"-TEX: a 100%-compatible successor to TEX Following humbly in the foosteps of the Grand Wizard

"-TEX is the rst concrete result of an international research & development project, the NTS Project, which was established under the gis of DANTE during 1992. The aims of the project are to perpetuate and develop the spirit and philosophy of TEX, whilst respecting Knuth's wish that TEX itself should remain frozen. The group were very concerned that unless there existed some evolutionary exibility within which TEX could react to changing needs and environments, it might all too soon become eclipsed by more modern yet less sophisticated systems. Accordingly they agreed to investigate a possible successor or successors to TEX, successors which would enshrine and encapsulate all that was best in TEX whilst being freed from the evolutionary constraints which Knuth had placed on TEX itself. To avoid any suggestion that it was TEX which the group sought to develop against Knuth's wishes, a working title of NTS (for New Typesetting System) was chosen for the project. During the initial meetings of the NTS group, it became clear that there were two possible approaches to developments based on TEX: an evolutionary path which would simply continue where Knuth had left o , and which would use as its basis the source code of TEX itself (i.e. TeX.Web); the other a revolutionary path which would be based on a completely new implementation of TEX, using a modern rapid-prototyping language which could allow individual components of the system to be modi ed or replaced in a simple and straightforward manner. The group agreed that the latter (revolutionary) approach had much greater potential, but were aware that the re-implementation would be non-trivial, and would require external funding to bring it to fruition in nite time;