Dec19 TUG news: donations, devfund, printing history fellowship, dek transcript, ctan

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers,

December is upon us.  Have a great holiday season and happy 2020!

I got a number of messages from various non-profit organizations
reminding us that this is the last month to give a 2019 donation.  We
probably would be remiss if we do not join the chorus: TUG donations
are tax deductible (at least in the US), so you may want to donate to us
at https://tug.org/ (just click the "Donate" button).  If you wish to join
us, membership dues are also tax deductible less the value of benefits
($40 with the hard copy of TUGboat and TeX Live or $10 with the electronic
membership option).

Among various projects we spend the money on is the Development Fund.
Here is the list of grantees:  https://tug.org/tc/devfund/grants.html and
the grant application:  https://tug.org/tc/devfund/application.html.
The Development Fund Committee also distributes travel grants related
to development of accessible PDF tools (thanks to the Moore Foundation
for the donation).  You may apply for these grants by sending email
to devfund at tug.org.

Speaking about money, we tweeted recently about the APHA Mark Samuels
Lasner fellowship in printing history; some TeXers might be interested:
https://printinghistory.org/programs/fellowship/

On another topic.  Many of us enjoyed DEK's video interviews of 2006
(https://www.webofstories.com/play/donald.knuth/1).  We recently learned
of an edited transcript of these 97 short videos:
https://github.com/kragen/knuth-interview-2006

New packages on CTAN (https://ctan.org) in November:
- algxpar, support for pseudocode with long lines of code
- chemplants, symbology to draw chemical plants with TikZ
- fontsetup, a front-end to fontspec, for selected fonts with math support
- GFSDidotClassic, the classic version of GFSDidot for Unicode TeX engines
- hvqrurl, a package to insert a QR code in the margin
- letterswitharrows, scalable left and right arrows over mathematical symbols
- lexend, the Lexend fonts for XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX through fontspec
- NewComputerModern, CM fonts combined with matching non-Latin alphabets
- pinoutikz, printing electronic chip pinouts with TikZ

Happy TeXing!
Boris Veytsman (TUG President)