[tex-eplain] TeX--XeT

[terry.s at Safe-mail.net]

> TeX was designed for use with METAFONT fonts but apparently a lot of people wanted to be able to use PostScript fonts ...

In general it's because they're more appealing (depending on the font, of course) and easy on the eyes.
For Asian text, it's an entirely different story. I mean, if a font doesn't have the glyphs, it doesn't have the glyphs.

> It's possible to use the eplain macros without a deeper understanding of how TeX works.  However, if your goal is to learn how (plain) TeX and the eplain macros work, I would suggest buying or borrowing one of the books on TeX, or see what (non-bootlegged) material is available online and work through it starting at the beginning.  Things like \newlinechar aren't really central to understanding how (plain) TeX works.

Yes. I type about WHAT I'm learning in the document so I can remember it. Sometimes I have a need for several short lines without new paragraphs. The \verbatim ... |endverbatim inserts visual blank lines (presumably to make code easier to read). Perhaps there's a setting for that, but I haven't got to it yet. (FYI, I started with short articles.)

Probably this is why I'm trying to use commands I don't know in detail when I start ... in the end, though, I learn more about it, or discover something unexpected. (Like why is ^^J printing Omega even with eplain loaded which defines it as a newline?)

... FYI, your suggestion works as expected (combined with the apalike example here):

\input eplain
\input apalike
\parskip=\baselineskip
\def\nl{\hfil\break}
\noindent Cite~\cite{article-full}.

Hello there,\nl
how are you?

This is a new paragraph.
\bibliographystyle{apalike}
\bibliography{xampl}
\bye