TUG Interview Corner

This Interview Corner is coordinated by Dave Walden, who has spent a lifetime in computer R&D but who is a relative newcomer to TeX and its friends (albeit a serious user of them). Thus, Dave is representative of many relatively new users of TeX who are interested in knowing more about past and current contributors to the TeX community.

Interview subjects are chosen based on (a) seeking diversity in many dimensions, (b) recommendations from people about who should be interviewed, and (c) potential interview subjects being willing to be interviewed. If you'd like to suggest subjects for future interviews, or are interested in conducting interviews yourself, please contact Dave.

Interested in a book of interviews???

Interviews

The list is alphabetical by last name. The one or two activities listed for each interviewee are meant as just a hint about each interviewee and are accurate as of the date of the interview.

Click here for a chronological list of interviews.

• Kaveh Bazargan and CV Radhakrishnan (interview completed 2006-09-21);
  Kaveh Bazargan and CV Radhakrishnan are co-directors of River Valley Technologies. They use TeX extensively in their typesetting business.
• Barbara Beeton (interview completed 2005-11-24);
  Barbara Beeton has been editor of TUGboat for 22 years and a member of the TUG Board since it was called the steering committee. She also serves as a liaison for TeXnical issues between Donald Knuth and the TeX community.
• Karl Berry (interview completed 2005-09-27);
  Karl Berry has been a long-time board member of TUG, became TUG president in 2003, and was elected for another term in 2005. Among other projects, he is co-administrator of the tug.org server, co-editor of TeX Live, and a member of the TUGboat production team.
• Duane Bibby (interview completed 2006-05-19);
  Cartoonist Duane Bibby is well known for the lion illustrations used in numerous TeX books (starting with The TeXbook) and by TeX user groups.
• Mimi Burbank (interview completed 2005-09-06);
  Mimi Burbank is a member of the TUGboat production team and a past member of the TUG board.
• David Carlisle (interview completed 2007-06-20);
  David Carlisle is a member of the LaTeX team and deeply involved with issues of typesetting and displaying mathematics, including being an Invited Expert on the W3C Math Working Group.
• Lance Carnes (interview completed 2004-12-13);
  Lance Carnes founded Personal TeX, Inc. in 1985 and has been providing PCTeX ever since.
• Jin-Hwan Cho (interview completed 2007-05-22);
  Jin-Hwan Cho is the maintainer of dvipdfmx, and a leader in supporting and encouraging the use of TeX in Korea.
• John Culleton (interview completed 2006-12-2);
  John Culleton uses TeX in his indexing and typesetting business. He also participates in various Internet-based discussion groups related to printing and publishing where he is vocal about using TeX for typesetting.
• Susan DeMeritt and Cheryl Ponchin (interview completed 2007-10-11);
  Susan DeMeritt and Cheryl Ponchin are both members of the TUG Board of Diretors (Sue is board secretary), give workshops on LaTeX, and use TeX daily in their technical typing work.
• Victor Eijkhout (interview completed 2005-03-21)
  Victor Eijkhout is the author of the book TeX by Topic and several LaTeX packages, associate TUGboat editor for macros, and a long-time participant on comp.text.tex and various mailing lists.
• Thomas Esser (interview completed 2006-06-5);
  Thomas Esser is the creator and maintainer of the popular teTeX distribution of TeX.
• Robin Fairbairns (interview completed 2005-02-16);
  Robin Fairbairns maintains the TeX FAQ and the UK CTAN node. He is also a member of the LaTeX Project team.
• Peter Flynn (interview completed 2006-09-19);
  Peter Flynn has worked on TeX interfaces at many levels for many years, including SGML, XML, dual web and print presentation, within the context of excellent typography. He is also a past board member of TUG.
• David Fuchs (interview completed 2007-05-14);
  David Fuchs is renowned in the TeX community for his work with Donald Knuth in the earliest days of TeX.
• Peter Gordon (interview completed 2008-01-08);
  Peter Gordon is the editor at Addison Wesley for Donald Knuth's books and the company's TeX/LaTeX books.
• George Gratzer (interview completed 2005-04-13);
  George Gratzer is a mathematician who has written books on TeX and LaTeX and edits a journal prepared in LaTeX.
• Hans Hagen (interview completed 2006-03-02);
  Hans Hagen is the developer of ConTeXt, president of NTG, and active in many other areas of the TeX community.
• Jim Hefferson interview complete 2007-08-13);
  Jim Hefferon is one of the key maintainers of CTAN and a member of the TUG board.
• Taco Hoekwater (interview completed 2006-10-13);
  Taco Hoekwater is heavily involved in implementing many significant upgrades and improvements to various TeX-based systems.
• Klaus Höppner (interview completed 2005-02-20);
  Klaus Höppner is the vice-president of DANTE, the German TeX user group and a member of the TUG board.
• David Kastrup (interview completed 2006-08-21);
  David Kastrup is a frequent contributor to comp.text.tex and manifestly a TeXnician.
• Oleg Katsitadze (interview completed 2007-08-04);
  Oleg Katsitadze maintains Eplain and is a contributor to Texinfo.
• Jonathan Kew (interview completed 2007-04-03);
  Jonathan Kew is best known in the TeX community as the developer of XeTeX.
• Dick Koch (interview completed 2007-07-12);
  Dick Koch is the creator and lead developer of TeXShop, a front end for TeX on Mac OS X.
• Werner Lemberg (interview completed 2006-04-28);
  Werner Lemberg developed the CJK (Chinese fonts) package for LaTeX and has been involved in a number of other computer-based typesetting projects.
• Dan Luecking (interview completed 2004-11-08);
  Dan Luecking's answers on comp.text.tex are models of precision.
• Frank Mittelbach [link is to a PDF file] (interview completed 2006-01-11);
  Frank Mittelbach has been the leader of the LaTeX Project for many years.
• Ross Moore (interview completed 2007-12-12);
  Ross Moore is a long-time TUG board member and TeX contributor, especially in the areas of mathematics and Unicode support.
• Haruhiko Okumura (interview completed 2007-06-04);
  Haruhiko Okumura promotes and supports the use of TeX in Japan.
• Steve Peter (interview completed 2006-02-07);
  Steve Peter is a publisher and linguist, does freelance book design and typesetting, and uses TeX daily. He is also a member of the TUG board.
• Cheryl Ponchin and Susan DeMeritt (interview completed 2007-10-11);
  Cheryl Ponchin and Susan DeMeritt are both members of the TUG Board of Directors (Sue is secretary of the board), give workshops on LaTeX, and use TeX daily in their technical typing work.
• CV Radhakrishnan and Kaveh Bazargan (interivew completed 2006-09-21);
  Kaveh Bazargan and CV Radhakrishnan are co-directors of River Valley Technologies. They use TeX extensively in their typesetting business.
• Will Robertson (interview completed 2006-03-25);
  Like many graduate students, Will Robertson has gotten involved with TeX; he is also representative of a minority of such TeX-using graduate students who take the next step of contributing significantly to the TeX community rather than only drawing on it.
• Christian Schenk (interview completed 2006-04-15);
  Christian Schenk is the developer of the popular MiKTeX distribution of TeX.
• Rainer Schöpf (interview completed 2007-08-27);
  Rainer Schöpf was a co-founder of the LaTeX2e and CTAN projects, and is still a key maintainer of CTAN.
• Aleksander Simonic and Adriana McCrea (interview completed 2006-06-28);
  Aleksander Simonic and Adriana McCrea are the "WinEdt team" that develops and supports the WinEdt editor popular with many MS Windows users of TeX.
• Nicola Talbot (interview completed 2007-05-25);
  Nicola Talbot is a user, teacher and package writer of LaTeX.
• Philip Taylor (interview completed 2005-05-25);
  Philip Taylor is a long time TeX user/developer who chooses to work outside of the LaTeX framework. He is also a member of the TUG board.
• Christina Thiele (interview completed 2005-03-24);
  Christina Thiele has been typesetting with TeX for over 20 years, especially in linguistics and other non-math/science fields. She is a past president of TUG.
• Dave Walden (interview completed 2006-09-20);
  Dave Walden coordinates this interview column. This interview of him is intended to provide an answer to the question that some readers may have of, "Who is this guy and why is he interviewing TeX luminaries?"
• Gerben Wierda (interview completed 2006-11-28);
  Gergen Wierda is well known for his tools for installing TeX and other capabilities on Mac OS X systems.
• Peter Wilson (interview completed 2006-11-08);
  Peter Wilson is the author of the well known memoir class and has been involved with the development of several other classes and worked extensively with fonts.

Some interviews, memoirs, etc., in TUGboat and elsewhere

• Peter Seibel is preparing a book, Coders at Work, that will have a chapter on Donald Knuth; the book's website lists a number of Knuth interviews
• April 28, 2008 interview of Donald Knuth by Andrew Binstock for informIT.
• 97 short videos of Donald Knuth recounting his history at the Peoples Archive and dated 2007-06-06; his work with TeX is described in parts 7 and 8, videos 50-70.
• Donald Knuth, Interviewed by Donald J. Albers and Lynn A. Steen, Mathematical People: Profiles and Interviews, Donald J. Albers and G. L. Alexanderson, editors, Birkhauser, Boston, 1985, pp. 182-203.
• An interview with Donald Knuth, November 1991, TUGboat, Volume 13 (1992) No. 4, pp. 419-424.
• Questions and answers with Prof. Donald E. Knuth (TUG'95), TUGboat, Volume 17 (1996), No. 1, pp. 7-22.
• Amsterdam, 13 March 1996 -- Knuth meets NTG members, TUGboat, Volume 17 (1996), No. 4.
• Questions and answers with Prof. Donald E. Knuth (CSTUG, Charles University, Prague, March 1996), TUGboat, Volume 17 (1996), No. 4.
• DDJ chats with one of the world's leading computer scientists, Dr. Dobb's Journal, April 1996.
• Interview: Donald Knuth, interview conducted by Raph Levien, TUGboat, Volume 21 (2000), No. 2, pp. 103-110.
• Question & Answer Session with Donald Knuth (U.K. TUG, Oxford, September 12, 1999), TUGboat, Volume 22 (2001), No. 1/2, pp. 15-19.
• Rewriting the Bible in 0s and 1s, a profile of Donald Knuth by Steve Ditlea, Technology Review, September/October 1999.
• Donald Knuth: All Questions Answered (University of Oslo, 30 August 2002), TUGboat, Volume 23 (2002), No. 3/4, pp. 249-361.
• Donald Knuth, Founding Artist of Computer Science, audio interview by David Kestenbaum, National Public Radio, March 2005.
• Panel discussion with Hermann Zapf and Donald Knuth, reported by Taco Hoekwater, EuroTeX 2005 proceedings.
• Love at First Byte, Donald Knuth profile in Stanford Magazine May/June 2006 issue.
• How (La)TeX changed the face of mathematics: An E-interview with Leslie Lamport, interview conducted by Gunter M. Ziegler, TUGboat, Volume 22 (2001), No. 1/2, pp. 20-22.
• Laudatio for Professor Hermann Zapf, Frank Mittelbach, TUGboat, Volume 22 (2001), No. 1/2, pp. 24-26.
• My collaboration with Don Knuth and my design work, Hermann Zapf, TUGboat, Volume 22 (2001), No. 1/2, pp. 26-30.
• The Lifestory of Hermann Zapf, by Hermann Zapf, at the linotype website.
• Presidential words about Barbara Beeton, TUGboat, Volume 20 (1999), No. 3, Proceedings of the 1999 Annual Meeting.
• An interview with Barry MacKichan of MacKichan Software and Scientific WorkPlace.
• Interview with Donald E. Knuth, interview conducted by Gianluca Pignalberi, TUGboat, Volume 26 (2005), No. 3, pp. 183-185.
• Oral interview with George Williams, developer of FontForge.
• A wayward wayfarer's way to TeX by Stephen Moye, TUGboat, Volume 28 (2007), No. 2, pp. 153-158.

Some histories

• A Brief History of TeX, Philip Taylor, TUGboat, Volume 17 (1996), No. 4, pp. 367-381
• The (La)TeX project: A case study of open source software, Alexandre Gaudeul, TUGboat, Volume 24 (2003), No. 1, pp. 132-145
• Just What Is TeX?