As indicated elsewhere in the documentation of the AmiWeb2c distribution,
I finally abandon the Amiga after the release of AmiWeb2c 2.1 is made.  It
is my fondest hope to have served the Amiga community well by creating the
Amiga port "TeX and friends".

It would be a pleasure for me to give as much help, advice, and
encouragement to any volunteers who want to take over the task of
development and/or maintenance of the AmiWeb2c system.  What follows is
a list of possibly nice ideas for AmiWeb2c that I have not the time to
do myself.  

USER BEWARE! USER BEWARE! USER BEWARE! USER BEWARE! USER BEWARE!

   * FIX KNOWN BUGS: At least one grave, fatal, and severe bug is still
   lurking in the dvips binary coming with AmiWeb2c 2.1.  Here is a short
   description of the problem:

   If you invoke dvips with the "-Mmktexpk" option on a document that
   requires PK fonts which are not available on your installation, the
   program either hangs just before finishing its job, or it kills the
   machine with a #8000 0003 or #8000 0005 GURU.  The same occurs when
   automatic font creation is enabled and the CallMF scripts fail (e.g.,
   when you aborted the MetaFont run!).  Somehow, dvips fails while
   writing the "missfont.log" file.

   Enforcer reports "illegal writes" to addresses "0xA" and "0x12" (and
   possibly many others as bad).

   Unfortunately, I have not been able to (1) debug dvips properly,
   (2) reproduce this problem in the Linux setup.  My best guess is
   that the problem is in the Amiga port of dvips only.  It could well
   have to do with the incomplete interface between the programs using
   kpathsea and the CallMF scripts.

   There were NO problems when dvips ran "mktexpk" and the script
   finished correctly.  So it should be best to have the sources for
   missing fonts installed and let CallMF always finish its job.  Never,
   ever, abort the "background" run of MetaFont!

   * pdfTeX 0.12f as shipped with AmiWeb2c has a bug when reading
   psfonts.map, i.e., it falls into a loop.  My best guess it that
   web2c-7.2/web2c/pdftexdir/mapfile.c is a fault, but since pdfTeX
   is marked as "beta" anyway, I shall not dig into this problem.

USER BEWARE! USER BEWARE! USER BEWARE! USER BEWARE! USER BEWARE!

   * Keep up with the latest developments in the TeXnical field:

     - TeX, Metafont: Prof. Knuth has announced new versions of the
       original WEB sources for the core system to be released in
       spring 1998.  Most likely this will be the base of Web2c 7.3.

     - Web2c 7.X: The current maintainer of the Unix Web2c system,
       Olaf Weber <infovore@xs4all.nl> surely will keep working on
       new releases of Web2c with major and/or minor revisions and
       it would be great to see the Amiga follow suit.  [Mediate.
       However, no-one on the tex-pretest or tex-implementors lists
       is capable of checking things in an Amiga environment, so
       from time to time new stuff clashes with the requirements
       of AmiWeb2c.]

     - PDFTeX: Han The Thanh <thanh@informatics.muni.cz> most certainly
       will come up with repeated updates of his marvellous extension to
       TeX proper.  Given the ease of integration in the Unix version
       I think this goes with Web2c 7.X.  [Trivial.]

     - Omega: Yannis Haralambous <yannis@pobox.com> and John Plaice
       also will keep developing this 16-bit Unicode version of TeX.
       As of Web2c 7.2 this is part of the standard installation.
       [Trivial.]

     - e-TeX: Peter Breitenlohner <peb@mpg.de> is working on even
       more extensions in e-TeX and his work is well integrated in
       Web2c 7.2, so the Amiga also has this.  [Easy.]
       However, there is a slight chance of the "New Typesetting
       System" (NTS) seeing the light of reality and here most
       certainly a lot of work would have to done for the Amiga.

   * Make CallMF (or successor) use the VARTEXFONTS feature. [Easy.]
     Better yet, rewrite the mktex* scripts of Web2c/teTeX in ARexx.
     This would replace the clumsy CallMF (see the BUG description
     above). [Moderate to tricky.]

   * Make PasTeX's ShowDVI and DVIprint use Kpathsea. [Hard?]

   * Port (o)XDVI(k) to the Amiga to complete the Web2c system.
     Same for GhostView/GSView/GV as a decent frontend to
     GhostScript. [Definitely hard.]

   * Implement something like texconfig. [Easy.]

   * Implement something like install-cd.sh and install-pkg.sh
     (plus an uninstall-pkg.sh equivalent). This would most likely
     be written as an (Un)Installer script. [Moderate.]

   * Make the AmigaGuide documentation cross-linked between the
     respective parts. This requires a new version of AmigaMakeInfo.
     [Hard.]

   * [Your suggestion here.]

VOLUNTEERS, STEP FORWARD!


Andreas Scherer
Rochusstrae 22-24
52062 Aachen, Germany
<andreas.scherer@pobox.com>
