Hans Aberg wrote: > In fact, I am not sure that even the things that Frank Mittelbach wants > to do with LaTeX3, can be fully done without requesting a new TeX version. > This importance of the LaTeX3, namely, as an indicator on how TeX might > evolve, was already recognized by the NTS project several years ago. This is precisely what I have observed in many (or all?) discussions on this list. So I'd like to make an unqualified comment (being aware that this has probably been discussed internally by the LaTeX3 project members, and that Frank Mittelback prefers to talk only about Knuthian TeX in this place): All the more technical issues discussed seem to eventually boil down to some basic limitation in TeX the program and a lot of time and effort is spent by mending these on the macro level, or by reencoding fonts. The most striking example might be the non-hyphenation of words containing accented letters. To get around this problem which might be have been fixed by extending TeX, the EC fonts (thanks Joerg!) were developed in a probably immense effort. Although they undoubtely improve CMs appearence with non-English texts, they also perpetuate the division of the world into TeX and non-TeX. Following some discussion in comp.text.tex, it seems to me that it is unlikely that postscript versions of the EC fonts will appear any time soon---bad for web based TeX publishing, and for every commercially available font someone will have to at least T1-reencode it, which I guess is not a triviality. So TeX users will always lag behind in the choice of fonts they can use (if they want to avoid running into the non- hyphenation stupidity). From the user perspective (I really don't know anything about the internals and the philosophies behind them), it simply amazes me that the main trust of the LaTeX3 project is not directed towards fixing such an elementary and apparent flaw within TeX. With all due respect for Don Knuth, TeX appears to be designed in a very anglo-centred way, and I don't see why hypothetical version of LaTeX should perpetuate this. Much of the mathfont problems seem to be due to some other limitations in the font handling in TeX, I also remember some discussion about shortref mechanisms, which essentially got to the point "it cannot really be done in TeX, but we can write some clever hacks to do it". Unfortunately many packages contain already too many clever hacks (just thinking of amsmath: extremely useful, but also full of minor bugs and inconveniences that seem to be difficult to fix). Is this just my impression, or do the experts see it similarly? Marcel