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8 Pleas for the Future
curves will never work with plain TEX and it will never be as powerful as METAFONT or importing encapsulated PostScript files. Suggestions or criticisms by email are welcome. Version 1.41 has benefitted greatly from previous help. The latest versions are first available at URL:
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ftp://ilm.mech.unsw.edu.au/pub/latex/macros/curves/

The IP number is 149.171.228.99 but use your local CTAN mirror to reduce Internet load.
curvesls.sty uses much less TEX memory and is faster than curves.sty. More people could use curvesls.sty if emTEX or equivalent line drawing \specials were compiled into dvi drivers for viewing and printing. Ask your system people for this!
A
.dvi file containing curves produced with curvesls.sty has many occurrences of the text strings em:lineto, em:moveto and em:linewidth XXXXpt placed by the emTEX \specials. These strings would have earlier occupied TEX memory. Extra space is also taken by the disks curvesls uses to cover the cracks between square line ends at a slight angle. Renaming these \specials to L, M and W XXXXpt respectively would save TEX memory. Even better, W XXXXpt could also calculate and store the bitmap of a disk which L would add to its line end to round it so curvesls need not add disks to cover cracks. A fourth \special, D, could place the disk at the current position which curvesls would use to round the beginning of a curve. If you write dvi drivers, please add these four proposed \specials.