Subject: Bug#4346: Essential LaTeX style files missing

From: David Frey <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Sep 1996 23:30:50 +0200

>  Thomas> In 1.1.7, Debian's TeX is unusable for somebody who wants to do
>  Thomas> serious work with it, at least for me (I work in German).  Hardly
>  Thomas> any of the often - used packages is there (this starts with a4.sty,
>  Thomas> which is required by the documentation of german.sty, missing).

With \LaTeX2e you shouldn't need A4.sty. Just say a4paper in the 
\documentclass
options.

>  - if you were to start from Karl Berry's sources, you wouldn't get it
>    either, what Debian delivers is a standard "base" TeX.

Just a silly question: Which flavour of \TeX is Debian shipping?
How far is it away from e.g. teTeX?

>And Debian is after all an open system. Everybody could package, say,
>latex-goodies. I just put these things into /usr/local/lib/texmf/tex/latex
//

Sidenote: I've packaged some things from teTeX for myself, for example the
rsfs fonts, which are badly needed.
But: Is somebody knowledgeable on the copyright terms on the rsfs's fonts?

>As for a4, I much prefer vmargin (which the LaTeX Companion has as vpage,
>described on page 89).

And I pagesize...

David

---

From: Thomas Koenig <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Sep 1996 18:55:18 +0200 (MET DST)

>How far is it away from e.g. teTeX?

IMHO, teTeX is a very good package.  I think it should be used as the
base for Debian TeX, if that's possible at all.
-- 
Thomas Koenig, [email-masked], [email-masked].
The joy of engineering is to find a straight line on a double
logarithmic diagram.