[tex-eplain] Eplain manual

[John R. Culleton]

On Wednesday 07 March 2007 08:25, John Was wrote:
> Dear Oleg
>
> I have just started experimenting with Eplain, which will be very
> useful (especially the multi-column facility).  I've joined the
> mailing list so no doubt there will be plenty of interesting
> suggestions to follow up.
>
> I decided to go ahead and buy the printed manual, which arrived
> yesterday, but I was disappointed to find that it is version 3.0a,
> one year out of date.  Since the manual is printed on demand (by
> Lulu), is there something you could do to ensure that the latest
> version is always supplied?  I've now printed out the PDF of the
> latest version, but of course the reason for buying the printed one
> was to avoid doing that, as well as to help TUG's profits.
>
> Incidentally, I find that the SOUL letter-spacing and underlining
> package doesn't work in plain TeX (with or without Eplain).  I get
> a lot of error messages, the most important of which is that none
> of the characters can be found in nullfont (that isn't surprising -
> but naturally the characters I want to use for typesetting aren't
> in nullfont anyway!).  I use Postscript fonts rather than TeX's own
> fonts.  If you happen to know of a version of soul.sty that works
> smoothly with plain TeX, I'd be glad to know about it (I tried
> contacting Franz Melchior, but the e-mail bounced back).
>
> Best wishes

I use the soul.sty package successfully with Context. The code is 
essentially plain tex, e.g., 

\input soul.tex
\sodef\ab{}{.250em}{1em plus 1em}{2em plus .1em minus .1em}
\sodef\aa{}{.250em}{1em plus 1em}{2em plus .1em minus .1em}
\sodef\za{}{.090em}{.35em plus .5em}{2em plus .1em minus .1em}
\sodef\zb{}{.025em}{.25em plus .5em}{2em plus .1em minus .1em}
\sodef\zt{}{.020em}{.20em plus .5em}{2em plus .1em minus .1em}
\sodef\zc{}{.070em}{.30em plus .5em}{2em plus .1em minus .1em}
\sodef\zy{}{.040em}{.25em plus .5em}{2em plus .1em minus .1em}
\sodef\zz{}{.050em}{.27em plus .5em}{2.2em plus .1em minus .1em}

I then use my new definitions aa,za,zb etc. thus:
\long\def\Subject#1{
\page[preference]
\blank
\leftline{\nimbuy\zy{#1}\rm\blank\indenting[next]}
}
..where \nimbuy is a font definition. The Context tags \page, 
\indenting etc. are not relevant to the issue.

The package soul.tex I use was orginally named soul.sty and has the 
following info:
%% File: soul.dtx  Copyright (C) 1998--2003  Melchior FRANZ
%% $Id: soul.dtx,v 1.128 2003/11/17 22:57:24 m Rel $
%% $Version: 2.4 $

I got it from the texlive 2007 distro. The one in TL 2005 is 
identical.

It is possible that you have a conflict between some eplain macro and 
soul.sty. Have you tested it without using eplain? 

-- 
John Culleton
Able Indexing and Typesetting
Precision typesetting (tm) at reasonable cost.
Satisfaction guaranteed. 
http://wexfordpress.com