Ok, I digged through quite a bit and pondered things and stuff, and here are my opinions: a) it is obvious that this is very much proof-of-concept quality stuff. A lot of serious work remains: one can't claim that for a reasonably complete release of a LaTeX3 core (and I am just talking about the core here, not even the base classes) more than maybe 30% of the work are done. b) much too much hardwired to be of general use. The output routine is focused on providing the functionality needed by the base classes, and is very much limited to that. One would have to patch around in order to accommodate different needs. For example, take a look at how magic penalties are allocated and used: hardwired. Similar for a lot of other stuff: hardwired. The output routine is supposed to cater for more uses than the old one, but it does all of that hardwired. Now suppose I don't need multicolumn support in a document class of mine, but I need several columns of margin notes (inner column, and two outer columns, one for verse numbers, one for marginal notes used for references). And I want margin notes in my footnotes as well. Boom. Now the attachment of marginal notes does not necessarily need to go via the output routine: one can also pass a box containing prospective magic penalties through a pass of \vsplit to \maxdimen, reinstating all magic penalties that have no handler defined for that pass, so that the material might still be treated in a later pass. For example, if one split material into multiple columns, one might place some marginal markers to the left of every column, but one might also just place optical markers/comments for rare stuff in a single column. The former magic penalties would have to be treated before the column split, the latter afterwards. So how to go about this? And we might have some margin note types where we would prefer if they were broken across pages, some where we would prefer to have them moved, and some where we would want them moved including the referrer line. All in one document. So we want to have something like \newmagicpenalty\marginparApenalty And then our footnote routine (and again, we want to be able to allocate several different classes of footnotes) can just, before inserting the material on the page, call \treatmagicpenaltiesinbox{\footnoteAbox}% {footnoteApreparation} And we would have had declared at some earlier time \callmagic\marginparApenalty{footnoteApreparation} {\AttachMarginPar{\outputtempAbox}} That way, the \treatmagicpenaltiesinbox call would prepare margin pars in \outputtempAbox. Actually, \outputtempAbox is too little info: what kind of margin par and the width of the box available for it would also have to be declared at some time. Anyhow, when the output routine finishes calling through all defined hooks, all material will have been distributed along all the declared boxes according to the algorithms associated with the various penalties. It becomes apparent that LaTeX would be split into two components: one core part that can generally cater for all sorts of documents, and one base part that will use the provided hooks in order to cater for the need of the standard classes. Whether a typical installation should have one dumped format for the core, or one for core+base, or one each, is a different question. c) non-eTeX should not be supported. Things like repeated \vsplit and various uses of markers to synchronize matters simply become too awkward and inefficient when one tries doing them with standard TeX. You can bet that the necessary extensions will make it into stuff like NTS and Omega, fast, when it turns out that LaTeX3 relies on them in an early enough stage. The sooner one turns on the thumb screws, the less pain and hectic for people to adapt. I see a lot of work cut out, and quite a bit of how to best tackle it. Question: if people decide that it would make sense to do that in the outlined manner, I don't see any reasonable time frame unless somebody is going to spend quite a bit of work as his main occupation for a while. I know that there are funds for the LaTeX3 project, and I would be interested in working on that matter, though I am not planning on starving myself during that (I am already doing that sort of stuff on other projects, and I can't keep it up forever. My savings are not unlimited). What would be the channels where one would propose work in that line and apply for a payment that will support a person spending full-time on it? Or would the only feasible manner of getting to work on this imply having to get a separate job paying the rent, and trying to manage the rest in spare time? Of course, much of the LaTeX work _is_ being done in that manner, and it will certainly remain so, but I fear that at least for cooking up a new LaTeX3 core, this model will fall short. Good ideas for other funding? -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum