[tex-live] src specials fixes

[Petr Olsak]

On Fri, 31 May 2002, Staszek Wawrykiewicz wrote:

> On 31 May 2002, Olaf Weber wrote:
>
> > as the banner -- this should probably be on whenever we're "plain" TeX
> > with anything out of the oridnary enabled: tcx files, src-specials,
> > MLTeX (which violates the spirit, if perhaps not the letter, of the
> > license).
>
> Among them, only tcx does not violate spirit, letter or license.
> D. E. Knuth writes about that.

I don't remember if Don Knuth has accept the tcx, but I remember that
my alternative solution (so called encTeX, year 1998) was not accepted
by web2c team. My solution is more more flexible: it manages with
xord/xchr+"printable_set" by new primitives and the setting is stored
into format by \dump. I have added only the second line after banner
about encTeX extension because pdfTeX has another banner than TeX (the
similar trick as in MLTeX).

The encTeX was rejected by web2c team and eTeX team for the TeX
license reasons.

tcx tables seems to be not violate the TeX license because the
xord/xchr+"printable_set" initialising is in system dependent part of
tex.web. Author of TeX menas that these values are set depending on
used system. The tcx tables do only this work. The only difference is
that this work is done on the run-time and not on the compile-time.
This is comparable with TeX-memory parameterers. In the old days, it
would be possible to change these parameters only at compile-time
but in new web2cTeX we can change them on run-time.

Petr Olsak