Date: 08 Mar 1995 18:22:30 -0800
  
  --------- ANNOUNCING THE 1995 UPDATE TO TeX, METAFONT, and FRIENDS --------
  I've just gone through all accumulated correspondence and made appropriate
  changes to the master TeX sources on my home computer. (I plan to do this
  again in February of 1998, 2002, 2007, etc.!) My files are grouped in two
  main subdirectories, "dist" and "local"; the former consists of the master
  WEB, TeX, METAFONT, Computer Modern, TeXware, and MFware sources, while
  the latter consists of my own change files and supplementary macros
  and fonts that other people might like to look at. These files fit into
  similarly named parts of the big TeX archive tree; they should replace
  their former counterparts. I don't know how to do this myself, not even
  at labrea, so I am hoping that all current maintainers of TeXnicalities
  will be alerted to the existence of this new material.  I've checked
  everything pretty carefully, so I don't think there's any need to wait
  until independent vetting has been done.
  
  TeX Version 3.14159 has four bug fixes, two of which are significant:
   1) fontmemsize can vary between formats dumped by INITEX and loaded by
      VIRTEX --- this problem had already been fixed by all the major
      implementations
   2) math kerns disappear again at line breaks, as they should --- this
      problem arose by mistake in version 3.1415.
   3) overflow won't occur when converting huge stretch/shrink amounts from
      real to integer --- again, implementors had fixed this
   4) you can have more than 32K font parameters without crashing TeX
      (nobody ever wanted so many, but a crash is a crash)
  
  METAFONT Version 2.718 has only one bug fix, but it corrects a problem
  in the linear-equation-solving engine that lost significant figures and
  caused spurious overflows; the bug had been present since version 0.1.
  I've written a letter to Barbara Beeton about this, and she can send you
  a copy if you need more information. The bug had only microscopic effect on
  Computer Modern fonts.
  
  Ten changes were made to the Computer Modern fonts, affecting nine of the
  master source files, but the changes are rather minor and nearly invisible
  to the eye. (Again they help reduce the chance of overflow.) I have been
  unhappy to see so many people still using the pre-1992 CM fonts, because
  I made MAJOR important improvements in that year, and I hate to run across
  the obsolete symbols in preprints that people send me! Anybody who hasn't
  installed CM fonts since 1991 should surely change now; and please help
  stamp out all copies of the old fonts that you see installed anywhere.
  (The lowercase delta is the main giveaway --- the new shape is vastly
  better than the old. Also arrows are now darker, and several calligraphic
  caps are improved, etc etc; the TFM files did not change, but the images
  got lots better.) On the other hand, if you do have the 1993-or-later
  version of the fonts, there's no need to replace old bitmaps. Just replace
  the old source files, and regenerate fonts from them at your leisure.
  
  There are new versions of DVItype (3.5), PLtoTF (3.5), and VPtoVF (1.4).
  DVItype now checks the DVI file more carefully in material that is
  skipped over (e.g., between pages).
  
  Plain TeX format, version 3.14159, has eight changes, but only the
  change to \bmod has a substantial probability of affecting existing
  .tex files. Accents \b and \d have gotten better in four ways.
  
  Barbara Beeton will be distributing reward checks to 20 people who were
  first to report significant errors in Volumes A--E. The big "sweepstakes"
  winners this year were Chris Thompson (Cambridge) and Bogus{\l}aw
  Jackowski (Gdansk), who received the maximum $327.68 reward for
  pointing out longstanding bugs in TeX and METAFONT, respectively.
  
  All sources are frozen and no future changes will be made unless a new,
  serious and easily fixable error is reported. The threshold for calling
  something a feature rather than a bug is rising exponentially and may
  be almost infinitely high when I do this exercise again in 1998! However,
  I do still promise to maintain these programs as long as I am able.
  
  Where can you find the new sources? At labrea.stanford.edu, in file
  ~ftp/alpha/tex95.tar.gz (slightly less than 3MB).
  
  Thanks to all of you for continued high quality support. -- Don Knuth 3/8/95