The previous version of LATEX was known as LATEX 2.09. Over the
years many extensions have been developed for LATEX. This is, of
course, a sure sign of its continuing popularity but it has had one
unfortunate result: incompatible LATEX formats came into use at
different sites. This included `standard LATEX 2.09', LATEX built
with the New Font Selection Scheme (), , ,
and so on. Thus, to process documents from various places, a site
maintainer was forced to keep multiple versions of the LATEX
program. In addition, when looking at a source file it was not always
clear for which format the document was written.
To put an end to this unsatisfactory situation, LATEX2e has been
produced; it brings all such extensions back under a single format and
thus prevents the proliferation of mutually incompatible dialects of
LATEX 2.09. With LATEX2e the `new font selection scheme' is
standard and, for example, amstex (formerly the
format) or slides (formerly the format) are simply
extension packages, all working with the same base format.
The introduction of a new release also made it possible to add a small
number of often-requested features and to make the task of writing
packages and classes simpler.