amstex vs amslatex differences

[kohlhase]

[Originally Ticket 1345]

It just dawned on me that this was assigned to me; :>
Alas, I’m not familiar with AMSTeX (as opposed to the
ams packages for LaTeX), and don’t have much time to
get familiar.

FWIW (in case it’s not obvious), some thoughts on strategy:
I’d try to leverage the existing (for latex) ams*.ltxml
as much as possible; I’d assume the overall design is
relatively similar.

I don’t know if amstex uses “environments” in the same
way as latex (ie \begin{env}..\end{env}), but they must
have a construct with similar intent. Maybe it would
be possible to get amstex to use the same definitions
created by DefEnvironment?

Another area where amstex is likely to differ is in
having more/different frontmatter setup.
There is already some flexibility in the DTD and
some (undocumented) tools in TeX.ltxml, used by
LaTeX.ltxml, for working with frontmatter, so
maybe that can be used.

Hope that helps some…

[kohlhase]

For the Zentralblatt Math corpus, they use amstex (not amslatex as Bruce supplies it with latexml). So there are some macros that are not implemented e.g. \tag.

What should we do? We could define them locally in zbl.ltxml which calls the amxlatex suite. That would be a local solution.

A more general solution would be to do something for amstex directly but that seems a lot of work.

Bruce?

[kohlhase]

Anca has volunteered :-) for the ZBL corpus

[brucemiller]

Milestone 0.6 deleted

[brucemiller]

There is now an initial binding of amstex.tex in
the distribution, along with amsppt.sty which seems
to be the main "class" file.

It is probably rough; I just load the various ams latex styles.
Most are probably fine, but amsmath.sty defines a number of
environments. These may work when used in the amstex style
(eg \array ... \endarray), but there are probably issues with
respect to grouping, and unusual argument patterns in some cases.
Probably some of these will need to be re-implemented in amstex.tex
in the long run.

So, we'll need to keep an eye out for errors that appear...

BTW: Is there any news on dealing with ZBL ?