KerTeX has been updated to the latest D.E. Knuth's sources (tex, mf and some auxiliaries). AMS fonts 3.04 are also here.
The most visible change is the X11 online graphics output for METAFONT, allowing to see on screen what one is drawing. This has two main purposes: 1) To allow people to have totally what is described in the METAFONTbook; 2) To give hints that METAFONT, generally ignored against TeX, is not only a compiler/interpreter for a drawing language (for font design), but is also a... rasterizer engine... The instructions for compilation/installation are in the LISEZ.MOI / README files and a get_mk_install.sh POSIX.2 script does the job almost automatically. See: http://www.kergis.com/en/kertex.html /* english or sort of */ http://www.kergis.com/kertex.html /* french */ In a nutshell: KerTeX is a distribution of D. E. Knuth's Computer and Typesetting programs. It includes all D.E.K.'s programs and fonts, plus AMS fonts, T1 versions of the CMR, dvips(1), Adobe AFM for PostScript standard fonts, NTS e-TeX (TeX bidirectional), John Hobby's MetaPost, Oren Patashnik's BibTeX and D.E. Knuth and Silvio Levy' cweb (and cwebmerge). It is intended to be an universal kerTeX distribution since: 1) It uses only C89; 2) The tools to compile or to administrate are a small subset of POSIX.2 utilities. For POSIX compliant systems, it depends on strictly nothing external; 3) It provides the kernel: for example, LaTeX is not a program but a seti of macros to be interpreted by TeX (latex is just argv[0] for a version of virtex(1) instructing TeX to load the precompiled set of macros). LaTeX can be installed on kerTeX as a package (there are already a good number of packages for kerTeX), but it runs on the "kernel"; 4) For the building framework, it has been organized and simplified and it is under a BSD like licence, allowing, too, the use in a commercial offer (it has already happened)---D.E.K.'s programs and others have their own licence; 5) Once the "kernel" is installed (hosted), supplementary packages can be added and this is the same package on whatever system since it is then kerTeX problem and not the hosting system one. KerTeX is small: the default install (it could be restricted to just D.E.K.'s work and it would be far less) requests the download of a 10MB tgz file; needs less than 40MB to compile; uses less than 50MB to install, the majority of space being occupied by the fonts (generated at installation time with the programs compiled when the METAFONT sources are given, or when TFM files are generated from alien fonts). For the moment, kerTeX has been, at least at one time, compiled and used on *BSD, Linuces, MacOSX, Plan9 and Windows (via Interix but a native built will come soon). Best, -- Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com> http://www.kergis.com/ Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89 250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C
