Apologies to those who get this message twice. I am attaching below a draft of the preliminary brief announcement that is to be circulated more widely sometime very soon. Please feel free to comment on its clarity/usefulness, but remember that it is supposed to be brief! A fuller version will also be published as soon as possible, containing, for example: -- more about e-TeX and other executables that provide these extensions (e-pdftex e-omega ...); -- more on the reasons for the changes; -- more `HOW-TO's; -- more about _possible_ futures, timings etc. Many thanks chris ========================================================================== From The LaTeX3 Team: maintainers of Standard LaTeX. LaTeX and e-TeX [Here, e-TeX means: e-TeX V 2 (but excluding the bi-directional TeX--XeT extensions provided by the e-TeX software).] Preamble -- There is a demand from current LaTeX2e package writers to use e-TeX features. -- Although e-TeX does not provide a lot of new features that can be directly used in documents, it does make a lot of LaTeX programming more robust, both directly and by supporting better and more efficient code production. -- For existing TeX documents, there are no incompatibilities between e-TeX and TeX. We are therefore announcing the following plans, which will be implemented during 2003: -- Although we have decided not to rewrite the 2e kernel to take advantage of features provided by e-TeX, we may provide packages that make use of e-TeX when it is available. -- We shall produce experimental packages that require the use of e-TeX (not including the TeX--XeT extensions). -- We wish to encourage package writers to use the features of e-TeX wherever it is appropriate to do so. We are therefore encouraging all TeX distributions (as soon as possible and certainly by 2004): -- to include an executable that provides the e-TeX features; -- to use this executable when making and running the LaTeX format; and/or to provide a configurable and straightforward way for a user to make the change to using such an `e-TeX compliant' executable.