KerGIS.com: kerTeX : Take Care of TeX!

"Simplicity is the shortest path to truth." (C. de Gaulle). KerTeX aims to be the shortest path to the TeX and al. typesetting system : minimal dependencies (including minimal license strings attached); minimum storage requirement; minimum energy (in all acceptions of the word) to obtain the desired result.

And since the truth about something is universal, KerTeX aims to be installable on all operating systems, including in very constrained environments.

The current published version is stable: 0.99.22.00 (update of extensions handling). Please refer to engineering (present; future) for a discussion about the present state.

RELEASE NOTES

2024-07-07 : Modification of risk_comp to circumvent a bug in Debian dash(1) system shell. This is only to fix for a compilation error due to a bug in Debian's dash. There is no change for the resulting installed kertex_T. Thanks to B. Atticus Grobe for report, tracing the offending code and testing the solution!
2024-05-21: Fix of a blunder in the handling of third parties packages (recipes). The POSIX.2 library used for handling what is related to packages can be updated separately from the core system, without rebuilding everything. Unfortunately, a blunder made the "updated" version available for download having the same release number as the good, in the distribution, but with a blunder; and, when updating, this "same" library overwrote the good one installed making recipes failing. It has been corrected and a whole release has been done. Warning! One has to download new versions of get_mk_install.sh or get_mk_install.rc! The reason has nothing to do with the previous problem: I had "upgraded" CWEB with a new version not anymore under Silvio Levy responsability; unfortunately, this version depends on a LaTeX file and, even more problematic, debugging of included cweb files doesn't work anymore. So I have reverted to the last Knuth and Levy versions, and there is not anymore a cweb tarball to unpack. Thanks to Romano for making the report about the former problem on 9front!
2024-05-21: LaTeX recipe updated. The LaTeX recipe has been updated to match what is current (including sources organisation) on CTAN as of today—the kergis.com cache has been updated as well. Thanks to Jack Lawler for reporting the error!
2024-02-16: Important informations concerning the new recipes (for LaTeX users). This has to do with the gestion of languages (Babel). See Managing additions to the kernel.
2024-02-14: Fix to recipe pl@fonts.sh. The directory name in the zip file has changed and the recipe has been thus fixed. Thanks to Antonio Olivares for the error report!
2024-02-01: Fix to recipe urw@fonts.sh. The Classico part was updated, and the list was incorrect. Thanks to Antonio Olivares for the report!
2024-01-29: Update to the extensions framework. An important update to the extensions framework has been made as well as updating the recipes for the current state of CTAN. There is no need to reinstall the system, but simply to update the pkg framework. See Managing additions to the kernel.
2023-08-01: kerTeX / MetaPost: fix for a fault introduced when simplifying the search for an input'ed file. When simplifying the search of an input'ed file, that was "stuttering" in case of failure—the first search already searched for all alternative, so retrying was yielding exactly the same result—I had suppressed an alternative branch of the code, useless for the result, but inside which an automatic variable was defined ensuring that it was then defined also in case of failure. The result was that, in case of failure to find the file, the automatic variable had a random value, in all probability different from zero and was interpreted as "true" while it should have been false. Coredump was following. Corrected. Thanks to Dirk-Wilhelm Peters for reporting the problem!
2023-08-01: kerTeX / Prote: file primitives behavior. The new file primitives are expected to behave like the input primitive i.e. to add a ".tex" extension if there is none. Prote modified to do so. Needed for new LaTeX.
2023-07-25: >kerTeX: CWEB update and armv8l parm addition. The CWEB utilities have been updated to the 4.9 version now maintained by Andreas Scherer, and support has been added for armv8l (v8 ISA for 32 bits version in little endian). One has to use the new version of get_mk_install since there is the addition of a separate sources tarball: the one for CWEB separately maintained. Thanks to Antonio Olivares for bug reports on Android!
2023-05-09:Fix for latex.sh on Plan9. Sed(1) on Plan9/9front doesn't handle characters classes. Thanks to Jack Lawler for the report and fix!
2023-05-08: get_mk_install.sh. The script now verifies that the user given (if distinct from the default) does exist—the installation does NOT create the user and group—and that he belongs to the group given.
2023-03-17: LaTeX: recipe updated in order to allow to add various different languages hyphenation patterns and exceptions, by Babel names. By defining on the command line (or in the environment) the variable SUPPORTED_LANGUAGES with a blank separated list of Babel names, the hyphenation patterns and exceptions of these languages are compiled in the format. The switch, afterwards, has to be done with Babel normal macros. Exemple:
SUPPORTED_LANGUAGES="french ukenglish ngerman russian" $KERTEX_SHELL latex.sh install
will add hyphenation for french, english UK variant (an extension of D.E.K. `hyphen.tex', new german (post 1996) and russian, the related "user level" Babel related packages having to be added afterwards, via their dedicated kerTeX recipe.
2023-03-05: kerTeX_M: fix for compilation on RHEL. On RHEL, the order of the objects linked, at least when one is called "lib.o", does matter. Thanks to B. Atticus Grobe! for the report.
2023-01-19: kerTeX 0.99.19.01: Increase the memory (BIG) for current LaTeX on CTAN. The current LaTeX version on CTAN needs more memory in TeX (the memory is a compile time defined constant). Thanks to Antonio Olivares for the report!
2022-11-06: Fix for the compilation of kerTeX_T on Plan9. A macro definition related to the POSIX version is needed in order to compile some system dependent code (for the implementation of one of the supplementary routines required by LaTeX). Reported by Skip Tavakkolia. Also, fix of a blunder, spotted by Martin Ruckert, in input.ch (but that had no functionnal implication—no need to upgrade just for that). Thanks to both for reporting!
2022-10-13: Fix to the LaTeX recipe for Plan9. Some commands added to the recipe recently were not matching Plan9 usage (rmdir, mv directories...) and the call to mf was done without ensuring that the binary was in the PATH/path. Fixed. Thanks to Chris Gorman for the report!
2022-09-26: Update of the LaTeX recipe . The recipe has been updated to add various files needed to process at least the bbold@fonts.sh dtx when adding the support of these fonts for LaTeX (compatibility?). Thanks to Antonio Olivares for reporting and testing!
2022-09-12: Update of the LaTeX recipe (2022-06-01-PL5). The recipe has been updated in order to work with the current version on CTAN. Note: if the name of the files have been unchanged, a recipe will work even with a more recent version on CTAN. In case of a change, the recipe will fail and has to be then used with the KerGIS cache of the files matching the time when the recipe was written: $KERTEX_SHELL rcp.sh -p http install. Thank you to Antonio Olivares for reporting the incompatible change.
2022-09-08: kerTeX minor release. Support for FreeBSD fetch as HTTP client (it supports CTAN CDN mirror redirections)—one has to use the new version of get_mk_install.sh to select it at installation time). Also, improvement of mp2ps for isolated MetaPost figures.
2022-05-18: Two new LaTeX packages: exam and lcg. (Suggested for addition by Antonio Olivares...)
2022-04-28: LaTeX package. Another bug fixing: the search path for fonts (installed by this very recipe) was not specified; but the LaTeX ones are mandatory for the format; hence they were searched with the default paths (the kerTeX installation on the node) and found only when LaTeX has been previously installed, and not found in a fresh install. Fixed. Thanks to Antonio Olivares for the bug report!
2022-04-26: Connection problems for recipes (pkg). The recipe latex.sh uses a server address that is in fact a CDN, redirecting to HTTPS servers depending on load and location. Two problems : some http clients (depending on the host system) are not able to handle the redirections or (ftp(1) on FreeBSD) do not handle HTTPS; et, secondly, curl, that can handle both (but with some flags) is rejected by some servers when identified as Curl... If the default client does not manage to download, use for example lftp(1) by declaring it this way:
sys_httpc=lftp sh latex.sh install
or update the pkg management in kerTeX by:
sh $KERTEX_LIBDIR/pkg/rcp/tools@pkg.sh install that will allow (or should...) to use curl as client (sys_httpc=curl). Finally, you can also replace in the latex.sh recipe the server line: http://mirrors.ctan.org/ by http://downloads.kergis.com/kertex/pkg/src/ that has been fed with a copy of the data required by latex.sh, and that doesn't use a CDN nor require HTTPS (it serves HTTPS too, but it is not a requirement).
2022-04-21: latex.sh: bug fix; kerTeX 0.99.17.1: increase of BIG capacity for LaTeX. A blunder in the latex.sh was not installing all the fonts related files relative to psnfss. Fixed. Thanks also to Jack Lawler! for signaling a portability blunder in the recipe (unzip used instead of $PKG_UNZIP). Pour kerTeX: capacities had to be increased for LaTeX documents defining a lot of control sequences. Also correction of an error emitted when meeting an end of file without the line being ended by a end of line. Ease of use: some documents referred to epsf.tex as epsf.sty: links added. Thanks to Antonio Olivares for the reports!
2022-04-18: latex.sh: bug fixes . Graphics was included but not mentionned in KXPATH; psnfss was incompletely included, all the pfb definition fonts missing and the dvips maps as well. Corrected. Thanks to Antonio Olivares for the report!
2022-04-17: kerTeX 0.99.16.0: Prote default engine and LaTeX3 compatibility. Release of the stable version with Prote as default TeX engine (TeX, e-TeX compatibility; additional primitives required by LaTeX3, and input handling compatible with Web2C (TeXLive) version). Also: the curdir specification "./some/file/path" leads to the pathname being taken as is, without searching (the curdir is the process one; not the dirname of the first input script file). The latex.sh recipe has been updated to allow to compile and install the latest version on CTAN (LaTeX related recipes—the present ones should be compatible—will be updated progressively when time permits).
2022-03-25 :Prote (devel): implementation of supplementary methods for the input primitive. Prote—default engine now for TeX, eTeX and LaTeX—now accepts a double quoted argument (allowing spaces in the name) and a grouped argument subjected to various expansions as a file name definition for the input primitive. Explanations can be found in the input.pdf document on the dedicated Prote page. Thanks to Phelype Oleinik for the test file about the expected behavior of the implementation! (Note: the recipe for LaTeX is unchanged, waiting the verification that the double quotes dance does not hide any devil in a little corner.)
2022-03-07: Prote: dev version 0.99.15.9: allowing spaces in filenames at the general shared library level. The majority of the engines used nowdays with LaTeX allow to specify as input, filenames with spaces (while, in the original code, spaces where delimiters and were thus forbidden in filenames). In order to achieve this, the shared library used for file searching and opening by all the utilities (whether written in WEB/Pascal or in C) had to be adapted and all the WEB/CWEB change files and/or the C code modified for the new API. The modification of the TeX input primitive will come next. This is an alpha release.
2021-10-14: Prote has been successfully tested on NetBSD, FreeBSD, DragonFly and Android, on amd64, aarch64 and earmv7 machines. As usual, thanks go to Antonio Olivares for being instrumental in testing on a lot of different systems!
2021-10-11: Prote has been integrateg in the development version of kerTeX. This version is available for development by selecting dev when get_mk_install.sh (or get_mk_install.rc) asks for the version. Please see the Prote page on this site for more informations!
2021-09-21: Prote: new engine, TeX and e-TeX compatible, with extensions. In the same spirit as e-TeX, Prote is developed on TeX and e-TeX, being compatible with these and adding extensions. The first extensions are the latest LaTeX required primitives (missing in TeX and e-TeX). The engine will be incorporated soon in the kerTeX distribution.
2021-09-02: Security fix for TeX, METAFONT, MetaPost and e-TeX. A bug, in the handling of the filenames in extrem cases has been found, and the present correction at least ensures that when writing the log or dvi files, the extensions ".log" and ".dvi" are always present. If you have installed the LaTeX recipe, after upgrading, please re-install LaTeX so that the underlying engine is the updated one (e-TeX).
2021-06-27 : Fix for kerTeX_T:mp2ps. echo treats or not escaped characters (this is implementation defined in POSIX.2). With the Pi shell, escaped characters are interpreted leading to an incorrect generation of the TeX template. This is corrected—this is the only modification and if mp2ps is working on your system, there is no need to update. Thanks to Antonio Olivares for reporting!
2021-04-22: D.E. Knuth's 2021 tune-up incorporated. D.E. Knuth has revised the TeX, METAFONT and al. system in early 2021. KerTeX has been updated to latest versions, e-TeX and MetaPost being adapted to match also.
2021-04-07: Fixes for some babel recipes (pkg). The Babel's recipes belarusian, friulan, georgian, hungarian, italian, occitan, piedmontese, romansh and slovenian have been fixed for a harmless bug: there is no .ins generated so the processing of these shall not be called. Thanks to Antonio Olivares for the report!
2021-03-08: fixes for Plan9. Plan9 doesn't provide rmdir and mv renames/moves files but not directories. Fix in RISK, RISK version adjustement in kertex_M, fix for mp2ps in kertex_T, and fixes for the recipes (pkg) latex.sh and amstex.sh. Thanks to Gilman Ironworks for reporting!
2021-02-11: fix of RISK for Raspberry Pi OS. The dynamically shared libc needs a second static library chunk whose informations are given in a pseudo libc in /usr/lib/... that is actually a ld script. Searching first /lib/... finds the true libc file but then, when linking, some symbols are not resolved. Solution: modify the order of the search for raspbian. (Thanks to Antonio Olivares for the report of the failure with the new version of Raspberry Pi!)
2020-11-22: fix to latex.sh recipe. The new recipe now integrates required packages (ams, babel core, cyrillic, graphics, tools—and ec fonts) that were separate packages before. Hence, after installing the new version, the latex recipe automatically removes the obsolete packages it replaces. But the new files were installed in the very same directory as the resp. old package. Hence, it the old package was installed, removing it removed the new files that have overwritten the old... Fixed. Thanks to Antonio Olivares!
2020-11-22: RISK and kerTeX_T fixes. RISK fix for untested "cd try_dir" that might fail (Linux); RISK fix and kerTeX_T fix for static compilation under Linux based distributions (tested on Android). Thanks once more to Antonio Olivares for the reports!
2020-11-18: RISK fix for FreeBSD and russian and ukrainian recipes fixes. RISK: Search for clang and do not take c99 that accepts only POSIX options. Russian and ukrainian: batchfile definition for docstrip has to be kept as is. Thanks to Antonio Olivares for the reports!
2020-11-17: RISK fixes for OpenBSD and arm64. Fixes have been applied for compilation on OpenBSD; paramaters file has been added for arm64 (aarch64). Thanks to Asad Lodhia for reports and tests!
For LaTeX (babel) language recipes. The autogeneration generation of files is done via docstrip, that is provided by LaTeX and hence has to be done by latex and not tex—docstrip is accessible by tex if and only if babel@tex has been added. Thanks to Antonio Olivares for reporting the error!
carlisle@latex recipe added for miscellaneous style or macros files written by David Carlisle (scalefnt.sty for example).

Git sources are available here:

Donald E. Knuth has developed, described and published a set of typographical utilities and data, i.e. a program to describe and render (rasterize) glyphs to build fonts ; fonts (the Computer Modern or CM) ; a page formating program: TeX and other related utilities, to which has been added by Tomas Rokicki a program to convert the DeVice Independent format (DVI), output by TeX, in PostScript : dvips; a scripting drawing engine derived from METAFONT out-putting PostScript commands: MetaPost from John Hobby; an extension of TeX with primitives for right–left writing: ε-TeX by the NTS team.

This whole, with some pieces added (AMS fonts and T1 version of the CM; Adobe afm of the standard PostScript fonts; Oren Patashnik's BibTeX; CWEB by Silvio Levy and D. E. Knuth; hyperbasics.tex, by Tanmoy Bhattacharya, allowing to generate hyperlinks in PDF generated from the PS producted by dvips) forms a complete typographical system, since it goes from the drawing of the glyphs (and, indeed, from general drawing), to compositing text and rendering (for the moment uniquely converted to the PostScript, with the benefit of all the power of PostScript but with the drawback that a PostScript-compliant printer has to be available, or a PostScript interpreter—generally an instance of gs (GhostScript))

D. E. Knuth has totally described the main pieces of the system, using this very system to produce the documentation! and has described it in a pseudo-Pascal—pseudo-Pascal because the language is so general that it is more an Algol, that is a mean to describe the processing done by the programs (TeX, METAFONT), than a particular implementation of Pascal, the very limited subset of Pascal allowing to translate automatically for the main part (there are ad hoc hints: it is not a general Pascal-to-C translation) this description in any suitable language, which is actually what happens now, all distributions compiling after translating this pseudo-Pascal in C.

KerTeX aims to follow these very principles:

In order for the system to be as universal as possible, it depends on the strict minimum that is also the more generally available and the more easily obtained: a standard C library (libc); and it depends on nothing else;
Because the whole forms a system: pieces that are meant to work together as a whole as a typographical system, kerTeX works as a kind of hosted system running on a host OS: what is added (macros for example) are the sole concern of kerTeX and the hosting OS has not the obligation to know anything about them (no need to pkg by OS: there is only one package: the kerTeX one, for every kerTeX installation); kerTeX has its own packaging system;
Because the user should be able to use in the very same way the system not withstanding on which OS it is installed, the user interface is unified, base on a very small subset of POSIX.2 utilities (the aim of POSIX being precisely to describe some commonality between systems);
By consistency, kerTeX separates what depends on the machine from what is independent from the machine, in order to be able to share what is machine independent (by whatever distributed file system) while using the binaries matching the system (a problem Plan9 has solved in a most elegant way). This separation is also realized by the compilation/installation framework: RISK (initially developed for KerGIS), that allows cross-compilation, making a distinction between the matrix (the system/machine we build on) from the target (the system/machine we build for);
For safety reasons, kerTeX runs in its own "realm" (the directories it has been installed in), severed from the rest of the system, allowing to install kerTeX alongside another TeX distribution without stepping on other's toes—even the manual pages are kept in its realm.

KerTeX is hence a kernel (Quixante) and a companionship system, allowing to provide the base with core supplementary data or external supplementary data (Pancho).

The different pages on this site explore in more detail one aspect or another of the system. Here are some use examples:

click to enlarge

METAFONT is a software for the design of characters of a font; it is both a language and an interpreter. But, indeed, more generally (since a character can be a lot of different things), this is a drawing software that is also a rasterizer: it converts vectorial description of drawings into rasterized data. The picture on the side is output by METAFONT (chapter 23 of METAFONTbook). This facility is called in kerTeX Online Graphic Output (at the moment available with X11 only ; rio and GDI to come). It allows hence to draw and visualize the tries when designing. The fact that METAFONT is also a rasterize is of fundamental importance if one dares to think about it a little...

click to enlarge

TeX and ε-TeX describent the result of their processing in DVI: DeVice-Independent (part 31 of TeX: The Program). This description has afterwards to be converted in a language accepted by the rendering device (a printer or a display system). Dvips is the program written by Tomas Rokicki to convert DVI into PostScript. Because it is possible to insert supplementary and arbitrary informations in DVI (informations that are in some sens "comments" for DVI), it is possible to achieve almost every effect and also to include PostScript data in the resulting file—and this is more general than PDF, since what can be done in PDF can be done, a fortiori, in PS; but the reverse is not true.