[XeTeX] Babel

Apostolos Syropoulos asyropoulos at yahoo.com
Fri May 4 20:26:41 CEST 2012


> 
> Don't you feel yourself in a loop? If they patch it, they apparently
> want to use it and if they want to use it, it is not useless for them
> because if it were useless, they would not use it and thus they would
> have no reason to patch it.
> 


No! The problem is that people should start saying that certain parts
of the old TeX world are irrelevant and so they should not be part
of any TeX distribution. For example, on a set of recently compiled
binaries I see the following:

apostolo at nadya>> ./tex
This is TeX, Version 3.1415926 (TeX Live 2012/dev)
**^D
! End of file on the terminal... why?
apostolo at nadya>> ./pdftex
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.3-1.40.13 (TeX Live 2012/dev)
 restricted \write18 enabled.
**^C


The question is: why keeping the tex binary when the pdftex binary can
do the same things? If you throw away the tex binary, then you can
get rid of most useless binaries that manipulate DVI files. 


> If the modern computer environment does not offer important features
> that were implemented in the old environment decades and still work,
> than (at least for me) it is natural to use the old environment.

That is called conservatism, that is, something against progress...

A.S.

----------------------
Apostolos Syropoulos
Xanthi, Greece




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