E-TEX: Guidelines for Future TEX Extensions

With the announcement of TEX 3.0, Don Knuth acknowledged the need of the (ever growing) TEX community for an even better system. But at the same time, he made it clear, that he will not get involved in any further enhancements that would change the TEXbook. TEX started out originally as a system designed to typeset its author’s own publications. In the meantime it serves hundreds of thousands of users. Now it is time, after ten years’ experience, to step back and consider whether or not TEX 3.0 is an adequate answer to the typesetting requirements of the nineties. Output produced by TEX has higher standards than output generated automatically by most other typesetting systems. Therefore, in this paper we will focus on the quality standards set by typographers for hand-typeset documents and ask to what extent they are achieved by TEX. Limitations of TEX’s algorithms are analyzed; and missing features as well as new concepts are outlined. Published in TUGboat, Volume 11 (1990), No 3 — 1990 Conference Proceedings. Reprint MAPS#10 (93.1); May 1993 Dutch TEX Users Group (NTG), P.O. Box 394, 1740 AJ Schagen, The Netherlands 86 E-TEX: Guidelines for Future TEX Extensions Bijlage Q E-TEX: Guidelines for Future TEX Extensions