Re: [NTG-pdftex] [ pdftex-Patches-93 ] \quitvmode

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"Pawe$,1 b(B" == Pawe$,1 b(B Jackowski writes:

Taco Hoekwater napisa$,1 b(B(a):

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But nothing seems to gets noticed until it is in the mainstream application (and no longer marked experimental), so having a separate pdfxtex quite likely will not help. I am not against reviving pdfxtex, but I doubt there is much to be gained from it.

Agree - it wouldn't help but I'm rather against reviving xtex. I can't see anything wrong in adding new features to the mainstream *if* they remain (some kind of) a secret. Unless not mentioned in release notes or documented (afair \quitmode was not), the primitive does not exist for the end-user but for developers. Please don't make pdf*tex's again -)

The idea of having pdfxtex again goes into the opposite direction. I don't think that it is a good idea to keep experimental features secret. Hans sais that it is more painful to have two programs in respect of testing. This is the case if new features are kept secret. I think that it makes more sense to have an experimental version where all the new features are documented. The experimental version should be clearly marked as experimental. And it should be documented. It should be distributed along with the mainstream release so that it is made available to a broader audience. Though it is more work for developers to test two programs instead of one, what I want to have is more testers. I want to have more testers because probably a few of them are good programmers as well. And there is plenty to do in the future. Documentation is important, but I don't think it's necessary to spend much time on it. You might wonder that you didn't get much feedback (if at all) though pdfxtex is part of teTeX. Well, the reason is that only developers know what it is. There is a manual page which is absolutely useless. It is just a copy of the pdftex man page. What do you expect? As I said before, not much documentation is needed. A simple manpage (less than 10 lines) which points people to * the pdftex manpage, * pdfxtex-syntax.txt, * a README. It is sufficient if the README is just a collection of announcements of new features made on this mailing list. It's not indended for end users and people can look into the mailing list archive or ask on this list when they are interested. Some time ago I read somewhere (maybe in a mail from Hans) that probably LuaTeX will be distributed along with pdfTeX for a while until it finally will be renamed to pdfTeX. This is exactly what I ask for with the only exception that it should be called pdfxtex instead of LuaTeX and other experimental stuff can go there as well. There is LuaTeX now and there will be Unicode-TeX and OTF-TeX in the future and they all will be renamed to pdfTeX sooner or later. So why not call all the experimental stuff pdfxtex? If you put experimental stuff into the mainstream release you have to be absolutely sure that it does not have any unwanted side effects. Of course, an experimental version should work, but you have more freedom for experiments because it is for evaluation only, not for production. In short: It's a matter of philosophy. You prefer to keep things secret, I prefer to involve more people. Regards, Reinhard -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reinhard Kotucha Phone: +49-511-4592165 Marschnerstr. 25 D-30167 Hannover mailto:reinhard.kotucha@web.de ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------