[Info-vax] LaTeX, VMS, CM fonts, DisplayPostScript fonts, GV, GS etc

[Phillip Helbig---undress to reply]

In article <j294hg$7ud$1 at reader1.panix.com>, JohnF
<john at please.see.sig.for.email.com> writes: 

> Off-topic, and simply curious, but I've read some of your other
> LaTeX/VMS posts, and wondered why you're investing so much effort
> trying to maintain it. 

I don't think it's that much effort; it's just that I haven't used it 
for a while.

> I have about 15 years past VMS development
> experience (resume's at www.forkosh.com), but my remaining contracts
> mostly involve maintaining systems after porting them away from VMS
> to Unix. There's still some sporadic legacy VMS maintenance work
> from clients who couldn't/wouldn't port, but as for truly new VMS
> development, that's (in alphabetical order) nada/nil/zero/zip,
> as far as I can tell. 

The LaTeX stuff is for home.  At work, I'm involved in new code on VMS, 
so perhaps I'm not as pessimistic.

> And while I still edit VMS code "in situ"
> with edt, latex documentation is prepared on a linux pc (or windows
> if forced). Even if a current and completely functional texlive
> distribution were available on VMS, I'd just never use it.
> I always liked the platform, but it just doesn't seem like
> the right place to continue working anymore.

In my case, my own stuff has grown since 1992.  Transitions through 
several physical disks, of course, and countries, and computers, but 
still my original environment on VMS.  Whatever effor I put into 
maintaining it is negligible compared to the effort which would 
require to port it elsewhere.  Now that reasonably fast VMS machines are 
available for free, I should be able to keep going for a while.