[tex-live] Bug in syntax package

[John R. Culleton]

On Wednesday 06 September 2006 19:00, David Kastrup wrote:
> karl at freefriends.org (Karl Berry) writes:
> >     When I wrote, "I have no idea where this version of syntax.sty comes
> >     from" I meant, "because it's not the one from CTAN".
> >
> > I have no idea either, but I have just updated the version in TL
> > from CTAN.  Thanks much for pointing this out.  Er, deleted all the
> > dvi files too.  Well, maybe someday there will be pdf's :).
>
> Frankly, for something like TeXlive, I don't see the point in having
> PDFs instead of DVI.  Take up much more space (how many copied of
> cmr10 do we want on the disk?) and are much slower to access.  TeXlive
> has a viable and fast viewer for DVI, one could even set up the DVI
> files to be compiled with source specials into the source tree, and if
> any Type3 fonts happen to end up in the PDF, they are at fixed
> resolution, whereas with DVI one still has a chance to render them
> properly for the configured printer.

If we could agree on a convention for naming the documentation
files (so that they are not confused with the actual macro being
documented) then putting the source of the documentation out
there would be the best thing IMO. If an European puts documentation
out there it will likely be in an A paper size. An American will
use letter size. In either case it is an awkward size for
someone's printer.  Given the .tex version of the document one can
adjust one or two statements and get the correct size for local
printing. 

OTOH if you put a dvi out there then I must convert it to
to pdf in one or two steps and print it via Acrobat Reader, using the
"fit to paper size" feature. This shrinks the document which
makes it harder to read. (My eyes are old.)

I haven't tested it this AM but intuitively actual source would
be smaller than even dvi.  

-- 
John Culleton
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