The TeX community remains vibrant and active! Please support TeX and the TeX Users Group (TUG) by joining or renewing your membership. A complete list of TUG's aims & benefits is available separately.
TUG was the first TeX users group and is the most international TeX users group. As such, TUG is a key component of the worldwide TeX community. Due to the happily close cooperation among all the TeX user groups and volunteers worldwide, it is difficult to precisely describe the boundary of TUG activity. For instance, individuals who see themselves working on behalf of TUG are deeply involved in the repeated, massive effort to produce the TeX Live distribution (included on the TeX Collection DVD, which is a benefit of TUG membership).
Since 1980, TUG has produced the journal TUGboat, another benefit of membership. You may have noticed the addition of comprehensive lists of authors, titles, and topics, to enable better access to the complete online TUGboat archives. TUGboat also reprints articles (translating into English when necessary) from other TeX user group journals, and has done several joint publications in recent years of the EuroTeX proceedings.
A further benefit of TUG membership is discounts; for example, for the TUG annual conference, joint membership in various other TeX user groups, and items at the TUG store such as the book of interviews with TeX people and the Lucida fonts.
TUG is deeply committed to participating in and providing services for the broader TeX community. TUG regularly contributes a bit of its membership income to support development projects (e.g., LuaTeX, MetaPost, and the GUST e-foundry fonts), and it has initiated some development projects (e.g., TeXworks).
TUG also serves as a path from donors wanting to make charitable contributions in support of TeX to projects, and does so with no overhead or administrative fees. It has also arranged for a discount on buying books published by Addison-Wesley or other Pearson imprints, and a number of other publishers, along with numerous book reviews; see our TeX books page.
TUG leans significantly toward the philosophy of open access and free software/open source. It is deeply involved in the maintenance and update of CTAN, and almost everything on the TUG web site is publicly and freely available; see particularly the list of resources in the left column of the home page. The TUG server is also a central component in developing or archiving many projects, some of which involve groups and individuals well beyond TUG. TUG also participates from time to time in finding new maintainers for software packages as prior maintainers leave the scene.
TUG also makes efforts to remind the world of TeX's continued utility at occasional mathematics, open source, computer user group, etc., conferences. Examples of such outreach include these articles:
Please join or renew, and support TeX and TUG. Thanks.