TeX is still actively developed

TeX is still actively developed

Posted May 3, 2007 8:59 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646)
In reply to: Emacs 22 on April 23 by bfields
Parent article: Emacs 22 on April 23

TeX *is* still in development. Owing to DEK's license, it is called pdfeTeX now, with regular new releases (including new features). There is also a separate development tier, Omega and Aleph, for better typesetting of international material; and also XeTeX that includes completely different font handling. And since Emacs 22 does not have much code in common with the original Emacs, we can also add research projects like exTeX to the mix.

In addition, there is work ongoing to merge many of these development tiers.

And almost all this work builds upon DEK's code base, so it is a continuation of the original program.

For reference: I'm one of the TeX guys; a CTAN maintainer, and a member of the LaTeX core team. I don't do core development, though; but I meet the guys regularly who do so.

Joachim

PS: What I don't know: How old is the FSF Emacs codebase, actually? TeX has seen two major implementations: The first in 1978 (in SAIL Pascal), and a complete rewrite in 1982 (in Web). Since then, the same codebase is used. How does this compare to Emacs?

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