[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > So to speak, but why in 2001 A.D. we still have to do with old MSDOS
> > 8+3 things? Currently every new system supports more than 8+3 characters
> > in filename, from Windows, to Unix, to Amiga, Mac, etc.; also for ISO,
> > which has Joliet, RockRidge, HSFS, etc. extension to have long file
> > names. And all these systems supports at least 31 characters long file
> > names, as well as for ISO CD images, which has Joliet, RockRidge, HSFS,
> > etc. extension to have long file names.
>
> There are still a lot of people around, particularly in the so-called
> Third World, who are happily running TeX on ancient machines.
> Earlier this year I installed emTeX on a 386sx machine with a 40MB
> hard disk for my youngest daughter. She wanted to do her university
> work on a machine which couldn't be used for playing games by her
> children. She uses it solely for producing documents - and in even a
> couple of months has learned enough about LaTeX not to want to even
> try learning something which requires a machine with gigabytes of hard
> disk space.
ancient machine doesn't mean ancient OS. You can install Linux
on 386 which has support for long names. On the other hand if she uses old DOSes
she can continue to use old (em)TeX version (on the other hand latest emTeX is
from 1998) with short naming scheme.
>
> The following bit isn't directly relevant to font naming, but
> indicates that old systems still have something going for them.
>
> Even though I usually use teTeX under Linux on my home machine, I
> recently discovered one case where the emTeX drivers are better than
> dvips.
> I was using xymtex to produce a diagram of part of an RNA molecule.
> This uses nested picture environments to put the atoms in particuler
> places and link them, and hence makes a lot of demands on memory.
> Under teTeX dvips produced an error message "Out of stack space"
> The emTeX drivers let me both view and print the diagram.
well, probably dvips can be recompiled extending default stack size...
> And on Stephanie's machine, with 8MB ram, it was slow but still
> worked.
Anyway my objection was with ancient 8+3 names, not for old machines.
When I was using the Amiga as main machine, I was running
TeX (PasTeX, DVIPrint, ShowDVI, SpecialHost, etc)
even with 1-4MB of RAM (and no virtual memory/swap), but the Amiga had
long file name support since the 1986... On that machine
MetaFont taken 8-9 minutes (with the inner loop rewritten in 680X0 assembly).
Now on a K7/1Ghz with Linux I measured around 0.3 seconds.
>
> > How about a revision of the 8+3 KB naming scheme to support more
> > characters for more prosaic font names? WDYT?
>
> If a system isn't broken, don't fix it?
well, programs evolves. Otherwise we wouldn't even had all
the PostScript and PDF extension of the newer TeX things.
Bye.
Giuseppe.
