[tex-eplain] Does xeplain.tex still exist?

Jim Diamond Jim.Diamond at acadiau.ca
Thu Jun 18 15:08:01 CEST 2009


On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 07:59 (+0300), Oleg Katsitadze wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 07:53:56AM -0300, Jim Diamond wrote:
>> I had already taken a look inside
>> eplain-3.2.tar.gz, and there is no xeplain.tex in there either.

> It's there, but again inside a zip archive, look in
> eplain-3.2/source/eplain.  As I understand, that's the recommended way
> to distribute TeX packages.

>> I think that in 2009 there is likely more
>> (human) time spent maintaining two versions of files then will be lost
>> by having TeX occasionally read and discard the comments in a complete
>> source file.

> As Dan mentioned, eplain.tex is generated automatically, so there's
> only one source copy.

OK, please allow me to re-state myself, or maybe ask a follow-up
question.

In TeX live 2008, I see arrow.tex, btxmac.tex, and eplain.tex.  The
first two are identical to the files which I can find in the eplain
zip archive.  In the zip archive, instead of eplain.tex, there is
xeplain.tex, and in TeXlive 2008 there is only eplain.tex.  This
asymmetry is a bit frustrating.  (I realize that some people might
just want to use arrow and/or btxmac by themselves, thus they must be
available.)

Now, perhaps I am the first and only person ever to spend some time
searching for xeplain.tex, but just on the off chance that some other
people have done so or will in the future do so, might it make sense
to either
(1) include xeplain.tex in TeX distributions, even if only in some
    "doc" directory, or
(2) (in light of today's compute power) drop the concept of having an 
    automatically-generated eplain.tex and just define eplain.tex to
    \input the required source files.

Cheers.
				Jim


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