[tex-eplain] Eplain manual

[Oleg Katsitadze]

On Wed, Mar 07, 2007 at 01:25:30PM -0000, John Was wrote:
> there will be plenty of interesting suggestions to follow up.

Suggestions are always welcome, especially interesting ones :).

> I was disappointed to find that it is version 3.0a, one
> year out of date.

Oh, sorry about that.

> is there something you could do to ensure that the latest version is
> always supplied?

Of course, from now on I'll make sure that the Lulu version is
updated.

> 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.

You did help TUG (thanks a lot for that), but sorry again that you
didn't get the latest manual.

> Incidentally, I find that the SOUL letter-spacing and underlining
> package doesn't work in plain TeX (with or without Eplain).

This is very strange because I've tested soul with Eplain, and it
worked.  I have the same version of soul.sty as John Culleton:

  %% 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 $

So I guess that you are either using an older version, or doing
something wrong.  Eplain has a test file (test/soultest.tex), maybe
you can check if you can compile it.  Also, keep in mind that you
shouldn't load soul.sty with \usepackage in Eplain, just call

  \input soul.sty

> I get a
> lot of error messages, the most important of which is that none of the
> characters can be found in nullfont

My guess is that this is not related to soul.  Again, compiling
soultest.tex should make it clear.

> I use Postscript fonts rather than TeX's own fonts.

This shouldn't make any difference, I guess.

> 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

See above.

Please let us know if you have further problems.

Best,
Oleg