kerTeX: D.E. Knuth's latest programs and mf X11 support

[tlaronde at polynum.com]

Hello,

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/
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