Welcome to the Public folder at Blue Sky Research's ftp server! If you can use the World Wide Web, check out http://www.bluesky.com/. This file contains: *A brief decription of each subfolder. *A little talk about binhexing and compression. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% % What's here? % %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% *****3rd.party.unsupported In this directory are some editors and macros. They aren't necessarily current (but they may be newer than what you have) and we can't give much help with them (hence the name unsupported). "00_contents" describes the contents. New in this area is the CoolNetTools directory, which has some binhexing and unstuffing utilities, and Fetch. *****demonstration These are some QuickTime movies which demonstrate some of the abilities of Textures and show off our unique interface. *****fonts This is where you'll find TeX metrics and screen fonts for Textures. Some virtual fonts live there as well. There are no PostScript fonts there. "00_fonts" describes the contents in more detail. *****formats Precompiled formats live in this folder. If you see an "incompatible format file" message in your TeX log and you don't want to recompile them yourself, you may find a new one here. "00formats.abs.txt" should have more details. *****graphics In this folder are macros for including pictures in Textures files. Several of them come with their own documentation, and they are detailed in "00Graphics.abs.txt". *****information The Frequently Asked Questions list lives in this folder, as does the sales info file. Install help in the form of Textures typeset windows of the install guides. Help with printing is there too. *****latex In the latex directory are two different kinds of latex: the older, supposedly-obsolete-but-still- useful LaTeX 2.09, and the brand new, work-in-progress LaTeX2e. Both contain complete, ready-to-run, precompiled Textures-ready LaTeX installations. Please read "00latex" for more details, and the readme files for each LaTeX for installation instructions. *****metafont This directory contains the Blue Sky Research Macintosh version of Metafont. It's totally unsupported, so you're on your own, and please be considerate of other users when deciding to download such a large file. *****sources These are the source files for recompiling formats. The file "00sources.abs.txt" describes what each file is. *****updates When a new bugfix comes out and we make a new version of Textures, an updater to the most current version will be found in this folder. More info is in "00updates". *****utilities The utilities folder contains (close to) the latest versions things like BibTeX, EdMetrics, and such--- Textures utilities. "00utilities.abs.txt" describes each file. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% % Binhexing and Compression % %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Why do all those files have the suffix .hqx? How do I use them? Why's it say "this file must be translated with binhex4.0" at the beginning of each file, and how do I do that? Well, the short answer to these and other questions is "Go out and buy Stuffit Deluxe". I heartily recommend it for all your compression and translation needs. It will translate not just binhex, but uuencoded, tar'ed, arc'd, and many more file formats. It has a nice intuitive interface, it's speedy, and dropstuff and dropexpand have improved my quality of life immensely. There are other options: there's a free unstuffer from Alladin which I'll try to find and put on our server. If you aren't using Fetch and you're getting to us from a Mac, first get Fetch from ftp://ftp.dartmouth.edu. Most of the things I said about Stuffit apply to Fetch, and it's free! ***Fetch tip: when transferring files, set the mode to Text. Fetch will start the text transfer, ask for a save location, then ask to translate the binhex for you. Say Ok!*** Compact Pro is an excellent shareware compression utility. You can find it in the compression/translation folder at your local info-mac mirror. It will also translate binhex. Why Binhex? Well, it's a pretty standard file format. It allows files to be safely sent over the 'net. Fetch will auto-translate it. People on other platforms (why would you use anything but a Mac?) can often translate binhex. What is binhex? It's a way of taking binary files and changing them into plain old ascii text. Ascii text is the lowest common denominator on the internet, and will fly safely through any gateway, pathway, route, platform, or whatever. Thanks for reading! It makes my job easier :-) --Ben Ben Salzberg | (Email to for Blue Sky Research | the Frequently Asked Questions list) Ben@bluesky.com | Web site!-->[http://www.bluesky.com]