparently that avoids the bug. Tim ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 14 Apr 88 18:22 CDT From: Subject: Last Message Concerning Cross-Referencing Dear Mr. Brown, Please delete my last message concerning "Cross-referencing of figures and tables". I have come in contact with someone who has a solution and there is no impending need to include it in TeXHax. Thanks Tom ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 14 Apr 88 16:42:37 PDT From: rokicki@polya.stanford.edu (Tomas G. Rokicki) Subject: PKtoGF Is available on SCORE.STANFORD.EDU in PKTOGF.WEB. Enjoy! -tom ------------------------------ From: lantz@orc.olivetti.com Subject: dvi-to-text and printers Date: Thu, 14 Apr 88 16:55:17 -0700 1. Are there any (preferably good) "dvi2ps"-like converters out there for converting dvi to formatted text -- similar to using device:file or device:pagedfile in Scribe? If not, one wonders how you TeXophiles include readable documents in e-mail messages. 2. I've sent the following request to laser-lovers, news-makers, and info-postscript. Perhaps some of you who haven't already received it have something to add? ------------------------------ Subject: high-speed Postscript printers Date: Wed, 13 Apr 88 17:39:32 -0700 From: lantz@tuscany.orc.olivetti.com Several months ago I posted a request for information about high-speed Postscript printers. I received some input about the following: Diconix Dijit 1/PS: processor couldn't keep up with print engine; could print double-sided; 68020-based version rumored Dataproducts LZR-2665: lots of people have these; some favorable remarks, but a fair number of complaints about speed (the BEST reports said 12 ppm with simple pages, whereas MacWEEK reported a 190% DEGRADATION compared to the LaserWriter Plus on complicated graphics images... this for a print engine rated at 26 ppm); several people had problems replacing the toner QMS PS2400: "really bad Xerox engine... it gave us constant trouble ... Avoid if you can" TI Omnilaser: write-black yields some print-quality problems, but not overwhelming; prints Scribe "articles" (mostly Roman with some bold or italic) at 15 ppm, TeX output somewhat slower, complex graphics a lot slower (but faster than a Laserwriter) DEC LPS-40: widely acclaimed; Scribe and TeX text output at 30-40 ppm; complex graphics 2.5 times a LaserWriter; but rather painful operating environment, networking wise Based on this information, the TI OmniLaser looked like the best bet at the time, with the LPS-40 for those to whom price and DECNET expertise are no object. However, we've been off fighting other fires and are just getting back to this one. So I'd appreciate any additional input -- on the above or new machines. Note that the principal use of this machine will be as a "lineprinter" (i.e. simple, fixed-width font, for code, mail messages, etc.), with "technical documents" coming in second, and truly complex graphics (of the sort typically tested in the trade rags) rather rare. Thanks in advance, Keith Keith A. Lantz Phone: (415) 496-6235 Olivetti Research Center Internet: lantz@orc.olivetti.com, or 2882 Sand Hill Road, Suite 210 lantz%orc.uucp@unix.sri.com Menlo Park, CA 94025 UUCP: {acornrc,oliveb,sri-unix}!orc!lantz ------------------------------ Date: Thu 14 Apr 88 22:14:51-PDT From: Barbara Beeton Subject: Re: /magsteps allowed only magsteps 0-5 and magstephalf are defined in plain.tex (texbook, p. 349). it wouldn't be hard to extend the definition; knuth just didn't, apparently, see the need for larger sizes. -- barbara beeton ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 14 Apr 88 23:08:46 PDT From: Pierre MacKay Subject: WARNING: Unix TeX in C writes to file descriptors > 2 Incidentally, I have already suppressed all reference to the old \read to \blort method in the UnixTeX instructions. virtex '&plain' some_silly_file_name on the command line works better, and if I understood the last message correctly, also bypasses the open descriptor problem. Email: mackay@june.cs.washington.edu Pierre A. MacKay Smail: Northwest Computing Support Group TUG Site Coordinator for Lewis Hall, Mail Stop DW10 Unix-flavored TeX University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195 (206) 543-6259 ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 15 Apr 88 15:00 GMT From: Subject: female and male Has anybody ever used the 'female' and 'male' symbols (see below) in TeX ? *** * * ***** ***** * * * * * * * * ***** ***** * *** * Can anybody tell me how to generate these ? Stephan Maier PhD BIOMED@CZHETH5A Zurich, Switzerland ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 15 Apr 88 09:29:23 PST From: Peter Scott Subject: FTP'ing DVI files to VAXen I remember a discussion a while back on how to FTP DVI files onto a VAX which expected them to be in fixed-block format; didn't pay much attention to it until I had to do it myself yesterday and discovered the problem; you can't use CONVERT because it won't write the last block unless it happens to end on a block boundary. However, we do have a C program here that local support people wrote for people FTP'ing .EXE files that works just fine; anyone who needs it please contact me. Peter Scott (pjs%grouch@jpl-mil.jpl.nasa.gov) ------------------------------ From: Date: Fri, 15 Apr 88 15:48:55 EST Subject: hello! I'm new to this list, but I have been looking for this specific item for a while now. Does anybody have a TeX or LaTeX generated for cassette tape labels? Krishna Sethuraman krishna@athena.mit.edu ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 15 Apr 88 15:36:37 +0200 From: mcvax!diku.dk!seindal@uunet.UU.NET (Rene' Seindal) Subject: Re: easter From: cja@crim.eecs.umich.edu (Charles J. Antonelli) Date: 1 Apr 1988 1904-EST (Friday) Subject: Re: easter i couldn't get Theo Jurriens' "easter" program to work, so i rewrote the part that deals with the columnar output to use the macros given in the texbook. it works much better now. my version is available via anonymous ftp from crim.eecs.umich.edu:pub/easter.tex. The version of "easter" I received had some lines broken in column 79, apparently by some mailer. It had caused two "\fi" to become "\ fi" and "\f i", which naturally didn't work. Reassembly of those lines fixed everything (at least it worked for me). Rene' Seindal, DIKU, U. of Copenhagen. (seindal@diku.dk) ------------------------------ Subject: AAAI-88 styles Date: Fri, 15 Apr 88 22:08:21 -0400 From: Ken Yap The LaTeX and BibTeX style files for AAAI 88 conference proceedings have just been released. The files are: aaai-instructions.tex (instructions to authors) aaai-named-0.98.bst (BibTeX style file) aaai-named-0.99.bst (") aaai.sty (LaTeX style file) and can be retrieved from the archive server in the usual way. The version numbers 0.98 and 0.99 are the BibTeX versions required. (BibTeX style files must match the BibTeX release version - 0.99 is not backward compatible with 0.98.) Ken ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 16 Apr 88 16:20:37 PDT From: KARNEY%PPC.MFENET@NMFECC.ARPA Subject: Plain TeX vs LaTeX This is in response to comments by Daniel M. Zirin in TEXHAX V88 #33. My recommendation to beginning TeX users is "Use LaTeX". Here are my reasons: (1) LaTeX encourages a "logical" approach to document preparation (see Lamport's article in the latest TUGboat). Plain TeX beginners tend to sprinkle their papers with lots of \vskips, etc., because they haven't learned how to write macros. This leads to a messy paper, inconsistencies in style etc. (2) It is easy to switch formats (e.g., your institution may put out a preprint of a journal article which needs to be in a different format from what's submitted to the journal). (3) The ability to cross-reference equations, citations, etc. is indispensible if you're writing a long paper. (Of course this is possible with Plain TeX, but you have to write the macros.) (4) The user can start writing his document right away without having to bother with writing umpteen macros. Most users don't want to become TeX programmers. LaTeX users don't have to. (Many "Plain TeX" sites have a home-brewed set of macros, which alleviates this problem for Plain TeX users. Of course this introduces a portability problem. And some poor soul has to maintain them.) (5) The manual is shorter than the TeXbook, since it's geared towards the user of LaTeX rather than the programmer. (6) BibTeX and makeindex work well with LaTeX. To answer some Zirin's points: 1) If a site has the TeX WP System installed, plain TeX is the first thing to work. LaTeX requires system types to fixup style files... At my site, we use all the LaTeX files without modifications. I have provided some additional style files (e.g., to produce a letterhead with letters). ... (in some earlier versions, the LaTeX .EXE for VMS didn't even work on some local systems so LaTeX was run by constantly loading the LPLAIN format (.FMT) file with a command like "TEX &LPLAIN inputfile"). I'm know of two major VMS implementations: (a) Stanford's (Maria Code). This requires the loading of a format file BOTH for Plain TeX and for LaTeX. The need to specify the format is removed by symbol definitions $ tex :== $tex_exe:tex $ latex :== $tex_exe:tex &lplain (b) Kellerman and Smith's. This allows the format file to be preloaded. 2) LaTeX is a completely separate environment and once you start to want "extras" plain TeX starts to shine. Extras for LaTeX are quite easy to provide with style files. 4) Portability. LaTeX users may have to carry around style files to make sure it will work the same on another system (this may have changed recently, but I started with pre-TeX80). Plain TeX users have *nothing* to worry about with this regard. I would turn this around. A LaTeX user can E-mail his document to another site and not worry about anything as long as he's using one of the standard styles. A Plain TeX user will usually have to send of his site's macro package in addition. (Or else, the first 10 pages of his document will consist of TeX macros.) Charles Karney Plasma Physics Laboratory Phone: +1 609 243 2607 Princeton University MFEnet: Karney@PPC.MFEnet PO Box 451 ARPAnet: Karney%PPC.MFEnet@NMFECC.ARPA Princeton, NJ 08543-0451 Bitnet: Karney%PPC.MFEnet@ANLVMS.Bitnet ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 17 Apr 88 11:30:58 BST From: stoy%prg.oxford.ac.uk@NSS.Cs.Ucl.AC.UK Subject: TeXtoC - checksun problem We have encountered a problem with our LaTeX system produced with the aid of Tim Morgan's TeXtoC (TeX version 2.7 on a Sun 3/50 (SunOS 3.2)). After making initex and virtex we went through the usual business of producing LaTeX (i.e. the \read 0 to \blort stuff, undump etc.). Our problem is that for the pre-loaded fonts (e.g. cmr10), but not for the others (e.g. cmcsc10), our more fussy device drivers produce reports such as: Requires: cmr12.1500pxl Checksums Wrong DVI: 0 PXL: 1487622411 The same system produced by compiling the Pascal source does not exhibit this problem. Apart from this (e.g. using a driver that does not do this check), everything seems to work properly. Have we done something wrong? Is this a known bug? Any advice would be gratefully received. joe stoy ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 17 Apr 88 18:04:40 EDT From: "Don N. Kleinmuntz" Subject: Two BibTex questions/requests 1. Does anyone have a convenient method for generating a LaTeX document that consists of a bibliography containing "^em all" the entries in a bib file, along with the key for each entry (preferably as the label)? Example: [label1] Author1 name. Title1. Other stuff1. 1985, and so on. [label2] Author2 name. {^it Booktitle}. And so on. . . . . . . (This is useful for reference purposes when the bib file gets too large to remember all the labels.) 2. Does anyone have a bibliography style file for American Pscyh. Association style (or reasonable approximation) that works with version 0.98i of BibTex? I looked at the apalike files on the Rochester collection and they look pretty good, but I don't have access to BibTeX 0.99, which apalike requires. OR: Can anyone advise me on the availability of BibTeX 0.99 for either CMS or MS-DOS machines? We recently received an update of the CMS TeX distribution (TeX version 2.9, I believe), but the LaTeX files and BibTeX files seemed to be unchanged from our previous versions. Thanks. |-----------------------------------------------------------| | Don Kleinmuntz | | high tech: dklein@sloan.bitnet or dklein@sloan.mit.edu | | medium tech: (617) 253-2430 | | low tech: Sloan School of Management | | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | | 50 Memorial Drive, E52-568 | | Cambridge, MA 02139 | ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 17 Apr 88 14:31 PDT From: Don Hosek Subject: DVItoVDU terminal drivers If you have anything beyond the standard group, I would like to hear about it, and possibly get a copy of the .mod file. To refresh you memory, the currently available VDUs are: AED483 (AED 512 with 512 by 483 screen) AED512 (AED 512 with 512 by 512 screen) ANSI (any ANSI compatible VDU; synonym = VT100) ENVISION (ENVISION 230 and Lear-Siegler 7107 terminal; synonym = LS7105) REGIS (any ReGIS compatible VDU; synonyms = GIGI, VK100, VT125, VT240) VIS240 (VISUAL 240; synonym = VIS241) VIS500 (VISUAL 500) VIS550 (VISUAL 550; synonym = VISUAL) VT100132 (any VT100 compatible VDU in 132 column mode) VT220 (VT220 using down-loaded chunky graphics; synonym = VT200) VT640 (VT100 with Retro-Graphics) (Note that ENVISION is not a standard terminal, but an additional one written by Ed Bell at U Kansas) Thanks, -dh ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 18 Apr 88 10:33:52 IST From: "Jacques J. Goldberg" Subject: Your questions about TeX versions. Coban, We will never know if it's me now, you, or the TeXhax editor when he got your mail and placed it in the last issue, that fell into the 1st of April trap. If you were kidding, then at least I'll say for my own pride that I write this, being aware of the possibility. But just in case you had taken that bulletin seriously, do not worry, your version is Ok, and the rest is cryptic funny history for those who were already TeX addicts back in 1982... Jacques ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 18 Apr 88 13:44:57 BST From: CET1%phoenix.cambridge.ac.uk@NSS.Cs.Ucl.AC.UK Subject: Re: \obeylines and MPSX input files In TeXhax #36, Gus Gassmann asks why he gets strange effects from TeX input of the form {\tt\obeylines COLUMNS ~~~~COL1~~~~~~ROW1~~~~~~~~~~~1.0 ~~~~COL2~~~~~~ROW1~~~~~~~~~~~2.0 } (By the time TeXhax got to me, those characters were all lower case Cs, but they were clearly meant to be tildes.) I thought I had seen all the forms of trouble (many, many of them) that TeX users could get into with \obeylines, but this is a new one on me! The problem is that the definition of the active character ~ in Plain TeX is \def~{\penalty\@M \ } % \@M is 10000 The control space is "innately horizontal" (i.e. will cause a switch from vertical to horizontal mode), but the \penalty *isn't*. Thus if ~ is used in vertical mode (as it is for those lines above beginning with ~) then the penalty generated goes in the *vertical* list, and inhibits page breaking rather than line breaking! This is arguably a bug in plain.tex: probably there should be a \leavevmode before the \penalty in the definition. Still, beginning a paragraph with a tie is rather unusual. Gus Grassman continues > I understand that \obeylines explicitly starts a new paragraph at a > line break, ... No, it doesn't---although that is a common misapprehension. It *terminates* the current paragraph (if any) at the line break, but it doesn't start a new one. You must understand this to see why, for example, empty input lines do not generate extra vertical space. Local users often try to use both \obeylines and \obeyspaces, and then wonder why leading spaces on input lines get ignored. The awnser, of course, is that space tokens (which active space characters generate by default) are no-ops in vertical mode. The circumvention I normally recommend is the type used on p.421 of the TeXbook: {\obeyspaces\global\let =\ } so that active space characters generate a control space. (This also sorts out \spacefactor problems.) I would suggest you use this style. However, if you want to continue using ~ characters, you could use {\tt\obeylines\let~=\ % redefine ~ locally COLUMNS ~~~~COL1~~~~~~ROW1~~~~~~~~~~~1.0 ~~~~COL2~~~~~~ROW1~~~~~~~~~~~2.0 } Chris Thompson Cambridge University Computing Service JANET: cet1@uk.ac.cam.phx ARPA: cet1%phx.cam.ac.uk@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk ------------------------------ From: John D. Ramsdell Date: Mon, 18 Apr 88 09:22:39 EDT Subject: SchemeTeX---Simple support for literate programming in Lisp. SchemeTeX provides simple support for literate programming in any dialect of Lisp on Unix. Originally created for use with Scheme, it defines a new source file format which may be used to produce LaTeX code or Lisp code. Roughly speaking, LaTeX formats Lisp code in a verbatum-like environment, and it formats Lisp comments in an ordinary environment. SchemeTeX is available via anonymous FTP from linus (192.12.120.51) in the shar file named "pub/schemeTeX.sh". Included is an operating system independent version for the T dialect of Lisp. John ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 18 Apr 88 10:17:09 PLT From: Dean Guenther Subject: v88#36 (answer macro) Hal Varian writes about an \Answer macro: >This works fine unless I use mathematics. A question like "$(x+1)^2$ equals >\Ans{$x^2 + 2x + 1$}" generates an error message about a missing dollar >sign. I think that the problem has something to do with the difference Hal, the problem probably occurs because you used \underline. The following \answer macro works equally fine in math mode: -------------------- answer.macro ---------------------------------- \newbox\answerbox \newif\ifgiveanswers \def\answer#1{\setbox\answerbox=\hbox{#1} \vrule width 3.0\wd\answerbox height -.6pt depth 1pt \hskip-3.0\wd\answerbox\ignorespaces \raise1pt\hbox to 3.0\wd\answerbox{\vrule width 0pt height 11.0pt depth 1pt {\hfill\tenit\it\ifgiveanswers#1\else\phantom{#1}\fi\hfill}}\ } \let\ans=\answer This is an \ans{answer} or math \ans{$x\over y_2$}. \bye Dean Guenther TeX IBM VM/CMS Site Coordinator Washington State University Pullman, Wa. 99164-1220 phone: 509-335-0411 BITnet: GUENTHER@WSUVM1 ------------------------------ Date: 18 Apr 88 11:35:00 EST From: "SYSTEM MANAGER" Subject: tex driver for xerox 3700 in vms Peter Scott (PJS@NAIF.JPL.NASA.GOV) suggested that you might be able to assist me with finding a driver for TEX which will support the XEROX 3700 laser printer on a VAX/VMS system. Any information on where we could get such a driver would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. Barbara Mellon Systems Manager, CGL United States Military Academy MELLON@WESTPOINT.ARPA ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 18 Apr 1988 14:44 EDT From: Jim Walker Subject: RE: Computing Sines in TeX In TeXhax v.88 #36, Sebastian Rahtz asks how to compute sines in TeX. If you can do arithmetic, then you can estimate the sine function using, say, the Maclaurin series expansion. In the macros below, I use the formula x-(x~3)/6+(x~5)/120, which is decent when x is between -90 degrees and +90 degrees. The tricky part is persuading TeX to do floating-point multiplication. -- Jim Walker, Department of Mathematics, University of South Carolina %------------------- Cut Here ------------------------- \newdimen\x \newdimen\y \newdimen\xsquare \newdimen\xfourth {% \catcode`\p=12 \catcode`\t=12 \gdef\numonly#1pt{% \def\xx{#1}% }% }% \def\MULTyBYx{% \expandafter\numonly\the\x \edef\b{\y=\xx\y}% \b }% \def\calcsin{% Find sin(\x) and put it in \y. Say \x is in degrees. \x=0.0174533\x % Convert to radians. \y=\x \MULTyBYx \xsquare=\y \MULTyBYx \MULTyBYx \xfourth=\y \y=1pt \advance\y by -0.1666666\xsquare \advance\y by 0.008333333\xfourth \MULTyBYx }% % Example of use: \x=23pt \calcsin \expandafter\numonly\the\y % Now \xx should contain the sine of 23 degrees. ------------------------------ %%% %%% Concerning subscriptions, address changes, unsubscribing: %%% BITNET: send a one-line mail message to LISTSERV@TAMVM1.BITNET: %%% SUBSCRIBE TEX-L % to subscribe %%% %%% All others: send mail to %%% texhax-request@score.stanford.edu %%% please send a valid arpanet address!! %%% %%% %%% All submissions to: texhax@score.stanford.edu %%% %%%\bye %%% ------------------------------ End of TeXhax Digest ************************** -------