Message-Id: <199707021218.IAA12734@delorie.com>
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 1997 11:36:15 +0300 (IDT)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: djgpp-announce AT delorie DOT com
Subject: TeX, Web2c, DVI drivers ported
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This is to announce that the DJGPP port of TeX, Metafont and related
programs originally written by Donald Knuth, as well as DVI drivers
for popular devices and Karl Berry's Kpathsea library, have been
uploaded to SimTel.NET and should be available shortly from your
nearest SimTel.NET mirror.  The ported programs should run on any
platform compatible with DJGPP (check out the DJGPP FAQ for details).
In particular, they will run on MS-DOS and its clones, and also on
Windows 3.X and Windows 9X (and support long filenames on the latter).
The port includes all the programs in the Texk/Web2c distribution 
maintainedby Karl Berry, plus DVI drivers for DeskJet printers and a
simple VGA previewer.  (No PDFTeX yet, sorry; volunteers are welcome
to add it.)

TeX is a *very* large package, so it was decided to create a special
directory for it in the DJGPP archives:

     ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/gnu/djgpp/v2apps/tex/

Begin by downloading and reading the file TeX.README in that
directory; it should tell you enough to decide what parts of the
package you need to download.  This file also includes detailed
installation instructions, so please read it before unzipping the
downloaded files.  (A copy of that README file comes with all the
other zip files and is unzipped into `gnu/texk-7.0/djgpp' directory
under the name `README'.)

Porting TeX and DVI drivers was a major undertaking, much more than
other ports, even though I had done quite a few of them lately.  It
took 2.5 months; the last 3 weeks went into testing.  (By contrast,
the average porting job is usually done in 10 days; the largest
package until now--Groff--took 3 weeks to port.)

The core of the ported programs work for me reliably for the last 2
weeks; I've generated, viewed and printed DVI files for several large
TeX and Texinfo documents.  However, no matter how much time would I
spend testing, the package is so large that it's impossible to expect
a single person find all of the bugs which are specific to DOS-like
platforms.  In particular, the long filename support on Windows 95 is
virtually untested (I don't have access to development system with
Windows 95).  Please treat this port accordingly and report any
problems on the DJGPP news group comp.os.msdos.djgpp first.  (If you
can't access Usenet news, send email to <djgpp AT delorie DOT com>.)

Please post follow-ups to this announcement and any discussions
related to it to comp.os.msdos.djgpp.

Last, but not least, I would like to thank Karl Berry <kb AT cs DOT umb DOT edu>
Fabrice POPINEAU <popineau AT esemetz DOT ese-metz DOT fr> and Ulrik Vieth
<vieth AT thphy DOT uni-duesseldorf DOT de> whose kind help and patient replies
to my many questions were invaluable to me during my work on this
port.