>> For this to work, there must be a body that issues TeX upgrades, which >> are suffiently conservative that the many TeX implementations only need to >> flip in the new source code, I think. We do have to be really careful about terminology here: there can't be any upgrades to TeX unless they are issued by DEK himself; he will look at TeX at ever-increasing intervals, and he intends to make no changes (other than pure bug-fixes) whatsoever. As an alternative, the e-TeX/NTS team propose e-TeX; it is 100% compatible with TeX, written in pure Pascal Web as a changefile, and should be readily ported to every modern platform (versions currently exist for VMS, MS/DOS, Unix, Amiga and Windows 32/95, plus perhaps other systems of which we are currently unaware). e-TeX V1.1 was released about six months ago; we have had no bug reports since then. e-TeX V1.1 offers over 30 additional primitives when compared to TeX V3.14159, most of which are accessible in extended mode (that is, in a mode which does not compromise compatibility with TeX); the remainder operate in enhanced mode, within which the bi-directional TeX--XeT environment becomes available. e-TeX is documented at, and available from http://www.rhbnc.ac.uk/e-TeX/ Philip Taylor, Tehcnical Director, e-TeX & NTS projects.