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Subject:
From:
Frank Mittelbach <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Mon, 16 Jun 1997 21:15:19 +0200
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Bernard,

it was never my intention to say that

 > in only one project. Yes things seem not to converge. But
 > they go and move and this is terribly unpolite to reduce
 > their work to an amusing task without interest. No !

it is not and this is not what i was trying to bring over (and i hope
that it was not seen in this way by the members of the e-tex project
or omega project)

what i was saying is that (in my opinion) we need to get a fixed
version that is directly attractive to users to switch in large
numbers and i was trying to explain that even a large step forward
like LaTeX2e was nearly not enough to make this happen for
latex. otherwise you will have a situation even worse than in old 209
days where more and more small islands of user comunities did have
their private version of TeX/LaTeX being unable to communicate with
each other.

if we get ourselves into a similar corner again then we are very
likely to bring TeX to death.

for this reason my suggestion is to concentrate soon on bringing a
fixed version out that contains pdf support e-tex as of version 1 and
the stable and good parts of omega. that further research and work in
all three projects is necessary and important goes without saying but
my claim is that none alone (except perhaps pdftex and thus pdftex +
e-tex) can be made attractive enough to the end users to switch from
the current TeX installations.

my fear is that if we don't make something like this happen soon then
we might indeed find ourselves cornered by MSWord so much that when we
finally get the single system that we all feel happy with we are the
only ones left.

or to say it positive, i think that the 1.0 e-tex is a very good
intermediate step that we could use to the advantage of the community,
the same for basic work done in the omega project and for the pdftex
work and we now have the chance to package all that in a way that we
might win over enough user to make a first step towards NTS and
against the decline of TeX (= quality typesetting) usage.

frank

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