[Mac OS X TeX] Some clarification

[Gerben Wierda]

<x-flowed>Dear Adrian,

The current release is OK. It contains pdfTeX 1.00a and margin kerning 
that is fixed to work with all recent releases of pdfTeX. For other 
people who might get worried that non-working distributions have been 
sent out, the problems at all times have been limited to margin kerning 
only.

Now for the details. Here is what I think happened:

The teTeX.dmg that I released on Oct 28 did indeed contain a working 
Margin Kerning setup. However, the original protcode.tex by Han The Than 
is sloppy in two ways:
(a) It has faulty code to check for the pdfTeX version
(b) It is integrated with Than's personal abbreviations file, which also 
can cause conflicts (as I understand it, I haven't encountered them 
myself).

Error (a) only appears when you use pdfTeX 1.00a. When Ross reported the 
errors, he was running 1.00a, while my installer was still at a patched 
0.14h. (1.00a also contains the patches I contributed to the TeX team as 
well as other changes, some of which I also had adapted, but also some I 
had not adapted yet).

So Ross reported a problem with margin kerning (with a PDF to show the 
result) while marging kerning worked ok on your site because you were 
still running a pdfTeX version that does not trigger problem (a). He was 
right that Than's code was at fault, but that fault was not triggered by 
your different pdfTeX version form the Oct 28 release of my installer. 
That explains why he reported a problem that you did not have.

I decided upon a new release with two changes:
(1) after testing that tworked, I upgraded my patched pdfTeX 0.14h to 
pdfTeX 1.00a. The main reason is that there has been a bug fix with PDF 
creation that I had not installd myself yet and that I did not know 
before where the 'secret' snapshots of pdfTeX were being kept.
(2) adopt the protcode.tex changes by Ross

I made the following mistakes (when I hurried to release a version that 
is in sync with Ross), which made me republish two times
- I fixed protcode.tex not correctly, I only patched with the changes 
that Ross put out on the mailing list (error (a)) and I removed the 
inclusion of Than's personal abbreviations file. I did not check this 
version in my hurry and hence a non-working protcode.tex was put out. 
reason: because Than's abbreviations were not included, some symbols 
were unavailable.
- at one time, I had it indeed fixed, but not installed in my distrbuted 
texmf tree.

So, two non-working (recall: Margin Kerning only, the rest is OK) 
distributions were shortly put out.

Currently, on the ftp site, both the Oct 28 and the Nov 1 release are 
available. The Nov 1 release is the better release because it contains a 
better pdfTeX with better PDF production and a better margin kerning 
setup. I only keep the Oct 28 release available for people who feel 
better using a release from before all this confusion.

ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/comp/macosx/tex-gs/teTeX-2001-10-28-10-56-21.dmg
ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/comp/macosx/tex-gs/teTeX-2001-11-01-01-34-47.dmg
ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/comp/macosx/tex-gs/teTeX.dmg links to 
ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/comp/macosx/tex-gs/teTeX-2001-11-01-01-34-47.dmg

I am currently working on using TeX Live instead of a mix of the older 
teTeX and the newer pdfTeX.

Gerben


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