MiKTeX Blog

The current MiKTeX setup uses ushyph.tex as the default hyphenation table. This is not strictly a bug. But it can lead to different line breaks (in comparison to other TeX systems). Therefore I will change language.dat as follows:

< english ushyph.tex
---
> english hyphen.tex

hyphen.tex is the classic hyphenation table written by Knuth.

The revised language.dat will be made available with the next MiKTeX update.

Today the MetaPost team has announced MetaPost 0.9. I am currently downloading the tar file. Tomorrow I will take a look at the source code. If possible, I will make available binaries for MiKTeX 2.4. We shall see...

The packages captcont, subfigure and subfig all contain the file ltxdoc.cfg in the input directory (e.g., C:\texmf\tex\latex\captcont). That will be corrected with the next update, i.e., ltxdoc.cfg will be moved into the source directory.

Besides the old lm fonts version, there is another bug: updmap.cfg doesn't contain an entry for the new font mapping file lm.map.

Today's update delivers version 0.98.2 of the lm fonts. That's a mistake. My intent was to distribute 0.98.3 (the current CTAN version). I will correct this tomorrow.

MiKTeX 2.5 developmet has started in December. According to the roadmap, the first step is to redesign the internal interfaces (aka refactoring). The outcome will be a portable set of components. Portable in the sense that it will be easy to build the components for other systems.

I am currently working on the core component (MiKTeX-core*.dll). The core component handles

• file searching
• running secondary processes
• reading configuration files

System-dependent features in this area are:

• reading directories
• reading/writing memory-mapped files
• threads

There are well known design patterns which help to separate system-dependent code. Implementing these design patterns is an interesting job which will keep me busy the next few months.

Every once in a while I receive the following request: "Please, make mgs.exe runnable at the DOS-prompt". You should know that mgs.exe is a special version of Ghostscript, meant to be called internally by MiKTeX applications (such as Yap). If you start mgs.exe at the DOS-prompt, the following will happen:

> mgs
MiKTeX GPL Ghostscript 8.15: Can't find initialization file gs_init.ps.

That's because mgs.exe doesn't use the original registry keys and environment variables. For example, mgs.exe queries MIKTEX_GS_LIB instead of GS_LIB. You can start mgs.exe at the DOS-prompt if you set MIKTEX_GS_LIB as follows:

MIKTEX_GS_LIB=C:\texmf\ghostscript\base;C:\texmf\fonts

There are quite a few packages ready for deployment. And some more packages need to be prepared. I am planning to upload the batch on Monday.

I'm blogging now!