[tex-live] Re: Please drop the DVI-with-pdfTeX hack!

[Ralf Stubner]

"Jonathan Fine" <J.Fine at open.ac.uk> writes:

> As already noted, it seems that
> for the microtypography there are few users.
[...]
> My concern is that we might be breaking (how many) existing documents,
> for the benefit of (how many) users of microtype.sty.

Number of users is pure speculation. Your search gave only 18 hits, here
are two searches which give ten times as many hits:

(microtype OR pdfcprot) -Hefferon -Announcements group:*.text.tex

           Note that pdfcprot.sty also deals with character protrusion
           and is also affected, but IMHO microtype is the better
           interface.

("character protrusion" OR Randausgleich) group:*.text.tex

            '(Optischer) Randausgleich' is the german term for
            'character protrusion' which is one of the microtypographic
            extensions implemented in pdfTeX.

Interestingly, most hits are from d.c.t.t.

With respect to breaking existing documents I would like to repeat that
teTeX made exactly this switch without an one-year warning period. The
number of problems reported on TeX related newsgroups or mailing lists
which I follow has been quite low.

> And that there may be a better solution to this evidently continuing
> problem.

'Writing additional code because a documented API has been hidden' does
not count as 'better solution' in my book. May I repeat myself

,----
| Please not that the reason for building the LaTeX format using pdfTeX
| was to enable the microtypographic extensions for DVI output, too. It
| now has been realized that masking some of the new primitves provided
| by pdfTeX inhibits to a large degree the very purpose of the original
| change. Hence, either go back to using eTeX for the LaTeX format or
| use an uncrippled pdfTeX.
`----

which is still my opinion. For me this is the last message in this
thread.

cheerio
ralf