[tex-live] Re: Please drop the DVI-with-pdfTeX hack!

[Jonathan Fine]

"Ralf Stubner" <ralf.stubner at physik.uni-erlangen.de> wrote in message
news:lzr7c13p4n.fsf at tfkp12.physik.uni-erlangen.de...

<snip>

> ---------------------------------------
> Warning:
>
> Starting with TeX Live 2004, pdfetex was used as default engine to build
> formats (with the exception of plain TeX and omega related formats). In
> order to ease this transition, some of the new primitives provided by
> pdfTeX have been 'masked'. With TeX Live 2005 this is no longer done.

> The advantage of this change is that now packages like microtype.sty can
> be used to produce DVI files with the microtypographical extensions from
> pdfTeX.

Thank you, Ralf, for preparing this draft announcement.
It makes it easier to see how users will be affected.

<snip>

> If you have many legacy documents that you cannot change to using
> ifpdf.sty, please uncomment '\input pdftex-dvi.tex' in
> TEXMFDIST/tex/latex/config/latex.ini and recreate the formats using the
> command 'fmtuitl --all'. However, then packages like microtype.sty can
> no longer be used when a DVI file is produced.

Reading this, I thought perhaps it would be better to revise microtype.sty.

A google search (18 hits) shows that it seems to have very few users.
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/comp.text.tex/search?q=microtype&start=0&hl=en&

Perhaps the microtype tail is trying to wag the dog.

This is what I thought, when I took a user's point of view.

Hope this helps, in what is clearly a difficult issue.

-- 
Jonathan