Some TeX Developments

WinEdt is a popular (La)TeX editor on Windows. A new major release, version 6, has just appeared on the WinEdt homepage. The interface has received a lot of attention, with new icons and menu arrangements. One thing that a lot of people have been hoping for is UTF-8 support, but the release notes say

Avoid sending major feature requests: they will have to wait for version 6.1 (unicode, folding and all)!

So for the moment people who need UTF-8 will have to look elsewhere. Another point to note for users of version 5.5 is that this is not a free upgrade (WinEdt is shareware).

I’ve had a couple of babel-related bug reports for siunitx. The first was with the Spanish language option, where the \percent unit misbehaves as \% is redefined by babel. My fix for this has then caused a problem with the Italian language option, as it makes ” an active character. So the latest release (v1.2d) fixes this too: apologies for the problems.

All of this makes more more eager than ever that a general move to UTF-8 input happens. This should cut down on the need for babel. At the same time, an updated LaTeX kernel (LaTeX3) which includes more functionality would also help package authors know what to expect.

I’ve been discussing some points about the future of (La)TeX with various people, and some key issues come to mind. Most LaTeX users do not want to meddle with the internal parts of LaTeX or TeX. In an ideal world, I suspect most users would like to need little beyond the correct document class to get things “just right” in their layout. Perhaps a few simple settings, but really little more than that.

With the correct packages and class loaded, you can do many things in LaTeX. However, you really shouldn’t need to load specific support for hyperlinks, T1 encoding, basic font changing, creating new float types and so on in 2009 (let alone 2010, 2011, etc.). The efforts of the LaTeX3 team have to date focussed on programming and to a lesser extent document design. How things will work at the user level is much less clear.

I’d suggest that a real focus on getting something for users would be the best way forward. This might mean less improvement internally, but I’d think that a LaTeX kernel which could do everything in The LaTeX Companion would be pretty successful, even with few changes “under the hood”. This would mainly be a re-coding excercise from existing packages, which in a way is similar to what I’ve tried to do with siunitx. Much of the basics in siunitx are taken from other packages (at least in terms of user interface), but it brings several ideas together in one place. The same idea could easily be applied to the kernel. Of course, this might leave some of the clever ideas for LaTeX3 out of the code at this stage, but I’d hope would get momentum behind a more regularly updated system.

One particular area to think about is fonts. With both XeTeX and LuaTeX able to handle system fonts directly, the basic LaTeX system seems very antiquated. At present, LaTeX3 only requires e-TeX, not LuaTeX (in contrast to ConTeXt Mark IV). Should the LaTeX team say something like:

For current testing purposes, only the e-TeX extensions are needed, but this is likely to change. XeTeX or LuaTeX will be required to run the release version of LaTeX3 with full functionality.

I’d say yes, as I think that it’s time to move on from complex font installation and usage restrictions. I’d also be very tempted to say that LaTeX3 will assume UTF-8 input unless otherwise specified (as both XeTeX and LuaTeX are native UTF-8 systems).

This type of approach will make LaTeX easier to use, and I’d hope to see it arrive! After all, users are the TeX community.