New Typesetting System

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New Typesetting System

The New Typesetting System (NTS) is a reimplementation of TeX

TeX

Java

Java is an island of Indonesia and the site of its Capital city, Jakarta. Once the centre of powerful Hindu kingdoms, The spread of Islam in Indonesia , and the core of the colonial Dutch East Indies, Java now plays a dominant role in the economic and political life of Indonesia....
. The specific aims of the project were to continue the tradition of Donald Knuth

Donald Knuth

Donald Ervin Knuth is a renowned computer science and Emeritus of the Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University.Author of the seminal multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming , Knuth has been called the "father" of the run-time analysis, contributing to the development of, and systematizing formal mathematical techn...
's TeX

TeX

TeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth. Together with the METAFONT language for font description and the Computer Modern typefaces, it was designed with two main goals in mind: to allow anybody to produce high-quality books using a reasonable amount of effort, and to provide a system that would give the exact...
by providing a first-class typesetting software which is both portable and available free of charge. But whereas TeX is now frozen, NTS was intended to remain flexible and extensible.

NTS is written in Java. It is alpha software (released in 2000) and it is capable of generating DVI.

NTS project was inaugurated under the auspices of Dante e.V. (Deutschsprachige Anwendervereinigung TeX
Deutschsprachige Anwendervereinigung TeX

Deutschsprachige Anwendervereinigung TeX e. V. is the German language TeX users group. With more than 2000 members it is one of the largest TeX users groups worldwide....
) in 1992.

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Encyclopedia

The New Typesetting System (NTS) is a reimplementation of TeX

TeX

Java

Donald Knuth

TeX

History

The NTS project was inaugurated under the auspices of Dante e.V. (Deutschsprachige Anwendervereinigung TeX
Deutschsprachige Anwendervereinigung TeX

Deutschsprachige Anwendervereinigung TeX e. V. is the German language TeX users group. With more than 2000 members it is one of the largest TeX users groups worldwide....
) in 1992. Coding began in 1998, following donations totalling 30 000 DM, and was funded through to completion. Joachim Lammarsch, Rainer Schöpf, Joachim Schrod, Bernd Raichle, Karel Skoupý, Jirí Zlatuška, Philip Taylor, Peter Breitenlohner, Friedhelm Sowa and Hans Hagen

Hans Hagen

Hans Hagen is the developer of ConTeXt, a freely available macro package for the TeX typesetting system, and the owner of PRAGMA Advanced Document Engineering , a Netherlands-based company....
, amongst others, have all been involved in this project, though not all were involved at the outset, and not all remained involved through to its completion.

The objective of the project was to re-implement TeX in a 100%-compatible way. The final product of the project is "trip-test" compatible, and demonstrates that a re-implementation is feasible. However, for several reasons it was decided not to pursue the project any further. First of all, NTS is too slow to be used for production purposes, which does not motivate users to switch to this engine. Furthermore, the by-then standard extensions such as e-TeX were not included in the code. Also, in order to be useful today, PDF

Portable Document Format

Portable Document Format is a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for document exchange. PDF is used for representing two-dimensional documents in a manner independent of the application software, hardware, and operating system....
output as well as pdfTeX

PdfTeX

The computer program pdfTeX is an extension of Donald Knuth's typesetting program TeX, and was originally written and developed into a publicly usable product by H?n Th? Th?nh as a part of the work for his PhD thesis at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno....
-specific extensions need to be implemented. Finally, by being 100%-compatible with TeX, the sub-processes of NTS are rather interwoven (due to the nature of traditional TeX), which thereby makes the task of adding extensions less simple than had been envisaged.

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