Sebastian writes: > PS I must add (publicly) that for the first time in years, I am feeling that > LaTeX has a future. Thanks for Frank, David and Chris for inspiring > talks at TUG 99. If you haven't checked their slides, do so. Stirring > stuff. thanks Sebastian for your kind words. they are worth a frame aren't they? :-) more seriously, i'm personally quite enthusiastic about the work undertaken in the last year or so (despite trying to raise twins and all that) and i too see and hope for a positive future of LaTeX with a design interface as it is currently taking shape. perhaps i should say that all of what we presented in Vancouver in larger detail (as given in the slides) is actually existing work (and not dreamware or whitepapers) which we plan to make available real soon to a larger audience for discussion and final shaping. Since i hope that we do get some more substancial discussions on that i would like to repeat the info about the location of the speakers notes we put on the web (especially as our web site is currently being changed and doesn't contain a visible link to it) The slides are now available from the latex project web site http://www.latex-project.org/talks/tug99.pdf and also from the TUG99 website http://www.tug.org/TUG99-web/pdf/carlisle.pdf http://www.tug.org/TUG99-web/pdf/mittelbach.pdf http://www.tug.org/TUG99-web/pdf/rowley2.pdf (all four of these URL lead to the same document) ------------ i regret to have to report that the slides do not give much detail on frontmatter syntax but a lot on the more general mechanisms we want to employ in a (first time) LaTeX interface to class design. the main reason is that for the front matter design (in contrast to other bits) we currently only have a prototype interface that was designed to work with an earlier version of the interface which we abandoned. However, as David said in a reply under this subject he is currently working night-shifts to convert and redesign the original proto-type using the new interface and i expect results soon. To answer Wolfgang Huber questions: (under TUG99 talk subject): > Now that I've looked at your talk I tasted blood. How about releasing your > interface in the experimental-directory ? actually not at this point in time as i don't necessarily want to see the current state of the interface ending up on CD-roms necessarily. my main argument is that while the general mechanisms of the various interfaces we propose seems to be fine there is a lot of detail to attend which will eventually result in small to large interface changes (as an example for those who have already looked at the slides or seen the talks given at TUG99: on xparse for example David just convinced me that the return of parsing coordinate pairs in LaTeX should be a single brace group like {{x-val}{y-val}} rather than two groups, ie {x-val}{y-val}. This is a small and in some sense unimportant detail but a large change to the interface as far as coding and using it is concerned. So rather than putting it out on experimental (where i guess it might show up for 99/12 (whenever this happens :-)) my suggestion is to put it up bits by bits on our web site www.latex-project.org for now; together with a hopefully lively discussion on the important aspects of the current part under disucssion. so my plan would be to start putting things up real soon. meaning probably after next weekend, starting with the xparse interface, followed by the template interface (where more documentation is needed first) followed perhaps by frontmatter or other stuff like lists, headings ... however to put this stuff into perspective, eg to understand why there is xparse ... i would urge you to have a look at the slides we put out and perhaps you have some comments/questions/whatever beforehand once you've seen that. > Your css-like approach to style-things seems to open new ways towards > publishing a document on paper and on the web, likeways. > I hope, you release the LaTeX2e* before the next official LaTeX2e-Release! to sum up i hope to be able to release a substancial part of it together with the 99/12 release (in experimental then and further integrated in the release following, ie around the TUG meeting 2000 in Oxford) but i plan on releasing bits earlier for discussion on our web site and announced on this list. frank