TUGboat, Volume 10 (1989), No. 2 Janet users may obtain back issues from the As- Resources ton 'QX repository (for details, contact Peter Ab- bott, e-mail address above). DECnetISPAN users may obtain back issues from the European (con- Announcing (belatedly) -MAG tact Massimo Calvani, fisicaQastrpd.infn. it) or American (contact Ed Bell, 7388 : :bell) DECnet Don Hosek T)?J repositories. University of Illinois at Chicago Others with network access should send a mes- After being chided for not publicizing my electronic sage to archive-serverQsun.soe.clarkson.edu "magazine" enough, I have decided to make a formal with the first line being path followed by an address announcement of its availability to the 'J&X cornmu- from Clarkson to you, and then a line nity at large. get texmag texmag.v.nn What is =MAG? for each back issue desired where v is the volume number and nn the issue number. The line index WMAG is available free of charge to anyone reach- texmag will give a list of back issues available. able by electronic mail and is published approxi- A typical mail request may resemble: mately every two months. The subject material index t exmag generally falls somewhere between the somewhat get texmag texmag.l.08 chaotic (but still useful) correspondence of 'QXHAX and UKW, and the printed matter in TUGboat How do I submit articles to TEXMAG? and QXline. Some previous articles have included I was hoping you would ask. Articles are accepted an early version of Dominik Wujastyk's article on on all aspects of T)?J, M'QX, and METAFONT from fonts from TUB 9#2; an overview of the differ- specific information on interfacing graphics packages ent font files used by 'QX, METAFONT, and device with particular DVI drivers to general information drivers; macros for commutative diagrams and sim- on macro writing to product reviews to whatever ple chemical equations and many other topics. One else strikes your fancy. A general rule of thumb to issue was dedicated to the issue of non-English 'QX. use in deciding whether something would make a How do I subscribe? suitable WMAG article is to assume that it would! WMAG has two special columns for shorter You can only subscribe if you have access to one submissions as well: "The Toolbox" is a forum for of the electronic mail networks and can send mail presenting short useful macros, and "T)?J Myster- to Bitnet (I have neither the time nor resources ies and Puzzles" presents interesting and unusual to mail hardcopy issues to those without network typesetting problems for possible solutions by the access). To subscribe, one should send the follow- WMAG readership (these questions are also for- ing one line message to 1istservQpucc bitnet or . warded to the WHAXand UKm groups in hopes listservQpucc.princeton.edu: of getting as many responses as possible). The pur- SUBS TEXMAG-L your full name pose of both of these columns is to attempt to pro- If you have problems doing this, send a note to vide exposition of problem solving mniques, so U33297Quicvm.uic .edu asking to be added to the when submitting macros for either of these, please list (this address sends mail to me, not a server, so try to explain how and why you did what you did. phrase it for human reading. There are also several "regional" redistribu- o Don Hosek tions. CDNnet subscribers may subscribe by send- 3916 Elmwood Stickney, IL 60402 ing a note asking for a subscription to WMAG Internet: [email protected]. edu to list-requestQubc. csnet. Janet subscribers Bitnet: u33297@uicw should request subscriptions from Peter Abbott, AbbottpQUk.Ac.Aston. Where can I get back issues? Users with FTP access to the internet may re- trieve back issues of 'QXMAG from the directory pub/texmag on sun.soe.clarkson.edu. TUGboat, Volume 10 (1989), No. 2 mine wait for articles to arrive, you sit and wait a long time. I feel that Z&Wine has been well supported, Malcolm W Clark even if I do write far too much of it still. I try not to mine now terms itself 'a newsletter of the rn edit very much, but it is always necessary to re-word community'. When it began in 1985, it described (and sometimes re-write) in order to make articles itself as a newsletter for QX users in the UK and fit into pages. Sorry. The next issue of wine, Ireland. The w-world has changed even in the number 9, will have a table of contents for all the last four years. previous ones. I try to include areas which are not In 1984, I attended the historic TUG meeting at strictly Wware (where mware includes Urn, Stanford where announced that QX had been d@m, METAFONT, etc.), like SGML, POST- finalised, and that no more work was to be done SCRIPTmatters, reports of relevant meetings (like on it, with the exception of bug fixes. At the same those of the British Computer Society's Electronic meeting I saw w demonstrated on the Sun, under Publishing Group, the SGML Users Group, TUG, a windowing environment, where input text and a and anything similar). Software and book reviews preview could be viewed side by side. I returned are becoming more frequent. I even managed to per- to the Old World determined to be a missionary. suade one brave soul to review The =book. There TQX was alive in Britain, but I felt that we had to is a fair amount of very mainstream Wnical stuff try to identify one another, and started to build a which would not be too out of place in TUGboat. mailing list from the TUGboat listings (an arduous Barbara Beeton and I have discussed the possibil- task, since even to this day there are no regional ity of reprinting some Wine articles in TUGboat. subdivisions provided1). Encouraged in my fool- I have recently increased the amount of plagiarism hardiness by others I decided to start a newsletter, by using material which has appeared over the elec- based on that mailing list. From the outset, mine tronic networks, or which goes into other newletters. has been free. Obviously somebody has paid for the minetries to maintain a degree of informal- raw materials and the postage, but we just don't ity - at least that's my excuse for the typos. Many enquire too deeply about that. of its readers do not have access to electronic net- The newsletter format has been fairly consis- works, and, to my chagrin, the majority are not even tent, and frankly, pretty mundane. Because of a TUG members. I believe that it is very important fundamental restriction to easily obtainable raw ma- to get out into the community of 'little people'- terials (A4 paper), I use double columning, with a the ones who do not work in organisations where basic 10 point typeface. I have yet to find a really there are lots of fellow Wies; with the successful robust set of double columning macros. The first porting of T)jX to personal machines, the possibili- editions were set using m80(a slightly augmented ties of isolation have increased. I would like to think m78)running on a CDC machine under NOS, and that T@dine was addressing that situation (without with an Autologic APS-p5 phototypesetter for out- ignoring the other parts of the community). put device. The pages were pasted up from a sort of As the newsletter grew (in bulk), its mailing galley. I also included material prepared by oth- list also grew, especially outside the UK and Ire- ers from a variety of devices (embarassingly, this land. This was the main reason for changing the also included a typewriter). Since then production 'subtitle' so that the newsletter merely described it- has switched fist to Microw and a LaserWriter, slef in more general, non-nationalistic terms. This and now uses Textures on a Mac Plus (again with however represents a problem. Mailing costs for the a LaserWriter). The quantity of paste up has di- minority outside the British Isles now dominate the minished to almost nothing (but not for ideological costs. I try to arrange redistribution centres. TUG reasons -I still feel that paste up is often the best has agreed to provide a subsidy. Some of the small way to tackle problems). surplus from last year's m88conference has also What goes into mine? As all editors will re- helped to offset costs. alise, what goes into most newsletters is a mixture What next? I once said that the newsletter of what you are prepared to write yourself and what would never be electronic. Without exactly eat- you can extract from your friends. If you sit and ing my words, future editions (and some past ones) will be included in the Aston Archive. This Editor's note: Clearly Malcolm had not seen may mean that the newsletter can be printed else- this year's membership list when he wrote this. A where (although there wiil be problems where graph- listing by country and city has been added, by pop ics are included). It is not intended to remove ular demand. the need for printed paper copies. mine is set 194 TUGboat, Volume 10 (1989), No. 2 using m-the layout may not be exciting, but There are still two major impediments to using it is part of the newsletter. I would like to see mail for accessing the archive: it come out more regularly (even if not more fre- 0 Character tables at Gateways quently).