Hello 9fans@ Although it is no TeX I would like to suggest ``lout'', a lightweight (2 MB) document formatting system written in ANSI C by Jeffrey H. Kingston. [0]
Quotation from Wikipedia: ``It reads a high-level description of a document similar in style to LaTeX and produces a PostScript file which can be printed on most printers. Plain text and PDF output are also available.'' [1] It is free software and well documented, you might also want to have a look at the FAQ. [2] [0] http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/lout/ [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout [2] http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/lout/index.php?title=FAQ On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 12:10 AM, <tlaro...@polynum.com> wrote: > On Tue, Dec 08, 2009 at 02:30:49PM -0800, ron minnich wrote: >> On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 12:55 PM, Steve Simon <st...@quintile.net> wrote: >> > somone was working on a modern port of TeX to plan9. >> > did this work out? I would like to update my installation >> > as I think I may be using LaTeX before long. >> >> I gave it a go but it wore me out. The pdflatex guys just destroyed >> latex portability, and tex overall is far less portable than it was >> years ago. It's a sad story. > > I gave it a try too, but it's stalled---no abandon, but I have already > too much to do with the GIS. > > For whose who would give it a try (my plan was/is to get rid of all the > GPL mess added, since TeX, METAFONT and the like are the stable parts; > that's all the mess added around that is a hell): > > 1) I first thought about trying to get an open source Pascal compiler > (there is at least one in the old BSD sources). There is/was a GNU > project, or at least a GPL project too. But Pascal is not my cup > of tea and I found messages from Donald Knuth, who was trying to > compile the software with this (so that TeX depends on nothing > else) and he finally gave up... Conclusion: if even he gave up, > I should perhaps take another way... > > 2) Second way: translate WEB to CWEB. For the format, this is easy. But > for the code, this is more or less what web2c does. So... > > 3) Retrieve the public version (Thomas Rockiki) of the original > translation stuff, and restart from this. > > Personnally, my goal was only the core TeX and METAFONT, dvips and > MetaPOST without kpathsea---I use TeX and not LaTeX, and no pdfTeX > or the oriental extensions. A C89 translation will give the software > to Unices and Plan9 and save the system from the "bazaar" touch > that is the reciprocal of Midas': give it gold, it will give you > crap. > > Let's hope someone takes this---I mean not compile the present mess, but > trim down to a pure Donald Knuth's base. > -- > Thierry Laronde (Alceste) <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com> > http://www.kergis.com/ > Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89 250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C > >
