[texhax] Why isn't plain.tex plain.web? What would be the best way to update it?

[William Adams]

On Aug 21, 2013, at 8:22 PM, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

> A .web file is the documented source of a Pascal program.  But
> plain.tex is a macro package.
> 
> tangle tex.web -> tex.p   (the Pascal source of TeX, the program)
> weave  tex.web -> tex.tex (the documented source code)
> 
> You cannot use Web for TeX macro packages.  

Oh. I'd not realized that Web was so limited.

Interestingly, Robin pointed out:

http://tug.org/TUGboat/tb16-3/tb48bzyl.pdf

which if it isn't the literate version of plain.tex I was thinking of, is even better. One of these days, I'm going to start reading all the TUG back issues....

So at some point, I guess the questions are:

 - how much disk space / bandwidth could be saved by creating a TeX distribution which only included OpenType fonts and which used them by default
 - would such a distribution be able to pass TRIP?
 - what would be the appropriate uses for such a distribution? It seems to me it'd be well-suited to use on tablets, or in customized typesetting situations --- might even be useful as a back-end for LyX
 - would there be any other advantages of such a setup?

William

-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.