Journal: Dearest Netizens!

Fellow Surfers of the Information Super-Highway!

Let me welcome you to my first account on the popular on-line news journal named (quite humorously) Slashdot(dot)Org!

My intention here is to merely be a bit more public in my opinions on the state of modern computers and computations as opposed to the faculty website I have at Stanford. Hopefully, we can all learn a great deal from each others viewpoints.

I would also like to mention the newest release of TeX, the popular word processing format. Four things are different in the new TeX: Two of them are related to ``leaders,'' and two to ``alignments.'' None of the changes affect in any way TeX's logic for breaking paragraphs into lines, or breaking lines into pages; the only difference is that certain uses of leaders will result in more sensible numbers of boxes that turn out to be visible in the leader space. (More precisely, \xleaders used to drop the final box, incorrectly, in some cases where the boxes fit rather tightly in the available space; ordinary \leaders used to behave somewhat more capriciously in cases where the edges of the leaders came very close to the underlying ``grid'' of boxes. The first problem is cured by correcting a faulty algorithm for deciding when to stop placing boxes. The second problem is cured by using more care when rounding the quantities that determine the edges of glue and leaders.) The two changes with respect to alignments are merely designed to rule out certain weird hacks that a devilish user could formerly use to confuse TeX, but that nobody would conceivably need in any reasonable application.

Until next journal, I wish you well web surfers!

Sincerely,

Donald E. Knuth, Esq.