[texhax] In memoriam: Jean-Pierre Drucbert

[Karl Berry]

Denis Bitouz\'e of GUT asked me to post this sad news.  
(Sorry if my mailer messed up the accents.)


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GUTenberg, the French TeX user group, has just learnt with great sadness
that Jean-Pierre F. Drucbert passed away in March 2009. Jean-Pierre has
written notable LaTeX packages, including minitoc and xr; a complete
list can be found at

  http://www.ctan.org/author/drucbert

We asked some colleagues of Jean-Pierre about his wishes concerning his
packages, but they don't know. Their license (LPPL) allows anybody of
good will to undertake their development.

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Born in Lille (France) in 1947, Jean-Pierre Drucbert earned a degree in
1970 in Engineering at the National School of Aeronautics and Space
("ŽÉcole Nationale SupŽérieure de l'AŽéronautique et de l'Espace").

After majoring in computer science, he joined the "Centre d'ŽÉtudes et de
Recherches de Toulouse" (now ONERA) as a systems engineer, mainly in the
field of IT applied to scientific computing. Jean-Pierre installed and
administered several generations of computers (including an Iris 80 and
a Cray XMP), particularly for scheduling of computational jobs.
Moreover, he assured IT support to hundreds of users scientists,
especially in the field of parallel computing.

Meanwhile, fascinated by the sciences of language and typography,
Jean-Pierre showed an early interest in TeX and LaTeX.  He compiled,
installed and configured these on different systems, from Multics to
Linux through various proprietary Unix systems. He offered to ONERA
users a very complete LaTeX manual, including French translations of
many packages' documentation. For more than twenty years, he also
contributed to the LaTeX community by developing packages, a list of
which is at http://www.ctan.org/author/drucbert.
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--
Denis BitouzŽé, on behalf of GUTenberg
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