NEWS

                  WikiTeX 1.1 BETA 3 NEWS

          Peter Danenberg <pcd at wikitex dot org>


Sun Feb 19 17:34:41 PST 2006

          Added  five  layout properties for <graph>, corre-
     sponding  to  the  suite  of  Graphviz  utilities:  dot
     (default), neato, fdp, twopi and circo.

          <feyn>  has  been  updated  to accomodate Thorsten
     Ohl's powerf feynMF package.

Sun Feb 12 16:21:57 PST 2006    Peter Danenberg

          WikiTeX's security model  has  been  reimplemented
     from  the  ground  up:   We've doffed our dependence on
     blacklists,  and  instead  rely  on  a  combination  of
     ulimit, quotas, sudo; and the native facilites of LaTeX
     and LilyPond for forbidding script execution and direc-
     tory ascent.

          In addition, the `src' and `data' parameters allow
     you to reference uploads directly in your script; exam-
     ples:

          <svg src="tiger.svg"></svg>

     to hide ugly code; or to plot data:

          <plot data="plot.dat">plot "plot.dat" using 1:3</plot>

     Files thus sourced forgo processing by the template.

Thu Mar 10 01:26:39 PST 2005  Peter Danenberg

          Skak  by  Torben  Hoffmann has replaced Piet Tute-
     laers' package as the <chess> renderer; Skak  is  back-
     wards compatible and allows, amongst other things:

          o    SAN and PGN notation

          o    large boards (with \largeboard)

          o    move arrows (with \printarrow)

     see the docs for details.






                      19 February 2006





                             -2-


Tue Mar  8 16:53:39 PST 2005  Peter Danenberg

          <schem>  added;  id  est,  schematic  capture with
     gschem (geda.seul.org).  PPCH has been deprecated; XyM-
     TeX,  meanwhile, has taken its place as the <chem> ren-
     derer.

          Effort is underway to replace  our  ad-hoc  black-
     lists  with  chroot-based security; adieu, "directa non
     grata!"

          Lastly, verbose errors now declare  not  only  the
     whence, but the why of defects.

Sun Feb  6 14:21:48 PST 2005  Peter Danenberg

          We've disassociated our versioning from MediaWiki,
     and started with a pristine 1.0;  so  that,  should  we
     bundle  in  the  future, our release cycles can be dis-
     tinct.

Sat Jan 29 00:34:09 PST 2005  Peter Danenberg

          Changes almost too numerous to enumerate; but some
     of the more exciting:

     o    Gnuplot  and Graphviz: <plot> and <graph>, respec-
          tively

     o    Multi-page output for music, go and chess

     o    More detailed, helpful error messages

          The installation process, to boot, is less  error-
     prone;  no  Python:  but  the  bash  interface has been
     refactored.

Tue Jan 25 11:23:48 PST 2005  Peter Danenberg

          This candidate both maintains by  tightening  down
     our blacklist (thanks, Johannes Berg); and innovates by
     introducing Jan-Aoke Larsson's dvipng.  dvipng replaces
     dvi2bitmap; resulting in cleaner, faster renders.

          <math></math>  becomes  <amsmath></amsmath> in the
     stand-alone version, to avoid conflicting  with  texvc;
     in pre-packaged WikiTeX, it replaces texvc.

          I'd  also  like  to  un-cobweb that bash interface
     with Python before we go live.







                      19 February 2006





                             -3-


Mon Oct  4 01:56:23 PDT 2004  Peter Danenberg

          In order to plumb their  several  virtues'  depth,
     the  Batik  toolkit  ("heavy  SVG"),  will be available
     alongside ImageMagick; its more efficient kin.

          Batik  may  be  invoked  by  <batik></batik>;  and
     <svg></svg>, ImageMagick.

Sun Oct  3 17:38:03 PDT 2004  Peter Danenberg

          SVG  is finally here; and we opted for Batik's SVG
     kit (xml.apache.org/batik) which, though very full-fea-
     tured,  suffers  from a Java-like retardation.  It were
     mere oeconomy that ever  importuned  us  to  return  to
     ImageMagick's SVG subset.

Mon Sep  6 03:20:26 PDT 2004  Peter Danenberg

          With  the  introduction  of XML-like tags, we have
     cleared a major hurdle towards integration with  Media-
     Wiki; next on the list, parameters of the form:

          <music tempo="80"></music>

     WikiTeX'  vulnerability  to  attack  must also be thor-
     oughly sounded.

Sun May 30 00:00:00 PDT 2004  Peter Danenberg

          We're  refactoring WikiTeX from the ground  up  to
     implement tags of the form:

          <class [parm: value]>content</class>

     and  likely  of  an  external  parser; where a lex/yacc
     solution might  be attractive.  (Finite state  recogni-
     tion  is  probably  what  we're looking  for,  however,
     rather  than  look-ahead  left-to-right  parsing;  i.e.
     top-down recursive descent.)

          If  WikiTeX'  sum scope, on the other hand, resem-
     bles  a  glue-script with regular-expression grinding,*
     we might not need  to  look  past  Perl;  PHP,  in  any
     case,  just passes as lexer/parser: but we'd like some-
     thing more robust and, above all, to separate  applica-
     tion from interface.




-----------
  * Raymond,  Eric  Steven.   The Art of Unix Pro-
gramming (faqs.org/docs/artu).



                      19 February 2006





                             -4-


WikiTeX: expansible LaTeX module for MediaWiki
Copyright (C) 2004-6  Peter Danenberg

     WikiTeX  is licensed under the Artistic License 2.0; to
view a copy of this license, see COPYING or visit:

     http://dev.perl.org/perl6/rfc/346.html


















































                      19 February 2006