Excalibur now has a 312,722 word Danish dictionary. You can find it in the Excalibur section.

I frequently get asked about good places to start learning LaTeX and I usually recommend "The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e" by Tobias Oetiker. I have added it to the Getting Started, References, and Useful Links page.

I have posted three diagnostics (just like Star Trek) created by Blue Sky Research for use with Textures. They are:

BSR Font Diagnostic

This small applescript application "BSR Font Diagnostic" creates a SimpleText file that tells you which fonts should be in your Fonts folder and which fonts seem to be Textures-like, but are not supposed to be in there for your configuration.

BSR Diagnostic

The small Applescript application "BSR Diagnostic" creates a SimpleText file that tells you which items should and should not be in your Fonts folder, Extensions folder, Control Panels folder, TeX Fonts folder and Textures folder.

BSR Tech Support

The small applescript application "BSR Tech Support" creates a Simpletext file with a list of the contents of your TeX fonts, TeX formats, TeX inputs, System Control Panels and System Fonts folders.

You can find them all in the Tools for Use With Textures Section.

Excalibur 2.6 is now available. From Rick's message:

New features in version 2.6:

You can now drag multiple files on Excalibur.  When you do, it will
operate in a slightly different fashion.  It will automatically start
spell checking each file and it will auto save each file when you are
finished with it.

Added Navigation Services support.  You can select more than one file
to spell check.  When you select more than one file, the behavior is
the same as when you drop multiple files onto Excalibur.

Excalibur has a significantly better Standard Dictionary.  The new
dictionary is several times larger than the previous one.  As a
result, Excalibur's suggested application size is now about 2 MB.

Bugs fixed:

Fixed a display bug that appeared when a document was open and you
tried to open another document that was busy.

Fixed the handling of Save As while correcting.

Clicking on the splash screen no longer causes a crash.

You can find this new gem in the Excalibur Section of Tools Page.

Whoa! Finally another update. Not that I am complaining, since I have been very busy actually doing my day job since the last update . Actually, this is a day, night and weekend job (if you know what I mean). Anyway, enough editorializing, LaTeX R9P0 (revision 9, patch level 0) is available for Textures in the Textures Section. It was kindly put together by Art Ogawa.

Scott Prahl recently emailed me about a bunch of converters that he has ported to the Macintosh. They include Troff to TeX, RTF to (La)TeX, TeX to ASCII, and (La)TeX to RTF. People have been asking about converters such as these for years and it is nice to see that the Mac community now has some of the popular ones. You can find them in the brand spankin' new Converters section.

You can find it in the MacGS section.

I have added a subsection on fonts to the Editors page so that it will now be the Editors and Fonts page.

I have updated the British and German dictionaries for Excalibur. The German dictionary now has two parts. "Deutsches Lexikon" is a traditional German dictionary. "Neues Deutsches Lexikon" is a dictionary that contains words which have a new spelling as of August 1, 1998. Since the old spelling will probably be used for some time, you should use both dictionaries together.

In addition, I have added and Italian supplement. The "Italian Supplement" spelling dictionary contains 184,000 Italian words and occupies 1.6 Mb on the hard drive. It isn't useful on its own because it doesn't contain basic vocabulary. However it can be used to supplement the 62,000 words in the "Italian Dictionary" provided by Paolo Matteucci. The two together give Excalibur access to a total of 246,000 Italian words.

You will, of course, find all of these on the Tools page in the Excalibur section.

Tom Kacvinsky from AMS recently sent me these Macintosh versions of Taco Hoekwater's PostScript version of the new LOGO fonts (the ones with a P and an S, plus the extra sizes of the slanted variant, and the demibold variant) as well as the Macintosh version of Taco Hoekwater's PostScript version of the St. Mary's Road Symbol font. Both have been tested with Texutures, and the St. Mary's Road Symbol font has been tested with OzTeX. He is sure both will work with CMacTeX, but they haven't been tested them with it.

The St. Mary's Road symbol font is a symbol font that logicians and set theorists would find handy, and the newer version of the LOGO fonts contain a P and an S so that one may obtain a logo for METAPOST that looks like the logo for METAFONT. The St. Mary's Road Symbol font comes with a LaTeX2e .dtx file that will produce the necessary .fd and .sty files for use in LaTeX. The new LOGO fonts are used as always, but if you have a format file which calls on the LOGO fonts, you'll need to regenerate the format files so that the new metrics get loaded into the format file. In addition, you can add \font\sllogonine=logosl9, etc... to gain access to the new variants.

He says that I should list him as the contact person for the Macintosh versions of the fonts. Some questions may well be related to the generation of the fonts (he just converted them from their PC version, created the Textures metrics, and the Screen suitcases), and if so, he'll have to bounce those questions to Taco.

You can find these fonts in the LaTeX Editors and Fonts Page in the LOGO/St. Mary's section.

New versions of the German and Norwegian dictionaries are available for Excalibur. You can, of course, find them in the Excailbur section.

I have now been using these fonts for about two weeks on a number of "projects" (i.e., figures for a journal paper and figures in homework assignments for students) and I have to say that I am quite pleased with the results. The only place I use them is within Adobe Illustrator 7.0.1, but by using them, I completely avoid the font encoding problem associated with trying to use Textures fonts within Illustrator. You can find these fonts in the FauxTeX/ComputerModern section.

By the way, I have ordered the upgrade to Illustrator 8.0. It will be interesting to see if there are any good changes in the way it handles Textures fonts. I will let you know if I discover anything and I would appreciate it if all of you out there will let me know if you find anything interesting.

This appears to be the final 7.1 version and it is in the Alpha section.

BibGene PPC has been updated to 1.0b2. BibGene is a freeware bibliographic database -- it uses its own file format but is capable of importing and exporting BibTeX. It is intended to provide a convenient interface for editing BibTeX information as well as to store other information such as citations that do not easily fit into the BibTeX format. You can find it in the BibGene section.

As usual, it is in the Alpha section.

I have not tried these fonts, but they look like they could be a simple solution to the Textures/Illustrator problem. I will be trying them out over the next few days. Here are abbreviated descriptions of these fonts:

ComputerModern is collection of nine fonts based on the Computer Modern family originally designed by Professor Donald Knuth for his TeX typesetting language. It includes standard Macintosh versions of Computer Modern Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, Slant, Caps, and Bold Caps, Sans, and Bold Sans.

FauxTeX is a collection of three fonts, based on Computer Modern, that provide a means for creating simple to moderately complex mathematical expressions.

• Cymbol serves as a very attractive substitute for the standard Symbol font.

• MathMode contains all of the Roman alphabet, italicized for mathematical expressions, as well as much of the Greek alphabet and lots of symbols.

• KahoeTech is primarily for creating expressions that involve superscripts and subscripts.

Demo versions of these fonts are available on the Editors and Fonts page in the FauxTeX/ComputerModern section. Both PostScript and TrueType versions are available.

As Rick says:

"Fixed Excalibur's handling of Word Services. It works much better with most applications now. In particular, you don't lose formatting with ClarisWorks and WordPerfect.

Excalibur knows about \tabularnewline, \r (ring accent), \SS (capital \ss, \k (ogonek accent), \DH (eth), \DJ (dbar), \NG (eng), \TH (thorn) and their lower case equivalents.

The README file and the manual contain a complete list of changes."

You can find it on the Tools page in the Excalibur section.

I have a group of students working on an innovative (at least we think so) new way to teach undergraduate dynamics (see my research page for a few details). Anyway, the students wanted to add some JavaScript rollovers to the pages they are creating and I showed them how easy it is to do this with Macromedia Fireworks. I created the new JavaScripts as an example for the students and decided that I might as well use them. By the way, Fireworks is wonderful!

You will find it in the Excalibur section.

As usual, it is in the Alpha section.

We just got our new 300 MHz Macintosh G3 Server from Apple. Consequently, there may be some downtime on Tuesday (probably in the afternoon EDT) while the switch to this big, bad new machine takes place. The PowerMac 7100/80 that WebSTAR is currently running on has been serving continuously since July 24, 1995 and has over 29,150 hours on it. It will be passed on to a student and the new G3 Server will be our department's web server, a file server for a technology classroom we are creating, and will also take over the duties of the IIci that is currently running LetterRip Pro. It's amazing what an old Mac can still do (we are not sure what to do with the IIci).

If everything goes well, it shouldn't take more than a couple of hours (and with Macs, everything usually goes reasonably well). As we work out the bugs over the next couple of weeks, there may be additional short periods during which you will not be able to connect.

Update
We are back up and running on the new server. The entire process took less than two hours!

Brad Hanson has updated his very nice Textures BBEdit Plug-Ins to version 1.2. From his email message: "There is one added option that controls whether the file corresponding to the active window in BBEdit or the text in the active window is sent to Textures for typesetting. There are a couple other minor changes and the documentation has been revised (the version history notes in the documentation describe all the changes made)."

You can find them in the Textures Tools section.

From Blue Sky's News Page:

The updater is available now in the Textures section. It will accept any version of Textures 2.0. Bug fixes and improvements in 2.0.1 included Synchronicity problems, edit window character highlighting with synchronicity, a traffic light problem, and maintaining the typeset window page position while TeXing. Version 2.0.2 fixes a LaTeX mode error, a pTeX resource bug, and a search bug and adds project mode resource compression and dynamic buffer and save size parameters. Please write to help@bluesky.com if you have any trouble with the updater.

Update
Some people, including me, have been having trouble getting this updater to work. If you are having trouble installing this updater, you should be able to get it to work by forcing it to ask again for your Textures serial number and activation key. To do this, either delete your Textures prefs file and then run Textures or hold down the option key while starting Textures (thanks to Uwe Schmock for this suggestion) and it should then ask for this information again. Upon quitting Textures, you should then be able to run the updater.

Final Update
Blue Sky has posted a revised updater that supposedly fixes any problems people were having. I have updated it here also (in the Textures section) .

I have simply updated and fixed some of the links on the Getting Started, References, and Useful Links Page.

Port of Xy-pic for Textures and OzTeX. Ross Moore (the author) says that it may work with CMacTeX, but it has not been tested with it.

Xy-pic is a package for typesetting a variety of graphs and diagrams with TeX. Xy-pic works with most formats (including LaTeX, AMS-LaTeX, AMS-TeX, and plain TeX), in particular Xy-pic is provided as a LaTeX2e `supported package' (following the `CTAN LaTeX2e bundle' standard). You can find it in the Xy-pic section.

Tom Kiffe has updated CMacTeX to version 3.1 and I am finally posting it. It looks like a rather substantial update. New features of Version 3.1 include:

• CMacTeX is now available only for the PowerPC Macintosh. It will not run on the older, 68k Macintoshes. [This isn't entirely accurate. Tom has provided a 68K version. See the end of the CMacTeX section. - GLG]
• CMacTeX is mostly based on the Unix web2c 7.2 TeX distribution.
• CMacTeX has an updated User's Guide in PDF and Postscript formats.
• Omega, pdfTeX, and eTeX are now an integral part of CMacTeX.
• The procedure for automatically generating pk fonts has been completely rewritten. Dvips, dvipreview, and xdvi all call maketexpk to generate pk fonts.
• Dvipreview and xdvi always scale the PICT resource associated with an eps graphic to the bounding box of the eps graphic rather than to the picture frame included in the PICT resource.
• Dvips has been upgraded to version 5.78 and provides better support for partial font downloading.
• The BBEdit extensions have been substantially revised.
• Xdvi can be used in conjunction with EPStoPICT to display eps graphics that do not have a PICT resource.
• Dvips, bibtex, makeindex, and pdftex no longer have to be restarted at each run. Each of these programs calls a tool to do the actual processing. At the end of a run the tool automatically quits and transfers all of its console output to its parent. The tools have no meaningful user interface and should only be launched by thier parents.
• PdfTeX has been upgraded to version 0.12l and supports type 3 as well as type 1 fonts.
• The TeX directory tree is now based, rather loosely, on the TDS standard. This shift requires a complete reorganization of the distribution of CMacTeX. All of CMacTeX is contained in 14 separate files. To make the distribution more self-contained I have added the CM and AMS fonts in type1 format as both pfb files and Macintosh Printer fonts. With the setup application the user can change the screen font used by all of the programs.

As usual, you can find it in the CMacTeX section.

Whew! I think I am finally caught up with all the updates I have been meaning to post. If I have missed something, please let me know.

I just had to announce the arrival yesterday of my new PowerBook G3 Series 292 MHz/14.1"/64MB/8GB. I am passing my 8600/200 on to my students to use for their research and will be using the PowerBook full time (talk about freeing up desk space!). This machine is wonderful! The screen is bright, big, and beautiful and the keyboard is a joy to use. Did I mention that this thing is also fast (I am really cranking on those RC5 keys now)! Right now it only has 64MB of RAM, but I have ordered 128 MB more and I may get an IXmicro Road Rocket so that I can hook one of the two Sony 17" monitors that I used to have on the 8600 to my new PowerBook. On the other hand, I really like the desk space that I have without the monitor. Anyway, enough of my rambling, grab the new CMacTeX and have a great weekend.

BibGene is a freeware bibliographic database -- it uses its own file format but is capable of importing and exporting BibTeX. It is intended to provide a convenient interface for editing BibTeX information as well as to store other information such as citations that do not easily fit into the BibTeX format. You can find it in the BibGene section.

As usual, it is in the Alpha section.

Simon M. Cao just sent me a pair of Textures font metrics files that fix problems with cmss9 and lcircle10. Installation is a snap and he even included a test file to visually verify that you have the correct font installation. As he says, "Just LaTeX it and see if the overline breaks or not, that simple." You can find it in the Textures Section

Simon M. Cao also sent me version 0.9 of his port of the AE (Almost European) font metrics. You can find them in the Textures Section. From his readme file:

This is a set of AE (Almost European) VFs for Textures,
built from the standard CM fonts but encoded in T1.
It is useful if one wants PS version of the CM fonts instead of
bitmapped EC fonts (which is really huge), but prefers T1 encoding
for most European languages and their hyphenation patterns.
ItŐs a good idea to use AE fonts for producing PDF files from TeX.

Naturally, some glyphs are missing.
See the original README file for details and usage.

I have redone the web site so that (hopefully) you will not have to wait as long for the main page to load. In addition, I rather like the new look (if I do say so myself). Please let me know what you think.

You can find it in the Textures section.

As usual, it is in the Alpha section.

Since adding some server side includes, PageWatch has been telling people that the pages have changed every even though they have not. Hopefully this will make PageWatch work the way it is supposed to. Please let me know whether or not you are seeing more appropriate behavior (it will take a day or two).

I have been busy writing papers, going to Gainesville, Florida for a conference (I have never experienced heat like that!), and generally trying to catch up. I will be posting the CMacTeX update, and any other updates I can find or am told about, later this week. Sorry for the delay.

As usual, it is in the Alpha section.

I got my two CD's in the mail yesterday (nice packaging!) and I have updated the Textures icons on this page to reflect the new Textures 2.0 icon. Note that the activation key that ships with the CD is incorrect and Blue Sky will be sending out correct ones.

The first final candidate for Alpha 7.1 is here. As usual, you can find it in the Alpha section.

AMS/PS VFs 1.0 is a set of virtual fonts (VF) for using with AMS Type1 PostScript (PS) fonts and Textures and enables the use of those AMS fonts at the design sizes which are not presented in its PS version, but are included in its METAFONT (MF) version (v2.2). These are from Simon Mang Cao and you can find them in the Textures Section.

Of the usual 89 fonts in the collection AMS Fonts 2.2, only 34 fonts, which correspond to the most important design sizes, are available in Postscript type 1 format. If you want to use the other 55 fonts, you can use:

1. Bitmap versions (not so good for high resolutions unless you have the bitmaps for this size which take away a lot of space on your hard disk),

2. Scaled versions of the available fonts, in LaTeX2e for example by using the option "psamsfonts" (scaled metrics differ from the original ones, however),

3. Virtual fonts, which have the right original metrics and scaled Postscript character images.

These are option (c) from Dr. Uwe Schmock and you can find them in the Textures Section.

Sorry for the late notice, but due to a planned power outage, this web server will be down from some time Friday evening, May 22 until some time Saturday morning, May 23.

Andy has fixed a few things in his fix for Textures/Illustrator font problems. You can find the new version in the Textures Tools Section.

You can find it in the Alpha section. Again, this update "merely" contains the TCL directory.

Well, we may finally have it. I got an email message from Andy White yesterday stating that he had completed his fix for the Textures/Illustrator font problem (he mentioned in his email that the problem also affects some OzTeX users). I have put the file in the Textures Tools Section for downloading. I apologize, but I have not yet had time to try it, but I would love to hear from anyone that gives it a workout. Please let me know and I will relate your feedback here. I will also be announcing this on the Textures Mailing List.

CMacTeX now includes pdfTeX, a direct TeX to PDF converter. This program should be considered a beta release and is based on version 0.12h of pdftex. It only supports type1 fonts in pfb format. The installation instructions are included and the archive can be found in the CMacTeX Section.

I have started using Alpha again for some html work. I have made available the latest pre-release version from Pete Keleher, Alpha's author. You can find it in the Alpha section.

Tom Kiffe continues to work hard and has updated the dvips disk within his CMacTeX distribution. Here it is:

• Dvips - Disk 6 ([an error occurred while processing this directive])

Tom Kiffe has been busy and has updated a few programs within his CMacTeX distribution. He has updated dvitomp, mf, mpost, mptotex, setup, and tex. Here they are:

• Setup - Disk 1 ([an error occurred while processing this directive])
• TeX - Disk 2 ([an error occurred while processing this directive])
• Metafont - Disk 4 ([an error occurred while processing this directive])
• Metapost - Disk 16 ([an error occurred while processing this directive])

On a whim and because it seems like it would be very useful, I have decided to set up a listserv mailing list for Textures-related issues. This list is unmoderated and has almost no restrictions so please use it wisely and considerately. In addition, the list is running on an old Mac IIci running LetterRip Pro, so if it starts to get too busy, I may have to move it elsewhere. Here are the subscription details:

To Subscribe	send email to info@email.esm.psu.edu with the message "subscribe textures" (no quotes) in the body
To Unsubscribe	send email to info@email.esm.psu.edu with the message "unsubscribe textures" (no quotes) in the body
To Get Help	send email to info@email.esm.psu.edu with the message "help" (no quotes) in the body

Keep in mind that it may take a while for the number of subscribers to reach a critical number, so please be patient if you don't see many posts or get many responses.

This dvips and misc disks (6 and 7) have been updated. dvipreview moves up to version 1.9.3, dvips5.78 to version 2.0.2, and xdvi to version 1.7.1. Here they are:

• Dvips - Disk 6 ([an error occurred while processing this directive])
• Misc - Disk 7 ([an error occurred while processing this directive])

Of course, they can also be found in the CMacTeX Section.

Tom Kiffe has added e-TeX to CMacTeX and updated a couple more programs.

From the introduction, "e-TeX is the first concrete result of an international research & development project, the NTS Project, which was established under the ægis of DANTE e.V. during 1992. The aims of the project are to perpetuate and develop the spirit and philosophy of TeX, whilst respecting Knuth's wish that TeX should remain frozen." Here is e-TeX:

• e-TeX ([an error occurred while processing this directive])

and here are the updates:

• Setup - Disk 1 ([an error occurred while processing this directive])
• Metafont - Disk 4 ([an error occurred while processing this directive])
• Ghostscript - Disk 17 ([an error occurred while processing this directive])

I have updated the following parts of CMacTeX based on information found on Tom Kiffe's web site at: http://www.kiffe.com/tex/proglist.html. Here are the updates:

• Setup - Disk 1 ([an error occurred while processing this directive])
• Dvips - Disk 6 ([an error occurred while processing this directive])
• Misc - Disk 7 ([an error occurred while processing this directive])
• TeX Utilities - Disk 8 ([an error occurred while processing this directive])
• PS Utilities - Disk 9 ([an error occurred while processing this directive])
• Ghostview - Disk 11 ([an error occurred while processing this directive])
• Ghostscript - Disk 17 ([an error occurred while processing this directive])

I have upgraded the Engineering Science and Mechanics web server (this one!) to WebSTAR 3.0. I am only saying this because first of all, WebSTAR 3 rocks! The improvement over 2.1 is remarkable with regard to administration (e.g., ftp server, remote admin, and more) and (so far) stability (I am also now running Rebound!). Second, I am now using some Server-Side Includes that should make my life a little easier. They were available in 2.1, but I never got around to implementing them. Finally, if PageWatch or something else tells you that the page has changed, you will know why.

I downloaded the preview of Adobe ImageReady 1.0 yesterday and was able to rather substantially reduce the size of most of the images on this page. Hopefully you will now experience much faster load times.

Textures 2.0 is looking very cool and is shaping up to be one of the best upgrades Blue Sky has ever released! I have been using Textures since version 1.2 and have often wondered what it would take for Blue Sky to move up an entire version number. Apparently this is it!

The new Synchronicity™ feature is amazing and fixes one of the longstanding problems I have had with LaTeX (not just Textures) -- the inability to easily find one's location in the source given the corresponding location in the typeset output (and vice versa). That is, it allows one to easily find corresponding locations between LaTeX source and the typeset output. Here are some of the details:

1. Follow Focus --- the typeset window is automatically positioned to the active point of the edit window, and tracks changes as they are made.

2. Document Master --- after a document has been typeset once, and so long as the master (top-level) file remains open, Textures "knows" the entire document structure with all of its input files. When you tell it to typeset, or make changes to a file in Flash mode, it will typeset the entire document. This would have been very nice for my Ph.D. thesis!

3. Command/Click --- with the command key down, a single mouse click in an input window moves the typeset window to show the corresponding position; command/clicking in a typeset window moves to the corresponding point in the input file, auto-opening the file if necessary.

Here is a web page demonstrating the Synchronicity™ feature.

There that can turn Follow Focus on or off. In addition, there is a "LaTeX Mode", which automatically typesets the document twice to get the cross-references correct.

Two other new features coming in Textures 2.0 are Automatic Macintosh Font Installation and Hyper-TeX links.

• Textures 2.0 automatically creates font metrics for installed Macintosh fonts (those available to all Macintosh applications). The "Show Fonts" window will display their names (the same as other applications), and allow you to command/copy a font name to paste into TeX code.

• The Los Alamos Hyper-TeX document linking \special TeX commands are supported in Textures 2.0; see http://xxx.lanl.gov/hypertex/ for more information. Note that only local links are supported by Textures 2.0; network URLs will have no effect.

This is the December 1997 build (Release 8), Patchlevel 2, of LaTeX2e nicely bundled for Textures. It includes all the appropriate TeX inputs, TeX fonts (i.e., metrics for Textures), and a pre-built LaTeX format. This beautiful package was put together by Arthur Ogawa. You can find it in the Textures Section.

The OzTeX application (and just the application) has been updated to version 3.1.5. You can find a list of the changes here. The updated application can be found in the OzTeX Section.

From Blue Sky's Technical News page, "Art Ogawa has put together a fixed set of AMS virtual font metrics without the scaling problems and including a few missing sizes. So you don't need to use the [psamsfonts] option if you don't want to." The new metrics can be found in the Textures Section.

The Blue Sky Technical News page claims to have updated the freeware Textures Reader. I have made the new installer available here in the Textures Section, though the version number is still 1.8.2.

I just got a tip from Rick Zaccone (of Excalibur fame) about a new tool called FasTeX for the fast keying of TeX (LaTeX, AMS-TeX and AMS-LaTeX). From the web page:

"It replaces any keyboard shortcut by the equivalent TeX command or group of commands and will speed up your TeX inputting by a factor of 3, as well as providing many useful templates. It also helps to avoid the creation of special macro command abbreviations that make the TeX code hard to read and edit quickly by others who work on the same files. A set of files, which we shall refer to as the FasTeX Shortcut Files, contains the mapping information that expands keyboard shortcuts into the corresponding TeX commands."

FasTeX uses TypeIt4Me (a shareware control panel) to do its thing. I have added a FasTeX entry to the Mac Tools for TeX/LaTeX Section and have included the appropriate link to download TypeIt4Me and to go to the TypeIt4Me web site.

Applied more changes supplied by Detlef Nickel.

The new German dictionary contains 182,869 words, 9,233 more than the previous version. See the Excalibur Section.

Thanks to Laurence Passmore, there is now an Atomic Elements Dictionary for Excalibur. From the readme (included with the archive).

Whilst the standard (i.e. American-English) dictionary that accompanies "Excalibur" does contain the names of the first 103 elements (hydrogen (H) to lawrencium (Lr)), it does not include their associated chemical symbols. Also, since it is an American-English dictionary, it spells "aluminium" (pronounced "al-yu-min-ee-um") as "aluminum" ("a-loo-mi-num") since this is how Americans pronounce it.

To address these issues, this dictionary contains the accepted English spellings, as given by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), of:

• 109 elements and their chemical symbols; hydrogen (H) to meitnerium (Mt) Elements 104-108 are: rutherfordium (Rf); dubnium (Db); seaborgium (Sg); bohrium (Bh) and hassium (Hs).
• Three temporary IUPAC names and chemical symbols for the discovered elements, 110-112. These are ununnilium (Uun), unununium (Uuu) and ununbium (Uub). [See below for IUPAC nomenclature for unnamed elements]
• The two isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium (D or [2,1]H) and tritium (T or [3,1]H)

You can find it in the Excalibur section.

Once more, thanks to Uwe Schmock, I have added a very nice macro menu for use with Textures. You can find it in the Textures Tools section.

Again, thanks to Uwe Schmock, I have removed the very same set of virtual metrics for the AMS PostScript fonts that I posted last week. These metrics have a number of problems, but Uwe and along with Vincent Jalby (who also reported some problems) are working on a new set of metrics. I will post them here when they are ready.

All Textures fans will be glad to hear the Textures 2.0 is in beta testing. It has some very cool new features, which I will outline here as more details become available. Blue Sky is looking at an early summer release and it looks like a must have for all Textures users.

This new version will support color QuickDraw printers. It should be available at all the usual sites (including here!) in a couple of weeks.

Thanks to Uwe Schmock, I have added a set of virtual metrics for the AMS PostScript fonts. These metrics are needed to supply fonts in sizes other than those supplied with the AMS distribution. You can find them in the Textures section.

As was announced on Blue Sky's web site, Bruno Voisin found and fixed a couple of bugs in their AMS/PS metrics. The updated files ("AMS/PS Font Metrics" and "AMS/PS hide Metrics") are in the Textures section.

The folks at Blue Sky, with the help of TeXpert Art Ogawa, have found a bug in their LaTeX2e R7P0 distribution. They think it only affects the 68K versions. The problem was that the file latex.ltx had an extra carriage return (amazing how little it takes!). They have altered the LaTeX R7P0 package, have made a new fat format file, and have corrected the latex.ltx source file. I have added and/or updated all of these files in the Textures section.

You can find it in the Excalibur section.

Bare Bones has released a new version of BBEdit Lite. From the enclosed "What's New..." document, "From an engineering perspective, BBEdit Lite 4.1 has more in common with commercial releases of BBEdit than with previous releases of BBEdit Lite. It is built from the same code and resource bases. This has yielded many "under the hood" improvements to performance, functionality, and reliability."

At the request of Berthold Horn, I have, as I should have done in the first place, given proper credit to all of the appropriate participants for last year's release to the public (though they are not public domain) of the CM and AMS PostScript fonts. I have fixed the wording in both the Textures and OzTeX sections of the page.

On the heals of yesterday's announcement of a new Norwegian dictionary (version 2.0) for Excalibur comes an update to that very same dictionary (to version 2.1). To quote Rick Zaccone, "Someone was inspired by version 2.0 of the Norwegian dictionary (released just two days ago) and sent more words to Svein Olav Nyberg."

This Excalibur dictionary was assembled by Svein Olav Nyberg. From the information provided by Rick Zaccone:

It is not commercial, not Shareware, not Postcardware, not even Freeware, but Upgradeware. That means I would appreciate it if you upgraded the dictionary with new words, and sent it back to me after you had added a reasonable amount of words. This way, we can together create a very good dictionary. The current version contains 65,798 words. Upgrades will regularly be sent to the Excalibur's distribution.

To help you keep track, I will number the versions. This is 2.0. If you see any errors, please include the version number in your feed-back.

I have updated the OzTeX application to version 3.1.1. If you already have 3.1, you only need the file OzTeX.sea.hqx. From Andrew Trevorrow:

It fixes a bug in dvips (only in my implementation) that can occur if the -E option is used more than once in the same session. The bug causes bad BoundingBox values.

I also took the opportunity to update dvips to the latest version (5.76) -- only some trivial changes.

These are the only changes to OzTeX 3.1, so if you never use the -E option I wouldn't bother downloading 3.1.1.

I have added BoxedEPS because it is what I use, it has all the commands I need, it doesn't keep changing, and I like it. Other recommendations are welcome. You can find it in the Mac Tools for TeX/LaTeX section.

I have received a number of requests over the last few months for TeX and/or LaTeX converters on the Macintosh. For example, people have asked about:

• LaTeX to HTML and HTML to LaTeX,
• LaTeX to Word and Word to LaTeX,
• LaTeX to PDF and PDF to LaTeX.

Anyway, you get the idea. I am not familiar with any of these tools except that I do use Acrobat Distiller to create PDF files from PostScript (PS) files that I create from Textures. I also understand that you can create PDF files from PostScript files using MacGS (this is a free solution!). If any of the visitors to this page can to send me information on converters like these that are available on the Mac, I would really appreciate it. I will summarize responses and then make any relevant files available here.

Differences from first version:

1. Without doubt, the more important difference and the one it turns it into a work till now original is that Valencian (or south-occidental variant) verbal inflection has been completed. So, in a example like the verb ``cantar'', the Dictionary accepts ``cante'' as good option, in addition of ``canto''; and accepts as well ``cant\'essem'' and ``cant\`arem'', in addition of ``cant\'essim''.
2. The first version has been corrected word by word; mistakes found have been corrected and some barbarisms and localisms (admitted in a stroke of magnimity) have been eliminated.
3. Many geographic nouns and proper nouns (concerning catalonian linguistic area as well as from any other origins) have been enclosed depending on its frequency of use.
4. Many others terms have been enclosed, until a total of 286.622 entries (so is, more than 84.000 from last version).
5. Finally, I have change its title. ``Catal\`a (CAT-VAL)'' better expresses the criterions used in its elaboration. It joins the conventions conforming with the times and it results a coherent denomination according with my intention of making two versions in the future: ``Catal\`a (CAT)'' and ``Catal\`a (VAL)''.

There is no readme, so I have no idea what the changes are, but it was posted to Blue Sky's ftp site on 1/5 (Is it just me, or is it strange that they have files dated 3/27/98 on their ftp site?). You can find the rather small updater in the Textures section. If anyone can let me know what is different about this version, please let me know. By the way, the updater did successfully update my Textures 1.8.3 to 1.8.4.

CMacTeX is now at version 3.0. Here is what is new in version 3.0:

• CMacTeX is now based on the Unix web2c 7.1 TeX distribution.
• CMacTeX has a User's Guide in PDF format.
• Tex and initex have been combined into one program. The user can set various internal memory parameters for tex with the file tex.cnf. The small and big versions of tex have been discontinued. Tex--xet is no longer distributed.
• Mf and inimf have been combined into one program. The user can set various internal memory parameters for mf with the file mf.cnf. The small andbig versions of mf have been discontinued.
• Ghostview and gs are now based on ghostscript 5.10. Gs produces much smaller pdf files than previous versions.
• Dvips has been upgraded to version 5.76 and provides better support for partial font downloading.
• CMacTeX no longer maps a space character in a file or folder name to an *.
• All Apple Scripts have the same interface to CMacTeX programs.

See the CMacTeX section for all the appropriate files.

Pete no longer has a full and min install on his ftp site, so I have updated my version of Alpha to reflect this. I have also changed the actual 7.0 file since mine was dated December 23 and his is dated January 4. Sorry for the inconvenience, but better safe than sorry.

From the read me: "This version now allows users to specify up to 15 file extensions of their choosing for auto- matic deletion, in addition to 15 standard extensions (.log, .aux, .dvi, etc.); the change is at the suggestion of Tom Scavo to whom I offer my thanks. Thanks are also due to Michael Murray for helping find a bug which prevented the preferences being properly saved on PPC machines." You can find it in the deTeXtor section.