Bernard, it was never my intention to say that > in only one project. Yes things seem not to converge. But > they go and move and this is terribly unpolite to reduce > their work to an amusing task without interest. No ! it is not and this is not what i was trying to bring over (and i hope that it was not seen in this way by the members of the e-tex project or omega project) what i was saying is that (in my opinion) we need to get a fixed version that is directly attractive to users to switch in large numbers and i was trying to explain that even a large step forward like LaTeX2e was nearly not enough to make this happen for latex. otherwise you will have a situation even worse than in old 209 days where more and more small islands of user comunities did have their private version of TeX/LaTeX being unable to communicate with each other. if we get ourselves into a similar corner again then we are very likely to bring TeX to death. for this reason my suggestion is to concentrate soon on bringing a fixed version out that contains pdf support e-tex as of version 1 and the stable and good parts of omega. that further research and work in all three projects is necessary and important goes without saying but my claim is that none alone (except perhaps pdftex and thus pdftex + e-tex) can be made attractive enough to the end users to switch from the current TeX installations. my fear is that if we don't make something like this happen soon then we might indeed find ourselves cornered by MSWord so much that when we finally get the single system that we all feel happy with we are the only ones left. or to say it positive, i think that the 1.0 e-tex is a very good intermediate step that we could use to the advantage of the community, the same for basic work done in the omega project and for the pdftex work and we now have the chance to package all that in a way that we might win over enough user to make a first step towards NTS and against the decline of TeX (= quality typesetting) usage. frank