Rich Shepard wrote: > What are the differences among all these different TeX/LaTeX > distributions? Not in fine detail, but in general. What's wrong with the > teTeX that comes with every linux distribution?
Nothing, if you don't miss anything specifically. > I ask as a user of the tools, particularly LyX which I found to have > flattened the learning curve for me so I could be productive right away. As > a user, why should I care what form the back end takes? teTeX is just fine, but it is restricted wrt the packages. TeXLive is (AFAIK) based on teTeX, too, but it includes the _whole_ ctan. It is very easy to install, and you can select between different installation modes. The most recent (stable) teTeX is a bit outdated, especially wrt the basic tools. E.g., TeXLive 2004 (and teTeX 3) will include the most recent pdftex and will base almost everything on pdf(e)tex (instead of latex->tex). For me, this was the killer argument. Basically, you can now do almost all of the pdftex-specific things also with latex (i.e. pdftex with dvi output). The newest pdftex is very straightforward when it comes to microtypography. It supports not only "margin kerning" (this has been supported before in pdftex), but also so called "automatic font expansion". Hàn Thê Thành, the maintainer of pdftex, writes in his thesis: "Margin kerning is the adjustments of the characters at the margins of a typeset text. A simplified employment of margin kerning is hanging punctuation. Margin kerning is needed for optical alignment of the margins of a typeset text, because mechanical justification of the margins makes them look rather ragged. Some characters can make a line appear shorter to the human eye than others. Shifting such characters by an appropriate amount into the margins would greatly improve the appearance of a typeset text. Composing with font expansion is the method to use a wider or narrower variant of a font to make interword spacing more even. A font in a loose line can be substituted by a wider variant so the interword spaces are stretched by a smaller amount. Similarly, a font in a tight line can be replaced by a narrower variant to reduce the amount that the interword spaces are shrunk by. There is certainly a potential danger of font distortion when using such manipulations, thus they must be used with extreme care. The potentiality to adjust a line width by font expansion can be taken into consideration while a paragraph is being broken into lines, in order to choose better breakpoints." These features increase the quality of the output even if the quality is very good without these. If you do not need such nitpicks, you should not bother updating (which are all still more or less "experimental"). Regards, Jürgen P.S.: Herbert, please jump in if I got something wrong.
