[texhax] Dec17 TUG news: holiday TUGboat, packages, calendar, video

[TeX Users Group]

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)