From tug-news at tug.org Thu Jan 12 01:18:15 2017 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2017 00:18:15 GMT Subject: [tex-announce] Jan17 TUG news: election, conferences, membership, calendar, review Message-ID: <201701120018.v0C0IF4s032730@freefriends.org> Fellow TeX-ers, It is dark here in the US. Fortunately, there are lots of good things in the TeX world, including a calendar on which to mark the days until the thaw; see item 7. 0) But first, allow us to mention TUG memberships for the new year. If you've already renewed, or automatically renew your membership, thanks! Otherwise, you can find the membership form and information at http://tug.org/join.html, and would greatly appreciate your consideration and support. This year we have doubled the discount for electronic memberships to try to help where finances are a concern. 1) Also on the organizational front, this is an election year for TUG. A number of seats on the Board expire in 2017, including that of President; see http://tug.org/election/. The deadline for submissions is Feb 1, 2017, 5pm PST. Note that this deadline is firm. Direct inquiries to the election committee, whose address is on that page. Please consider running. TUG depends on all of us to continue the good work, and being on the Board is a great way to make a contribution. 2) Next year's TUG conference will be at the annual BachoTeX conference April 29-May 3, 2017. We will be joining the Polish TeX group GUST for their 25th birthday. More information will be appearing in this newsletter and at http://tug.org/tug2017/. If you are thinking about your trip I urge you to read the page, "Things you always wanted to know about Bachotek" at http://tug.org/tug2017/bachotex.html. 3) Very important: the deadline for Bursary Fund applications for the TUG conference is January 15, 2017. This fund helps members of the TeX community who would, for financial reasons, otherwise be unable to attend a TUG conference. Full information is on http://tug.org/bursary/. (Please consider making a donation to the TUG Bursary Fund. One hundred percent of the money donated is used to help people attend the conference. Thanks for your consideration.) 4) With the end of the year, we have ended the year's membership campaign (http://tug.org/membership/). Thanks to all TUG members who invited others to join and to our new members. And congratulations to the winner of the drawing, Doug Marmion, who will receive a limited edition of *Manuale Zapficum, 2009: Typographic arrangements of the words by and about the work of Hermann Zapf & Gudrun Zapf von Hesse* from RIT Press. 5) The next TUGboat is a regular issue, 38:1; the submission deadline is February 24, 2017. Submissions are most welcome, particularly of introductory and survey articles. 6) Looking forward, the 11th ConTeXt meeting will take place at Butzbach-Maibach, Germany, on September 11-17, 2017. The theme will be ConTeXt Gardening. See http://meeting.contextgarden.net/2017/. This meeting will host ConTeXt and LuaTeX developers as well as users. It gives you the chance to present your results, experiences, and ideas on future development. The talks will be followed by tutorials on ConTeXt and LuaTeX techniques. 7) Peter Wilson of Herries Press has prepared a 2017 calendar of historical Japanese woodblocks. The a4 version is at http://tug.org/calendar/17/tug-cal17-a4.pdf, and the US letter version is at http://tug.org/calendar/17/tug-cal17-letter.pdf. 8) Boris Veytsman has done another review, this time of the seminar *Presenting data and information* by Edward Tufte. Many TeX-ers will know Tufte's work, and the review is fascinating. See http://tug.org/books/reviews/tb118reviews-tufte.html. Happy TeXing, Jim Hefferon, for the TUG Board From tug-news at tug.org Fri Mar 10 00:15:12 2017 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2017 23:15:12 GMT Subject: [tex-announce] Mar17 TUG news: voting, conferences, membership, book reviews Message-ID: <201703092315.v29NFCHe009219@freefriends.org> Fellow TeX-ers, 1) Please vote in the TUG Board elections. The candidates, along with their candidate statements are at http://tug.org/election. Also on that page are the election procedures. I urge you to vote electronically, following the link and instructions given on that page. Voting closes on April 9, at the end of the day in UTC. 2) As mentioned last time, there was one candidate for President, Boris Veytsman, so he will be our next President. Congratulations, Boris! He will take office with the start of the 2017 TUG annual conference. 3) And that conference is fast approaching. Our meeting will be April 29-May 3, 2017, in conjunction with the Polish TeX group GUST at the annual BachoTeX conference. The latest information is at http://tug.org/tug2017/. If you are planning to go, please read "Things you always wanted to know about Bachotek" at http://tug.org/tug2017/bachotex.html. 3) Also approaching fast is the 11th ConTeXt meeting. It will be at Butzbach-Maibach, Germany, on September 11-17, 2017. This meeting will give ConTeXt and LuaTeX developers and users the chance to present results, experiences, and ideas on future development. The talks will be followed by tutorials on ConTeXt and LuaTeX techniques. See http://meeting.contextgarden.net/2017/. 4) The next TUGboat is a regular issue, 38:1. It is in preparation and should arrive in members' mailboxes sometime in April. Issue 38:2 will be the BachoTeX/TUG'17 proceedings issue, with a deadline of May 12, 2017. The next regular issue is 38:3. Submissions for this issue are due by September 1, 2017. All articles are welcome but particularly of interest are survey or introductory articles. 5) Dave Walden has returned to his series of interviews and the latest subject is Scott Pakin. As always, it is a wonderful conversation with a great subject. See http://tug.org/interviews/pakin.html. 6) TUG, like with many other scientific and technical organizations, is likely to feel a great impact from the US administration's proposed travel ban. The Board has adopted the following statement, a copy of which appears on the front page of http://tug.org/. "Since its inception, the TeX typesetting system has always had a special relationship with the American Mathematical Society, one of the earliest supporters of Donald Knuth's typography research, support which continues to the present day. Consistent with this tradition, the Board of the TeX Users Group supports the statement of the AMS Board of Trustees opposing the US Executive Order on Immigration." Happy TeXing, Jim Hefferon, for the TUG Board From tug-news at tug.org Wed Apr 19 00:36:58 2017 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Tue, 18 Apr 2017 22:36:58 GMT Subject: [tex-announce] Apr17 TUG news: election results, conferences, TUGboat, thanks Message-ID: <201704182236.v3IMawdb025567@freefriends.org> Fellow TeX-ers, 1) The big news here is the outcome of the TUG election. As previously announced there was one candidate for TUG President, Boris Veytsman, and he will assume the office at the beginning of the TUG 2017 annual meeting. The candidates elected to the ten open positions on the TUG Board are Karl Berry, Johannes Braams, Kaja Christiansen, Taco Hoekwater, Klaus H\"oppner, Frank Mittelbach, Ross Moore, Arthur Reutenauer, Will Robertson, and Herbert Voss. Their term will begin with the TUG 2017 meeting and extend until TUG 2021. I know I speak for all TUG members in saying thank you to all the candidates for their willingness to serve. It was a great slate of people and speaks well for the community. 2) The TUG conference will be quite soon, April 29-May 3, 2017, in conjunction with the Polish TeX group GUST at the annual BachoTeX conference. The latest information is at http://tug.org/tug2017/. 3) Also approaching is the 11th ConTeXt meeting, at Butzbach-Maibach, Germany, on September 11-17, 2017. It will give ConTeXt and LuaTeX developers and users the chance to present results, experiences, and ideas on future development. See http://meeting.contextgarden.net/2017/. 4) TUGboat issue 38:2 will be the BachoTeX/TUG'17 proceedings issue, with a deadline of May 12, 2017. The next regular issue is 38:3. Please submit articles for this issue by September 1, 2017. As always, of particular interest are survey or introductory articles. 5) This is my final newsletter. I ask your indulgence for some needed thanks. First, on behalf of the TeX community, I would like to thank the outgoing Board members: Steve Grathwohl, Steve Peter, Geoffrey Poore, and Michael Sofka. They have done a great job. I would also like to say to all the members of the current Board how very much I appreciated working with you. Particularly Karl, Barbara, Boris, and Klaus have gone the extra mile, or sometimes miles. Finally, I especially want to thank Robin for all that she has helped me with, and for all that she does at the TUG office. Thank you, Robin! I know that Boris and the newly-elected Board will do a great job. Happy TeXing, Jim Hefferon P.S. In late-breaking news, the TeX Live 2017 pretest has started. If you're up for trying it out: http://tug.org/texlive/pretest.html From tug-news at tug.org Tue May 9 01:28:51 2017 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Mon, 8 May 2017 23:28:51 GMT Subject: [tex-announce] May17 TUG news: BachoTeX, Brazil, PracTeX, ConTeXt Message-ID: <201705082328.v48NSpFf011856@freefriends.org> Fellow TeX-ers, This is my first TUG newsletter as TUG President. I am honored to serve this great community. Thanks for the welcoming letters and good wishes! According to our traditions the newly elected Board members and officers started their duties at the TUG meeting, which took place during BachoTeX'17. The weather in Poland in May was unusually cold, but the conference in Bachotek was very warm. Many interesting talks, discussions, even songs around a bonfire. BachoTeX is a yearly event, and definitely one deserving attending. Thanks to Jerzy and GUST for their hospitality! I am also happy to thank Paulo Ney de Souza and many people on the TUG Board, notably Jim Hefferon, for their efforts to make TUG'18 happen as a satellite conference of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This was recently approved by the ICM, and is a huge win for our community. So TUG'18 is officially set for Rio, from July 20-22; our Annual General Meeting will take place there as usual. https://tug.org/tug2018/ will have information as it becomes available. This will be the second consecutive TUG conference outside North America, and the fourth outside the US. We are therefore considering holding a Practical TeX conference stateside in 2018, and will make announcements in due time. Special thanks to Michael Sofka in this regard. Another important event later this year is the 11th International ConTeXt Meeting in Maibach, Germany, September 11-17, 2017: http://meeting.contextgarden.net/2017/ TeX Live 2017 is close to release (see https://tug.org/texlive/pretest.html if you'd like to help test), with the usual variety of changes and new features. Many come from new releases on CTAN, including a TeX implementation of the Gotoh sequence alignment algorithm (the author, Takuto Asakura, won the prize for the best talk at BachoTeX'17), a Babel package for Azerbaijani, a new package to create exams in LaTeX, and many others. It is a good time to be a TeXnician! Happy TeXing, Boris Veytsman From tug-news at tug.org Tue Jun 6 00:12:07 2017 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2017 22:12:07 GMT Subject: [tex-announce] Jun17 TUG news: officers, TeX Live, ConTeXt and TUG meetings, TUGboat Message-ID: <201706052212.v55MC7qX029376@freefriends.org> Dear friends in the TeX community, June is definitely not a slow month in the TeX calendar. We have plenty of (good) news. 1. The Board voted on the new officers. Susan DeMeritt will be continuing as Secretary, Karl Berry takes over from Klaus H\"oppner as Treasurer, and Arthur Reutenauer has been elected as Vice President. Thank you to all who served and congratulations to the new officers! 2. On Sunday June 4, TeX Live 2017 (https://tug.org/texlive/) was released. The release files should make their way around CTAN in the next day or two. The new release has a number of new features; see https://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#news. I would like to mention the changes in the updmap system: hopefully this will make font installation less painful. Many thanks to Karl Berry and the whole TL team for their hard work! 3. The ConTeXt Group and Pragma ADE are inviting submissions for the 11th International ConTeXt Meeting, September 11--17, 2017 in Maibach, Germany. The theme for the meeting is ConTeXt Gardening. As the organizers write, If you want to do an on-topic talk submission, there are plenty of angles to take at the theme: Seeding, weeding, fertilising, growing, harvesting, just to name a few. But anything at all related to ConTeXt that you would like to share is an acceptable subject for a presentation, tutorial, discussion, Q&A session, demonstration, workshop, recital, sketch, or sermon. The programme committee is Hans Hagen and Taco Hoekwater, feel free to email them with hints and ideas. Direct link to the registration form: http://meeting.contextgarden.net/2017/register.shtml Meeting website: http://meeting.contextgarden.net 4. TUG 2018, including the TUG AGM, will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from July 20-22, 2018, as a satellite conference of the 2018 International Congress of Mathematicians. https://tug.org/tug2018/ has some visa information, a preliminary call for papers, and some dates; more information will be posted as it becomes available, as usual. 5. TUGboat is accepting submissions for the next regular issue, vol.38, no.3. The deadline is September 1. Submissions are needed and welcome, particularly of (but not limited to) survey or introductory articles. Happy TeXing! Boris Veytsman From tug-news at tug.org Wed Jul 5 01:14:31 2017 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Tue, 4 Jul 2017 23:14:31 GMT Subject: [tex-announce] Jul17 TUG news: celebrations, conferences, institutional members, book review Message-ID: <201707042314.v64NEVtV032493@freefriends.org> Dear TeX friends, In July two North American countries celebrate their birthdays: Canada turned 150 (a nice date!) and United States 241. Congratulations and a little gift from our friends at TeX.sx: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/39485/how-can-we-display-fireworks The TUG'18 Committee has been busy discussing venue, accommodations and logistics. This tweet from Paulo Cereda might remind us about other ingredients for a successful TUG: https://twitter.com/paulocereda/status/876420672683167745. Please add your ideas under the hashtag #tug2018. For many of us the trip to Rio might be expensive. Please let me remind you that our Bursary fund could help you. Kaja Christiansen is the head of the Bursary Committee; Jim Hefferon and Will Robertson are the other members. On the other hand, you may want to help others to get to Rio - in this case please donate to the Bursary (or another fund, or the General Fund). The donation forms are here: https://tug.org/donate.html Speaking about TUG finances, we are very grateful to our individual and institutional members for their support. We've expanded our thanks to the latter by displaying their logos in the redesigned list of institutional members: https://tug.org/instmem.html (thanks to Peter Flynn for his help with the CSS trickery; not all institutions have sent us their approved logos yet). If your organization or company uses TeX in its work, it would be so greatly appreciated for you to join TUG to support development and advocacy of TeX and friends. Many TUG members are interested in non-Latin letterforms. Thus you might wish to check out this call for papers: Stanford Conference on Non-Latin Type Design and Human-Computer Interaction (December 1--2, 2017, Stanford University). https://networks.h-net.org/node/22055/discussions/185370/cfp-stanford-conference-non-latin-type-design-and-human-computer As said in this CFP, this conference brings together scholars, designers, engineers, and technologists to explore non-Latin type design, book design, interface design, and human-computer interaction beyond the Latin alphabetic world. The deadline for applications is rather close (August 4), so don't delay! Last but not least, we have a new book review: Dave Walden reviews Mark Kurlansky's "Paper: Paging Through History": https://tug.org/books/reviews/tb119reviews-kurlansky.html Have a great summer! Boris Veytsman, TUG President From tug-news at tug.org Mon Aug 7 01:22:48 2017 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2017 23:22:48 GMT Subject: [tex-announce] Aug17 TUG news: institutional members, conferences, tlcontrib, wikibook Message-ID: <201708062322.v76NMmCZ023889@freefriends.org> Dear TeX{}ers! Another summer (winter for some of us) month is going on. I hope your vacations are being refreshing. Some seasonal news from the TeX world. 1) Institutional members of TUG, past, present, and future. Overleaf and ShareLaTeX have been popular with TeX users around the world. In July they announced a merger (https://www.overleaf.com/blog/518-exciting-news-sharelatex-is-joining-overleaf), which is exciting news for those who liked features of both platforms. Both companies have been friends and supporters of the TeX community and TUG (and longtime institutional members of TUG). We wish them a happy marriage and many happy users. Speaking of institutional members, we are proud to report that the Association for Computing Machinery has joined TUG. ACM is a highly respected society and one of the largest publishers of computer-related journals and books - many of them typeset with TeX. The current list of institutional members can be found at https://tug.org/instmem.html. Both individual and institutional members are important for TUG's future. I would like to ask all TUG members to consider whether their organizations could join the list at https://tug.org/instmem.html. If you work in a place that uses TeX -- a university, a publisher, a research institution, a school, ... -- then supporting TeX development, infrastructure and advocacy is the right thing to do for them. If you think your organization could become a TUG institutional member, or donate to our general or special funds, please use your influence to make it happen as best you can. 2) Several notes for your calendar. We are glad to announce that a Practical TeX Conference will take place June 25-27, 2018, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, USA. We have a special guest: type designer Kris Holmes. I want to extend special thanks to Michael Sofka who made this possible. See the details at https://tug.org/practicaltex2018/. GuIT (Italian TeX user group) just announced that the 14th annual GuIT meeting will take place at Mestre (10 km from Venice) on October 21, 2017 (http://www.guitex.org/home/en/meeting). Let me also remind you about two conferences mentioned in the previous newsletters: the 11th ConTeXt meeting, Butzbach-Maibach, Germany, September 11-17, 2017 (http://meeting.contextgarden.net/2017/) and, of course, TUG 2018, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 20-22, 2018 (https://tug.org/tug2018/). 3) Some development news. TeX Live, one of the most popular cross-platform TeX distributions, has a companion: TLContrib. TLContrib is intended to carry packages that could not be included in TeX Live proper for one or another of the following reasons: - because it is not free software according to the FSF guidelines; - because it is an executable update; - because it is not available on CTAN; - because it is an intermediate release for testing. The TLContrib tree bears essentially the same relationship to the core TeX Live as Debian's non-free tree to the core Debian distribution. See http://contrib.texlive.info/ for the instructions about adding TLContrib to your tlmgr repository. The idea and first incarnation of the repository are due to Taco Hoekwater. Norbert Preining has recently revived and extended it. 4) Last but not least. A recent discussion by the TUG EduTeX working group (https://tug.org/twg/edutex) concerned LaTeX Wikibook, a popular learning resource. While many people successfully use it, its quality could be improved. I'd like to make another request to TUG members and TeX community: please take a look at https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX and contribute! Let us make it up to date, accurate and even more useful. Thanks and happy TeXing to all, Boris (TUG President) From tug-news at tug.org Fri Sep 8 00:41:12 2017 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2017 22:41:12 GMT Subject: [tex-announce] Sept17 TUG news: conferences, books, calendar, TUGboat Message-ID: <201709072241.v87MfCGP019971@freefriends.org> Dear \TeX{}ers, Summer (Winter for those to the South) days are over, and the Fall (Spring) is upon us. Many of us will spend the some of the coming days at TeX Conferences: the 11th ConTeXt meeting (Butzbach-Maibach, Germany, September 11-17) and the 14th annual GuIT meeting (Mestre, Italy, October 21, 2017). And looking forward to 2018, let me remind you about PracTeX 2018 in Troy (NY, USA) in June and TUG2018 in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in July. https://tug.org/meetings/ has more information and links. I've just received the latest TeX Live DVD and the fresh issue of TUGboat with the TUG at BachoTeX 2017 proceedings. Many thanks to both TL and TUB teams for their great work! We are finishing the work on the next TUGboat issue (38:3). If you missed the deadline, please don't neglect to submit items for 39:1 - manuscripts for the next regular issue are accepted until March 16. Please check https://tug.org/tugboat/ for submission information. As usual, we publish book reviews for the coming TUGboat issue ahead of time. We have a very interesting review by Peter Wilson, who discusses two books by Keith Houston: Shady Characters and The Book (see https://tug.org/books/reviews/tb120reviews-houston.html). Older reviews can be found on https://tug.org/books/. Peter Wilson also gave us another present: the TeX calendar for 2018, for a4 and letter paper as usual: https://tug.org/calendar/18/ calendar features manuscripts 1225--1800. As always, many packages have been released or updated on CTAN. Let me mention just one: everybody's favorite tikzducks (https://ctan.org/pkg/tikzducks) now has a duck with football, crown, beret, baguette, hockey, pizza, cake, lightsaber, graduate hat, superhero cape and many more. Happy TeX{}ing to all, Boris Veytsman (TUG president) From tug-news at tug.org Sat Oct 14 00:18:31 2017 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2017 22:18:31 GMT Subject: [tex-announce] Oct17 TUG news: discussions, new members, new fonts Message-ID: <201710132218.v9DMIVxl014325@freefriends.org> Dear \TeX{}ers, It is now October, the month of Canadian Thanksgiving, Halloween, Oktoberfest and other celebrations. Have great Fall festivals! There were several notable events in the last weeks. Brian Dunn started an interesting discussion about the finances and the future of TUG and the TeX community; see the threads on the TeXHaX list: https://tug.org/pipermail/texhax/2017-September/thread.html, https://tug.org/pipermail/texhax/2017-October/thread.html. I invite other \TeX{}ers to join: we definitely need new ideas about promotion of TeX and TUG. TUG'18 and PracTeX'18 published invitations to sponsors: https://tug.org/tug2018/sponsor.html, https://tug.org/practicaltex2018/sponsor.html. Please consider whether your organization would like to participate. Speaking of organizations, I am pleased to announce that Nagwa (https://www.nagwa.com), an education technology startup aiming to help students around the globe, has become our newest institutional member. Welcome aboard! The current list of institutional members, and information about joining, can be found at https://tug.org/instmem.html. I still remember the old times when a TeX document could use any font, provided that it was Computer Modern. The situation has changed; by now we have many free (and non-free) fonts of high quality. During the last several weeks CTAN (and thence TeX Live and MiKTeX) got several new exciting fonts. - Bob Tennent published Coelacanth, inspired by the famous Centaur font (may I remind you about the book about Centaur by Jerry Kelly and Misha Beletsky, recently reviewed in TUGboat, http://tug.org/books/#kelly-beletsky ). - Herbert Voss submitted the spark-otf package supporting Spark fonts, useful for creation of sparklines (for more info, may I also refer you to https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb38-2/tb119veytsman-sparklines.pdf ), and the dejavu-otf package, with Dejavu fonts and support, in TrueType/OpenType. - Andrew Cashner submitted musicography, which makes available a number of musical symbols to pdf(la)tex users. - A number of fonts have been updated as well: newtx and xcharter by Michael Sharpe. And ... a new interview with Michael has just been published at https://tug.org/interviews/sharpe.html. - Theppitak Karoonboonyanan updated Thai fonts in the fonts-tlwg package. https://ctan.org/pkg/fonts-tlwg - The indispensable fontspec & unicode-math packages by Will Robertson got another set of updates too. Looks like free font development is quite vibrant; thanks to all font designers and TeXnicians for their great work. Happy \TeX{}ing to all, Boris Veytsman (TUG president) From tug-news at tug.org Sat Nov 4 00:08:34 2017 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2017 23:08:34 GMT Subject: [tex-announce] Nov17 TUG news: halloween, typography essays, tugboat, conferences Message-ID: <201711032308.vA3N8Y3m019865@freefriends.org> Dear \TeX{}ers, Probably the most vivid \TeX-related experience for me this October was visiting CTAN on Halloween. I do not know what was more scary: the scream in my dynamics or the font on my screen. Certainly the CTAN team deserves a lot of candy. Among other interesting stories of the month was an essay on the history of mathematical typography by Eddie Smith (thanks to Martin Schr\"oder who found it): http://practicallyefficient.com/2017/10/13/from-boiling-lead-and-black-art.html While the author is not a professional historian of type, the essay is certainly worth reading. If you are in a mood for some late fall/early winter reading, here are a couple papers suggested by Norbert Preining: http://chalkdustmagazine.com/blog/is-there-a-perfect-maths-font/ http://www.vislab.ucl.ac.uk/pdf/MathBeauty.pdf TUGboat 38:3 is going to hit mailboxes soon. By tradition, the issue from a year ago, 37:2, is now available for the general public. This issue contains the proceedings of the Toronto conference, including the fantastic lecture by Prof. Charles Bigelow on the history of the Lucida math fonts (https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb37-2/tb116bigelow-lucidamath.pdf). The co-creator of the Lucida fonts, Kris Holmes, could not make it to Toronto, but I am happy to report that she has promised to visit PracTeX in 2018 and even conduct a calligraphy workshop there - another reason to attend the conference. And, of course, there will be TUG18 in Rio! Have a great November and hope to see many of you at our 2018 meetings! Boris Veytsman (TUG president) From tug-news at tug.org Fri Dec 8 01:15:27 2017 From: tug-news at tug.org (TeX Users Group) Date: Fri, 8 Dec 2017 00:15:27 GMT Subject: [tex-announce] Dec17 TUG news: holiday TUGboat, packages, calendar, video Message-ID: <201712080015.vB80FRHZ022802@freefriends.org> Dear \TeX{}ers, The holiday season is coming. I wish everybody merry holidays and a great 2018! One of the early season gifts is the fresh issue of TUGboat, 38:3. It has a couple of papers on the history of typography: a report on a meeting of desktop publishing pioneers by Dave Walden and a review of Volume 2 of Jacques Andr\'e's "Histoire de l'\`Ecriture typographique---Le XXe si\`ecle" by Charles Bigelow (http://tug.org/books/#andre). It also has an interview with Michael Sharpe, Hans Hagen's musings about the advertising of TeX, tutorials about the proper way to ask questions on TeX.SE and the use of ConTeXt, papers on serifed Greek fonts, Art Concret, PSTricks, actuarial symbols, LaTeX document variables, TeX tricks, pdf converters, herbarium labels, \linepenalty, testing index creation, TeX in cweb, dvisvgm, LuaTeX, and many other topics - including a cartoon and a review of two books by Keith Houston. This journal is good reading both in an easy chair with eggnog and at a desk with a notebook and a pen. The issue also presents a new Christmas file from David Carlisle: the fans of his xii.tex will be thrilled by the new file xii-lat.tex (also available from CTAN, TeX Live and MikTeX). Speaking of seasonal CTAN gifts, there is an update to the scsnowman package by Hironobu Yamashita (https://ctan.org/pkg/scsnowman). By the way, the first version of the package was also released during the holiday season: December 23, 2016. And there is the new art calendar for 2018 by Peter Wilson of Herries Press in a4 (http://tug.org/calendar/18/tug-cal18-a4.pdf) and letter (http://tug.org/calendar/18/tug-cal18-letter.pdf). This year the calendar features rare manuscripts (1225--1800) from the Herries collection. The last gift is for those \TeX{}ers who want to see their favorite subjects discussed by talking heads on a screen (and to occasionally scream at the screen when the talking heads are not quite correct). Nelson Beebe reports: I've just finished watching the latest BSDNow TV Web cast at http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2017_11_29-how_netflix_works From 1h4m to 1h18m in the Webcast, there is a discussion of Donald Knuth, TeX, LaTeX, and ConTeXt. Neither moderator has a background in this area, and there is nothing technically new to TeXperts in their discussions, but it is nevertheless a news story that may introduce new people to TeXware. Have great holidays and good luck in 2018! Boris Veytsman (TUG president)