TeX, any answers?

[Brant Cheikes]

In article <161 at skeeve.UUCP> arnold at skeeve.UUCP (Arnold D. Robbins) writes:
>Did we ever reach a conclusion as to the availability of TeX for the
>Unix/PC?

As Ed Hepler hasn't spoken up, it looks like what you want--- UNIXpc
binaries--- are no longer available.  The kernel TeX system consists
of these files:

-rwxr-xr-x  1 bin     bin      156680 Dec  7 14:15 virtex
-rw-r--r--  1 brant   users    269022 Dec  7 14:12 lplain.fmt
-rw-r--r--  1 brant   users    158091 Jul 29  1988 plain.fmt
-rwxr-xr-x  1 bin     bin       69636 Feb 16 20:34 bibtex	[optional]

LaTeX is had by the command "virtex \&lplain $*," TeX by "virtex
\&plain $*."  If these are all that people want, I can easily make
them available.  But you really need other files to actually process a
TeX or LaTeX source file, including style files (for articles,
reports, books, etc.) and the basic font definition files (*.tfm).
That turns out to be a significant amount of stuff (another 200 Kb+?).
People with FTP access can get most of that stuff from
hotel.cis.ksu.edu as well as score.stanford.edu (in <tex>,
<tex.bibtex>, and <tex.fonts> areas).  I haven't heard anything about
uucp availability.

I'll end there.  If you're interested in getting TeX but are having
trouble putting the pieces together, let me know and I'll see what I
can do.  If you don't know what TeX or LaTeX is, get to your nearest
bookstore with a decent Comp Sci collection and check out "The
TeXbook" by Don Knuth and "LaTeX User's Guide" by Leslie Lamport.
-- 
Brant Cheikes
University of Pennsylvania, Department of Computer and Information Science
brant at manta.pha.pa.us, brant at linc.cis.upenn.edu, bpa!manta!brant