TeXhax Digest Wednesday, 6 May 1992 Volume 92 : Issue 008 Moderators: David Osborne and Peter Abbott % The TeXhax Digest is brought to you as a service of the UK TeX Users Group % % in cooperation with the UK TeX Archive group % Today's Topics: MetaPost MetaPost GNU font utilities 0.4 available Update to STYles at FILESERV/Niord version 1.1 of ``my'' font naming scheme available Re: version 1.1 of ``my'' font naming scheme available acquiring TeX Hyphenation patterns for Catalan ready for beta testing BibTeX entry type appropriate for reprints Question about DVI drivers Output from bibliographic database services as (La)TeX input? ------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Fri, 27 Mar 92 10:41:00 -0500 From: hobby@research.att.com Subject: MetaPost Keywords: METAFONT, MetaPost, graphics, PostScript At the TeX User's Group Meeting in August 1989, I first announced my plans to create a picture-drawing language based on METAFONT but with PostScript output and features for dealing with text as well as graphics. By the summer of 1990, I had a preliminary version installed on a few machines here at Bell Labs, but I was not able to make it available externally. Since then, I have perfected the language implementation and the support software and I have written a User' s Manual, but I had trouble getting permission to make it available outside of AT&T. Now I can finally announce that the MetaPost language implementation is available free to any academic institution. It is still necessary to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Interested parties should contact me at the address below and give an address where I can have the necessary paperwork sent. Here are the main features of MetaPost: 1. The language is based on METAFONT and has almost the same syntax and semantics. This includes data types for curves, pictures, and linear transformations, as well as powerful macros and the ability to solve linear equations. 2. Pictures can contain typeset text using any font for which you have a .tfm file. MetaPost input can also contain text to be typeset with TeX (or troff). There are predefined macros for things like positioning labels and finding bounding boxes. 3. There are primitives and predefined macros for accessing PostScript features such as colors and shades of gray, dashed lines, and clipping, and for controlling the appearance of corners and ends of lines. While it is possible to use MetaPost to generate Type 3 PostScript fonts, the intended application is generating figures for technical documents. For this reason, MetaPost output consists of PostScript files that can be merged with TeX output using graphics inclusion features in dvi-to-PostScript translators. Since many dvi-to-PostScript translators download TeX fonts by including only those characters that are actually used by the .dvi file, extra provisions are necessary to allow such fonts in PostScript files generated via MetaPost. Version 5.47 of Tom Rokicki's dvips contains undocumented features for doing this, but a few bug-fixes are necessary to make them work properly. You can also use any dvi-to-PostScript program that understands encapsulated PostScript with standard comments like "%%DocumentFonts: cmr10". The actual MetaPost distribution contains web source for the translator and auxiliary programs, change files for use with the standard UNIX (r) TeX distribution (for use with web2c), auxiliary routines written in C, and a shell script that controls the preprocessing of TeX commands found in MetaPost input files. I will also include the bug fixes for dvips. John Hobby hobby@research.att.com AT&T Bell Laboratories 600 Mountain Ave. PO Box 636 Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974-0636 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 31 Mar 92 15:39:00 -0500 From: hobby@research.att.com Subject: MetaPost Keywords: METAFONT, MetaPost, graphics, PostScript My message announcing the availability of MetaPost should have explained how to get the manual. The manual is or will soon be available via netlib as CSTR 162. So you can either mail netlib@research.att.com send 162 from research/cstr or, if anonymous ftp is more convenient for you, get netlib/research/cstr/162.Z from research.att.com. I should also mention that version 5.481 of Rokicki's dvips has MetaPost support documented and working properly. John Hobby hobby@research.att.com AT&T Bell Laboratories 600 Mountain Ave. PO Box 636 Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974-0636 ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 28 Mar 92 09:08:43 -0500 From: karl@cs.umb.edu (Karl Berry) Subject: GNU font utilities 0.4 available Keywords: METAFONT, fonts, utilities I have released the first public version (0.4) of the GNU font utilities. It is available by ftp from prep.ai.mit.edu [18.71.0.38]:pub/gnu/fontutils-0.4.tar.Z. You will need GCC and GNU Make to compile these programs. For the programs which do online graphics, you will need an X11 server and the X11R4 or R5 libraries. Send bugs or suggestions to bug-gnu-utils@prep.ai.mit.edu. Here is a brief description of the programs included: * imagetofont reads an image in PBM or IMG format, and writes a bitmap font in GF format. * xbfe is a hand-editor for bitmap fonts which runs under X11. * charspace reads a bitmap font and tries to figure out reasonable side bearing values; it outputs a revised bitmap font and a font metric file. * limn reads a bitmap font and fits splines to the bitmaps; outputs a BZR file. * bzrto reads a BZR file and outputs it in Metafont or PostScript. * gsrenderfont uses Ghostscript to render a PostScript font at a particular point size and resolution into a PBM file, then uses imagetofont to make a bitmap font out of it. * fontconvert reads one or more bitmap font(s) and can rearrange the characters, filter them, omit them, split them into pieces, combine them, etc., etc. It can also output a TFM file. * imgrotate rotates or flips an IMG file. In addition, there are libraries to read and write the TFM, GF, and PK font formats used by TeX and its friends. If you are interested in helping to create some fonts for GNU (and get these programs to compile!), and especially if you have some typographic knowledge, please send me mail. Happy fonting, karl@cs.umb.edu Member of the League for Programming Freedom---write to league@prep.ai.mit.edu. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 31 Mar 92 14:29:43 -0600 From: "George D. Greenwade" Subject: Update to STYles at FILESERV/Niord Keywords: LaTeX, styles, SHSU Archive I'm truly sorry to those who have forwarded styles for me to add to our archives. Things have been sort of busy, so I've gotten a little behind. I will be sending out some notices within the next few days regarding updates which have been made, but are either undocumented or unannounced. This is my first set of announcements, so please bear with me. The first files of interest are two updates by David Carlisle to longtable.sty, and newarray.sty. longtable.sty defines the longtable environment, a multipage version of tabular. New in version 3: * The table does not have to start at the top of the page. * The documentation uses Mittelbach's doc.sty, so the documentation file longtable.tex is no longer needed. * Support for footnotes. * Many minor modifications. (One of the problems with using doc.sty is that it makes the author read his own code!) newarray.sty is an extension of Mittelbach's array.sty, which allows the user to easily specify new column types, and delimiters around the alignment. Also \extracolsep works with this style. Version 1 has a rather embarrassing bug in the treatment of @ and ! expressions. These were prematurely expanded inside an \edef, which may cause some rather spectacular errors. Please upgrade to Version 2 if you have a copy of Version 1. To retrieve either of these files, please include the commands: SENDME STY.LONGTABLE SENDME STY.NEWARRAY in the body of a mail message to FILESERV@SHSU.edu (FILESERV@SHSU.BITNET). The second set of files were submitted by James Darrell McCauley . First is an update to endfloat.sty, which puts all LaTeX figures and tables on pages at the end of an article in individual sections (optionally labelled). In-text references can be made where the text of the table of figure should have been placed. This new version (1.2) provides internationalization in naming and verifies that the floats were used before a section is created for them. Include the command SENDME STY.ENDFLOAT in your mail to FILESERV to retrieve this file. Second in Darrell's submissions are cea.sty and cea.bst. These are the unofficial LaTeX and BibTeX style files for Elsevier's ``Computers and Electronics in Agriculture'' submissions, respectively. To retrieve these, include in your mail message to FILESERV: SENDME STY.ENDFLOAT SENDME STY.CEA* The third file set of interest is Peter Ungar's cropmark.tex, a TeX macro to produce cropmarks in plain TeX. Include the command SENDME STY.CROPMARK_TEX in your mail to FILESERV to retrieve this file. Finally, Darrel Hankerson submitted a clean-up of pagefoots.sty. This style numbers footnotes beginning on ``1'' for each page. By default, it uses the \fnsymbol to "number" the footnotes (this is controlled by the first line of \newfoots); and it gets rid of the usual footnote rule, and inserts more vertical space for footnotes. Include the command SENDME STY.PAGEFOOTS in your mail to FILESERV to retrieve this file. - --George ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 02 Apr 92 10:21:28 -0500 From: karl@cs.umb.edu (Karl Berry) Subject: version 1.1 of ``my'' font naming scheme available Keywords: METAFONT, fonts, naming scheme I have released version 1.1 of my font naming scheme for TeX fonts. You can get it by anonymous ftp from ftp.cs.umb.edu [192.12.26.23]:pub/tex/fontname/fontname.texi I will also send it to you by email if you cannot ftp. It is about 28K in size. It is in Texinfo format, so you will need the TeX macros in the file texinfo.tex (available with most GNU programs) to be able to print it; that same directory also has a texinfo.tex. The rest of that directory contains the files showing the naming scheme applied to the Computer Modern, AMS, and Adobe fonts. This is an update of my article in TUGboat 11(4). The main changes are a much longer list of typeface families, a somewhat longer exposition of the problems with the naming scheme, and a proposal for another naming scheme for arbitrarily-long names (and a slight enhancement to TeX, approved by Professor Knuth, to allow this). I am happy to get additions, criticisms, or other comments. karl@cs.umb.edu ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 02 Apr 92 16:00:40 -0900 From: "Arthur Ogawa" Subject: Re: version 1.1 of ``my'' font naming scheme available Keywords: METAFONT, fonts, naming scheme I appreciate the work you've done on the terse font names. One of the main benefits of your scheme and its adoption by Rockiki is to have a name that many can agree on, mainly by virtue of its being there right away in a public place. Now that you're considering longer names, I wonder why not simply use the name provided by the vendor. This is a naive suggestion, I'm sure, but makes much sense to me. In fact, given my perspective, I fail to see any need for generating a scheme for long font names. Am I missing something? By the way, Textures (Blue Sky Research) has for years (say since 1985?) had in place a scheme like the one you propose . It takes advantage of the resource orientation of the Macintosh to allow a TeX-visible font name of practically unrestricted length. This turns out to be quite useful wrt Adobe font names, because they, too, are filenames of a sort, and have no embedded spaces. From a historical standpoint, MacTeX (ftl systems) also had such a scheme, but was limited by the Mac 31-character filename limitation. OzTeX could work the same way right now. MacTeX's scheme used no lookup file (not entirely true: there was a lookup table for specific fonts, like HelveticaNarrow-BoldOblique), but the effect of both is to have font names that are arguably standard and are certainly instantly recognizable. And, given VMS, there is nothing preventing users on such systems from enjoying these same benefits today. Under Unix, things are not so uniformly happy, but there one could very well use the name mapping technique; that's what it's there for. (Not to speak of DOS and VP/CMS.) My own practice is to use Adobe's name for my font. So, for instance, today I'm using StoneSans-SemiboldItalic (pstssi for short). To tell you the truth, going to a system (like DOS or Unix) with short names is markedly less convenient by comparison. I'm glad you got Don's blessing on your scheme, because this might mean seeing "verbose" (really, "true") font names used more widely. As things stand, I have to port my code to less functional, less convenient platforms. I hope that the ability to use longer font names leads to people turning to the only real authority for the font's name: its vendor. Arthur Ogawa Internet: ogawa@orion.arc.nasa.gov Ph: 1/415/691-1126 TeX consultant AppleLink: ogawa FAX:1/415/962-1969 STEPS Project 1101 San Antonio Rd. #413, MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA 94043-1002 ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 03 Apr 92 16:36:35 -0500 From: tat@senior.rad.tju.edu (talin tasciyan) Subject: acquiring TeX Keywords: TeX, installation, Unix We need TeX to be able to print some recently acquired ....tex documents. We ftp'ed README.TeX3.14 from your pub/unixtex directory. Although the instructions are clear, we have been unable to locate a TeX3.14 directory. Before we ftp'ed the entire unixtex directory, we wanted to doublecheck whether that's th e thing to do. Some of the files mentioned in the instructions do not exist under unixtex. We`d appreciate your comments. Thanks, talin ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 06 Apr 92 10:23:57 +0000 From: goncal@ssws1.cnm.es (Goncal Badenes) Subject: Hyphenation patterns for Catalan ready for beta testing Keywords: hyphenation, Catalan Hyphenation patterns for Catalan are ready for beta-testing. Anyone interested in testing them, please contact me. Specify if you are using 7 bit or 8 bit fonts. Goncal Badenes Centre Nacional de Microelectronica goncal@ssws1.cnm.es Campus Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona goncal@cnmvax.uab.es E-08193 Bellaterra (Spain) Goncal.Badenes@lambada.oit.unc.edu ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 15 Apr 92 17:49:40 -0500 From: Jeffrey "C." Gealow Subject: BibTeX entry type appropriate for reprints Keywords: BibTeX Has anyone developed a BibTeX entry type which produces complete references to reprints. For example, I wish to cite: Burks, Goldstine, and von Neumann, "Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument," U.S. Army Ordinance Department Report, 1946. Reprinted in Taub, ed., Collected Works of John von Neumann, vol. 5, Macmillan, New York, 1963, pp. 34-79. In my opinion, the inbook and incollection types are inadequate. Jeff Gealow jgealow@mtl.mit.edu ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 16 Apr 92 17:42:00 -0600 From: Message from the Federation Starship Enterprise Subject: Question about DVI drivers Keywords: driver, HP LaserJet I have been looking for a dvi driver for an HP laser Jet Printer ... I was refered to some ftp sites .. but have not been able to make any of them work -I'm running vms op system. I also like if you can point me to the latest version of TEX/LATEX. Thanks *************************************************************************** $^$ "Hypothetically speaking?.. ^^^^^^ Jose Luis Paredes $^$ $^$ I never learned to speak ^^^^^^ Physicist by choice !! $^$ $^$ hypothetical!" ^^^^^^ University of Houston $^$ $^$ -Star Trek TNG ^^^^^^ Jose@crcc.uh.edu $^$ *************************************************************************** ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20 Apr 92 15:26:43 +0000 From: David_Rhead@uk.ac.nott.vme Subject: Output from bibliographic database services as (La)TeX input? Keywords: LaTeX, bibliographic database This university's libraries offer various database-searching services. The databases concerned may be on CD, or may be held on a computer somewhere and accessed via networks. Such services are used by medics, scientists, lawyers, etc. From them, the user gets a collection of bibliographic references (plus, perhaps, the corresponding abstracts), typically either on paper or on floppy disk. The user may then go on to cite these references in his/her own publications. I don't know much about these things, but the relevant buzzwords/phrases seem to include Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, Arts and Humanities Cittaion Index, Index of Scientific and Technical Proceedings, Medline, Data-Star Medline format, Biosos, Dialog, BRS Colleague, Medlars (including Paperchase and Grateful Med), Chemical Abstracts, Dimdi, LS/2000, NUMS, NOTIS, OCLC, SCORPIO, STN, USMARC (created by MITINET distributed by EBSCONET). On the wordprocessing front, the typical user seems advised to buy a proprietary reference-handling package (e.g., EndNote, ProCite, Reference Manager or Papyrus) to run on their PC or Mac, both to fulfill a BibTeX-like function (fill in the citations and format the reference-list in a particular style) and to help the user to search his/her personal database of interesting papers (e.g., to search for all papers that have "smoking" in the abstract). Does anyone have experience of using the output from these services as (La)TeX input, and have any tips that they can give? Does anyone have any interfacing software that they want to put into the public domain? For example: 1. Is there a neat way of getting output from such database-searches into BibTeX .bib file format? Has anyone produced any .bst files that have entries/fields that have a one-to-one correspondence with any of the database structures (as distinct from the standard BibTeX entry/field structure defined in Appendix B of the LaTeX manual). 2. Has anyone successfully used one of the proprietary reference-handling programs in conjunction with (La)TeX? [I suppose that this would involve (a) putting things recognised by the proprietary program in place of LaTeX's \cite (b) implementing a "style" for the proprietary program so that it can produce a reference-list with embedded (La)TeX instructions (c) applying the proprietary program to the .tex file before applying (La)TeX.] David Rhead JANET: d.rhead@uk.ac.nottingham.ccc.vme ------------------------------ %%% Further information about the TeXhax Digest, the TeX %%% Users Group, and the latest software versions is available %%% in every tenth issue of the TeXhax Digest. %%% %%% Concerning subscriptions, address changes, unsubscribing: %%% %%% BITNET: send a one-line mail message to LISTSERV@xxx %%% SUBSCRIBE TEX-L % to subscribe %%% or UNSUBSCRIBE TEX-L %%% %%% Internet: send a similar one line mail message to %%% TeXhax-request@tex.ac.uk %%% JANET: send a similar one line mail message to %%% TeXhax-request@uk.ac.tex %%% All submissions to: TeXhax@tex.ac.uk %%% %%% Back issues available for anonymous ftp as: %%% machine directory filename %%% TEX.AC.UK [.tex.digests.texhax.YY]texhax.NN %%% YY = last two digits of current year %%% NN = issue number %%% %%%\bye %%% End of TeXhax Digest [Volume 92 Issue 8] ****************************************