$Id: README,v 1.2 2020/01/02 23:36:14 karl Exp $
This is the README file for the CTAN (free documentation) edition of the
book TeX for the Impatient, released under the GNU Free Documentation
License.  (This README file itself is public domain.)

Information about the free edition is included at the end of the preface
and on the copyright page.

Home page: https://ctan.org/pkg/impatient/
Chinese and French translations (independently maintained), as well as
all sources and PDFs, are available from there.

The book is looking for a maintainer; see README and errata.future for
ideas. I (Karl) don't plan to make any more releases, unless significant
bugs are found. But you can email me at karl@freefriends.org if need be.

For convenience, the diffs between all the free releases
are in the diffs/ subdirectory. To download the full releases, see
the urls in NEWS.


There is also a GNU package for the book, which is maintained
separately. Its home page: https://gnu.org/software/teximpatient/
The GNU version does not, at this writing, include the fixes made in
2020 (see NEWS and ChangeLog).

Original high-resolution scans of the artwork are available from
http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/teximpatient/artwork.  Reduced-size bitmaps are
in the artwork/ subdirectory on CTAN.


Some random thoughts for people thinking of working with the source:

- See errata.future for some relatively small ideas for enhancements.

- You may want to translate the source into some more standard
format, such as Texinfo; we used many homegrown macros, mostly just
to make typing and markup easier.

- You may also want to redo the index creation to use makeindex or some
other standard program, instead of the homegrown Icon programs (or else
they need to be fixed; right now somehow the + characters used for
spaces in book.idx are preserved in book.sdx, which is wrong).  Until
the index can be easily regenerated, the page breaks can't change
without the index becoming useless.

- Printing the GFDL required many kludges, a true Eplain-compatible
version is needed (which in turn would require using the current eplain
to print the book).

Happy TeXing.
