LaTeX 1996/12/01 release: Important announcement

[David Carlisle]

LaTeX 1996/12/01 release: Important announcement
================================================

As you may know, a LaTeX release with a nominal date of 1996/12/01
is due for release shortly.

This release will now be *delayed* until January 1997, to allow more
time for testing the following proposed change.

The LaTeX system currently uses some files with `mixed case' names.
The `Font Descriptor' files such as T1cmr.fd 
and the  `Output Encoding Definition' files such as T1enc.def

These files cause problems on certain common systems.
In particular, mixed-case filenames are not allowed in the 
ISO 9660 CDROM format and do not work correctly if a mono-case
file system (such as MSDOS) is mounted onto a case sensitive UNIX file
system. This latter example is very common in linux, where the MSDOS
and UNIX file systems are often available within the same machine.

In the forthcoming release, all these file names will be made lowercase.
Thus the two files mentioned above will be named t1cmr.fd and t1enc.def.

This change should not affect any LaTeX documents, as they do not refer
to these files explicitly; however, it may affect some local
configuration files, such as fonttext.cfg, which may be used when
making the LaTeX format. Further documentation concerning any required
changes will be distributed with the release.

The LaTeX system will look for `fd' files first with the new lower
case name, and then with the old mixed case name; thus existing
collections of fd files should work unchanged with the new system.


David Carlisle
LaTeX3 project