[XeTeX] Babel

Zdenek Wagner zdenek.wagner at gmail.com
Fri May 4 21:44:22 CEST 2012


2012/5/4 Apostolos Syropoulos <asyropoulos at yahoo.com>:
>>
>> Don't you feel yourself in a loop? If they patch it, they apparently
>> want to use it and if they want to use it, it is not useless for them
>> because if it were useless, they would not use it and thus they would
>> have no reason to patch it.
>>
>
>
> No! The problem is that people should start saying that certain parts
> of the old TeX world are irrelevant and so they should not be part
> of any TeX distribution. For example, on a set of recently compiled
> binaries I see the following:
>
> apostolo at nadya>> ./tex
> This is TeX, Version 3.1415926 (TeX Live 2012/dev)
> **^D
> ! End of file on the terminal... why?
> apostolo at nadya>> ./pdftex
> This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.3-1.40.13 (TeX Live 2012/dev)
>  restricted \write18 enabled.
> **^C
>
>
> The question is: why keeping the tex binary when the pdftex binary can
> do the same things? If you throw away the tex binary, then you can
> get rid of most useless binaries that manipulate DVI files.
>
This is because you invoke pdfetex under the name tex, in other works,
you ask pdfetex to forget pdf output and e-TeX extensions and behave
as the old Knuth's TeX. Thus pdfetex does nothing but responds exactly
with what you asked for.
>
>> If the modern computer environment does not offer important features
>> that were implemented in the old environment decades and still work,
>> than (at least for me) it is natural to use the old environment.
>
> That is called conservatism, that is, something against progress...
>
> A.S.
>
> ----------------------
> Apostolos Syropoulos
> Xanthi, Greece
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz



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