[texhax] Jun18 TUG news: conferences, donations, accessibility, fonts

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers,

Summer with its conferences is upon us. I am writing this text after a
full day at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries at Fort Worth, TX.
As befits JCDL, at registration we were given the proceedings volume in
digital form. By the way, I've run pdfinfo on the files and found out
that of 102 papers presented there, 68 were typeset in TeX. I think the
rumors of the imminent demise of TeX in the academic world are somewhat
exaggerated.

Unfortunately the list of TeX conferences this year is shorter than
planned: as previously announced, we did not have enough proposed talks
to hold PracTeX. On the other hand, TUG2018 in Rio is going to be a very
interesting event. Hope to see you there! Additional speakers and
participants would be very welcome; see https://tug.org/tug2018 for all
info.

As you know, TUG2018 is a satellite meeting of the International
Congress of Mathematicians, which starts August 1. I wonder whether any
of us is going to attend ICM: the TUG2018 committee is considering
opening a TUG booth there to recruit new members. If you do attend ICM
and are willing to volunteer, please email tug2018 at tug.org.

Speaking of TUG business, we recently got a (small) donation from
Amazon. The company offers its customers the option to support their
favorite charity via shopping starting from https://smile.amazon.com.
The prices there are the same as on the main site, but a portion of the
purchase goes to the charity of the customer's choice. If you happen to
shop at amazon.com, we would be grateful if you choose to support TUG.
(Also, at least amazon.de and amazon.co.uk have similar programs for
charities in their respective countries.) Also, many employers match the
donations of their employees: you may want to check whether yours does.

Some significant news about the accessibility project: Ross Moore
published the working plan for creation of accessible PDFs and examples
of what is possible so far. See the web page of the project at
https://tug.org/twg/accessibility/.

There is a new page on the TUG web site: a few selected TeX, Knuth, and
type-related videos at https://tug.org/video.html. Thanks to Barbara
Beeton, Dave Walden and Karl Berry who found the videos and collected
them.

CTAN has recently acquired some new interesting fonts: DSSerif is a
double-struck serifed font for mathematical use, SticksToo is a
reworking of STIX2 with features accessible to LaTeX users, notoCJKsc
provides Noto fonts for Simplified Chinese. Among other notable new
packages is OneDown, a package to draw bridge diagrams, and endnotesj, a
package for Japanese-style endnotes. (https://ctan.org/pkg provides
access to all the CTAN package pages.)

Finally, a reminder that all new members in 2018 will get a
letterpress-printed postcard *and* will participate (unless declined) in
a lottery for a book by Jerry Kelly and Martin Hutner, A Century for the
Century: Fine Printed Books from 1900 to 1999.

Happy TeXing!
Boris Veytsman, TUG President