Comments on TDS 0.9996

[Alan F R Bain]

A few comments come to mind after some thought.  I'm sorry if they
have been made ad nauseam.  This is the only version of the TDS which
I have seen although I can enthusiastically support the idea -- all
the TeX versions on machines looked after me have been `hand' compiled
and vary widely in file location (depending upon my mood).  This is
a right pain -- I'm glad to see a sensible standard.  I'm also quite
suprised to see how long the idea has been around without me seeing
a _single_ system which supports it(!).  

Section 3.5 Bibtex.

  * base, for the standard BibTeX databases and styles, such as
       xampl.bib, plain.bst.

plain.bst is so important I use it all the time... xampl.bib is a file
of daft examples which I never look at, and if I were, I would be
looking for documentation, so shouldn't things like that live in
the `doc' hierarchy e.g. $TDSROOT/doc/bibtex/base.  This is especially
true given that bibtex.tex lives there.

4.1 Documentation tree summary
  bibtex/           BibTeX
    base/           btxdoc.tex

I think btxhak.tex is sufficiently essential (despite its name that
it should be there too).

I'd also like to see more suggestions for what to do with on the
fly generated fonts.  This results from great embarassment being
caused by me using a semi-standard mf generated font containing
special glyphs getting `auto-installed' by MakeTeXPK in the system
directory, to the annoyance of the user who wanted the real
thing i.e. I think more provision should be made for `user
generated' fonts.  

***Gray Fonts
There doesn't seem to be any mention in the TDS of where the gray and
black fonts (as used by e.g. gftodvi) should be located.  I know that
they are _highly_ device dependent, but Knuth's defaults such as
gray.mf, grayimagen.mf are useful starting places.  They seem to have
slipped out of some TeX distributions, yet they don't seem particularly
optional.


These are the main serious points; as a personal note from the UNIX
world I would prefer src/ as the source directory.  After all the naming
changed in Bell Labs V6 unix if my memory is correct.

Alan