Mike Barr reported that Adobe Acrobat 8 tacitly suppresses all ligature glyphs of the fi, fl, ff, ffi, and ffl sort and displays blanks in their place and then that I have to admit that I never tested it, just copied the complaint from texhax but nevertheless this presumably gives us some idea why, at TAC, we still consider the dvi to be the official format. However, as I shall demonstrate, the rest of the world nowadays regards PDF as the standard format in which to publish technical documents. DVI (the normal output from LaTeX) was based on the 1950s Monotype typesetting system, and puts characters from various fonts at given positions on the page, but cannot rotate them, and has no graphics capability. The fonts also have to be supplied separately. On the other hand, it has the virtues of being a compact and simple format that future digital archeologists would have no difficulty in deciphering. Adobe's PDF and PostScript have general graphics capability. By insisting on DVI, "Theory and Applications of Categories" severely limits the ways in which authors can express their mathematical ideas. But its restrictions go further than this: the use of ANY macro package other than those by Mike Barr and Kris Rose is forbidden! Does anyone know of another journal that publishes primarily in DVI? One candidate might be the journal of the TeX Users' Group, tug.org/TUGboat but even that uses PDF. When I enquired about this, Karl Berry (who also wrote the Web2C Unix implementation of TeX) replied that DVI files are not self-contained, so they simply don't work for online archives. Turning to other respositories, arXiv.org generates papers in various formats on-the-fly. On its page for each paper, eg arxiv.org/abs/math/0512110 it offers PostScript and PDF, with other options (including DVI) only being available via another link. On my own web site, www.PaulTaylor.EU I also offer my papers in various formats, albeit statically, with DVI listed first. However, the downloads in September and October were DVI: 210 PDF: 1704 PS.GZ: 75 BKLT.GZ: 52 This includes 504 PDF and 69 other downloads of "Proofs and Types", but excludes the lecture slides and scanned manuscripts that I only offer in PDF. So, 85% of my readers choose PDF, even though I also offer DVI. Looking at my colleagues' web pages, my impression is that most of them ONLY offer their papers in PDF nowadays. I can't give authoritative figures for this, as Hypatia has been dead for seven years. Papers that people send me as attachments to read or referee generally come in PDF too. Even TAC has published a number of papers that it only offers in PS or PDF. Maybe Bob Rosebrugh could tell us how many downloads there have been in the various formats from the main TAC web site at MTA. Turning to software, although PDF legally belongs to Adobe, I really don't care about bugs in their programs, as I never use them. For me and anyone else who writes in LaTeX, PDF is de facto the language that is output by pdflatex and input by xpdf and ghostview (gv). It is a well documented open format, as Peter Selinger and Andrej Bauer have pointed out, citing www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_reference.html and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format See www.PaulTaylor.EU/technote.html for brief explanations and links to further information. When using my Mac OSX laptop, I use the program (Preview) that came with it to read PDF files. This also understands several other file formats, but not DVI. When I run "latex" in the current tetex distribution of the TeX system, it actually invokes pdftex (the version of TeX that was modified by Jirı Zlatuska to generate PDF instead of DVI) with \pdfoutput=0. Google indexes various other formats of web pages besides HTML, www.google.com/help/faq_filetypes.html including PDF and several versions of MicroS**t W*rd, but not DVI. Returning to TAC, I quote from its "Author Information" at tac.mta.ca/tac/authinfo.html An article must be submitted as a single source file. All macros must be included at the beginning of the file. Any macro that is not actually used should be deleted from the source file. The only exception is diagram macro packages. The currently acceptable diagram macro packages are those authored by Barr and Rose and Moore(Xy-pic). Recall however that authors are expected to provide source code which produces usable .dvi from these packages (see Note 4 above). Do not rely on .ps options. The author is responsible to ensure that the current version of a macro package has been used. Leaving the DVI/PS/PDF issue aside, why is it necessary for articles to be submitted as single source files? According to Mike Barr, in an email to me dated 10 July 2002, our rule is, no inclusions, with the following exceptions: diagram packages, including yours, and packages that are part of standard distributions. This is so that we can store each paper in a single file, without a growing (and essentially unidentifiable) directory of inclusions. Now it has been customary for as long as I have had anything to do with computers that software (by which I mean both programs and papers in this context) is developed in modular parts, divided into several files but collected in a directory or folder. In particular, programming with macros should be separate from writing text about mathematics. Indeed, the design of LaTeX2e presupposes this in its facility for passing options to macro packages via \usepackage[options]{package} Has Mike Barr not heard of sub-directories, or of tar-archives? Why does he create so much inconvenience for TAC authors for such a trivial benefit to himself? Notice, in particular, that my diagrams package was approved for use in TAC in 2002, but is now forbidden. Is this perhaps because Mike disgrees with me over DVI? The design decision to use PostScript inclusions to rotate diagonal arrows in my package was made in 1992, in consultation with users. Neither Mike nor Bob nor anyone else at the time argued against that decision, whilst several people said it was a good idea. The package web page, www.PaulTaylor.EU/diagrams explains the background to this decision, and also how to make half- decent diagrams using the UglyObsolete pre-1992 code if you REALLY need to use pure DVI. I would strongly request that anyone who uses my package, or who wishes to reply to my comments here, should READ this web page first. TAC began two or three years AFTER this decision was made, but Mike and Bob did not discuss their pure DVI policy with me. If they had done so, we might have been able to lobby the maintainers of DVI programs (such as Paul Vojta of XDVI) to add support for rotation, or they might have persuaded me to improve the old DVI code in my package. The time for doing either of these things has now long past. In his email of 23 January 1990 to me and 24 other people that resulted in the establishment of the "categories" forum and subsequently the TAC journal, Bob Rosebrugh said it seems clear (maybe only to me) that a TeX-based journal is a starting point. My guess is that LaTeX together with some version of Mike's macros should be the starting standard. It would appear that they are still trying to impose this standard. There are plenty of people who regard MY package as the standard. For example, I recently heard from a blind mathematician who "draws" diagrams by dictating the input language of my package to his wife, lalitalarking.blogspot.com/2007/09/great-dictator.html In conclusion, I call upon Mike, Bob and the Editorial and Advisory Committees of TAC to come out of the 1980s, and support the production of papers using the modern typographical software that other journals use. Paul Taylor PS. Whichever /"Mr" Paul taylor/ it was who wrote a joint paper with Phil Scott on locally cartesian closed categories is no doubt greatly honored to find that "Monsieur" Jean benabou regards him as a special case. However, M. Benabou will perhaps be disappointed that he is neither the author of nor cited "alongside [the] lot of complete nonsense" to which I alluded. This may be found at computing.unn.ac.uk/staff/cgnr1/liege_quantum03.pdf it cites Baez, Barr, Bell, Birkhoff, Bishop, Bridges, Dirac, Dummett, Ehresmann, Einstein, Freyd, Heyting, Hilbert, Johnstone, Leibniz, Mac Lane, Peirce, Scedrov, Troelstra, Turing, Wells and me.