<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">On Thu, 27 May 2021 at 18:37, Norbert Preining <<a href="mailto:norbert@preining.info">norbert@preining.info</a>> wrote:<br></div><div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">Hi Jonathan,<br>
<br>
On Wed, 26 May 2021, Jonathan Fine wrote:<br>
> Don Knuth wrote TeX to be archival. To give identical results from<br>
> identical inputs. My TeX source file is just one of many inputs. Recording<br>
> and exactly reproducing the other inputs is vital, to fully benefit from<br>
> the hard work of Don Knuth that made TeX archival.<br>
> <br>
> One goal is to make it much easier to archive all the resources used when a<br>
> document is typeset. And at a different time and place, and on a different<br>
<br>
Unfortunately that is getting rather difficult wrt to latex or xetex etc<br>
- sty files can easily be found by using -recorder and copy all recorded<br>
files to the cwd<br>
- fonts are much more tricky, as one needs to archive all the metafont<br>
sources at that time, or the ttf/otf fonts used in case of xetex.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Or type1 fonts. Some documents used commercial system or printer fonts <br></div><div>that aren't freely available.<br></div><div> <br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
Which, when used with lookup by filename versus lookup by font name<br>
can be tricky.<br>
- engines: some engines undergo changes that also might have an effect on<br>
the layout, so you need to archive also the engines' source code<br>
and be able to rebuild the sources<br>
<br>
All in all, a goal that is hard to achieve completely. But with archival<br>
of the runtime files (sty, tex, ...) one goes already a long way, and it<br>
is rather trivial thanks to -recorder.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>My experience has been that many active TeX users spend their careers <br></div><div>using a small number of templates acquired in grad school or from</div><div>publishers and then expanded with a non-decreasing list of \includepackage <br></div><div>statements. This works because they can just install TeX Live to get</div><div>all those packages along with a few they have been copying from old <br></div><div>system to new system. <br></div><div><br></div><div>Archiving is more likely to be useful if care is taken to choose stable</div><div>and well supported runtime files and fonts. It would help to have</div><div>curated collections chosen to meet the needs of major publishers,</div><div>documentation systems like Rd, etc. The collections should provide <br></div><div>"core" document classes to cover a majority of use cases. <br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
<br>
Fonts archiving gives you a little plus-alpha, but it is already a bit<br>
more involved.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>There are some well-supported high quality free font collections that <br></div><div>mostly stay backwards compatible, but few users are in a position to <br></div><div>evaluate font quality.<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
<br>
Engines archiving is only for the freaks.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I think considerable effort goes into avoiding breaking old documents <br></div><div>with new engine versions. Building old engines on current toolchains <br></div><div>may be more difficult than updating old documents to work with current</div><div>toolchains. <br></div><div><br></div>It would be useful to have a few collections of old documents for <br></div><div>systematic testing.<br></div><div class="gmail_quote"><div><br></div>-- <br></div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div>George N. White III<br><br></div></div></div></div>