[texhax] Ideas/lists of developer libraries of TeX Macros?

[Joseph Wright]

On 17/04/2011 20:33, Deyan Ginev wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> I am interesting in doing some Plain TeX hackery, but there are just too
> many wheels I don't want to reinvent.
> 
> Since I am interested in dev hackery, I am thinking of TeX as a regular
> programming language - and I know that "ordinary" programming language
> tend to accumulate special libraries/packages with utility functions
> like STL for C or the CPAN for PERL.
> 
> In TeX's situation I guess the usual case mixes utilities with the
> specific functionality that the package provides, which is especially
> common for most small LaTeX classes and styles. So I don't really see
> the CTAN as what I need, but some subset of it (or a special package
> or...) that focuses on utility macros.
> 
> Does any of you have pointers for a dev-oriented library of TeX
> utilities that I can reuse? That would be simply awesome!
> 
> Thanks,
> Deyan
> 
> 

Your options if you want plain TeX support are somewhat restricted, as a
lot of stuff even in this area focusses on LaTeX. You might take a look
at texapi as a place to start: it's a set of format-independent macros.

(In the main, plain TeX users want to avoid dependencies, hence the
relatively small number of plain TeX 'pre-packed' macros available.)
-- 
Joseph Wright