1 Jun 1993 04:06
Portable par
Out of the past 4000 retrievals of Latex files from Boole.Stanford.EDU (abstracts in /pub/ABSTRACTS), I have had hardly any complaints about incompatibilities with anyone's Latex environment. (All /pub files on Boole are archived in both .tex and .dvi form; current retrieval preference is running 7:1 for Latex over DVI.) Naturally this requires sticking to stock standard Latex, which rules out custom fonts like stmary, and custom .sty files are explicitly inserted in each file to be exported. My preferred source of inverted ampersands has therefore been the 75-line sprite definition (anonymous? from McGill?) rather than one of the metafont versions. However it has turned out that quite a few sites do not have sprite.sty, generating several complaints, the only ones I've gotten in recent memory. I've been dealing with this by including sprite.sty itself in the .tex file, the total then coming to 140 lines. Needing an excuse this weekend not to work on whatever it was I was supposed to be working on, I had a hack attack which yielded the following 6-line Tex macro package implementing a \draw command intended mainly for drawing character-sized objects. This allows inverted ampersand (and any other character that might take your fancy) to be implemented in two lines, with a drawing (hence initialization) time of around 0.3 seconds on a 10-Mips machine (the sprite version takes 8 seconds to initialize), plus an additional line defining a boxed version rendering in < .02 second (the sprite boxed version is ~0.1 second). Furthermore the boxed version uses some tricky coding to get the bare minimum of typesetting commands per character, permitting up to 300 of the fast boxed characters per page, compared with(Continue reading)
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