Nice summary, Frank. I go along with it. I get mail every day from LaTeX users trying to send us manuscripts; they fall into 3 categories - those who don't know 2e exists - those who have a 1994 version and dont understand why it breaks - those who can't control it anyway (viz Scientific Word users) and a very few who have the same setup that i do... there is _no way_ these people will upgrade to get at the sort of extra e-TeX provides. they _might_ upgrade to Omega, i suppose, if they are typesetting Russian. what they _do_ use is pdftex. I am amazed at how wide-spread references to it are, in purely academic places, in `semi-commercial' contexts (like the man redoing all the Debian Linux docs with pdftex) and the publishing world, where it has undoubtedly struck a chord. i am biased, of course, but my ideal future is the `NTS' box that takes the Omega engine and uses DSSSL as its style language to format XML documents. from that perspective, there is simply no place for `LaTeX' at all. Sebastian