Jul19 TUG news: Nature article, tug'19, CTAN, fonts

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers!

We are over the crest of the year. I hope it has been good for you.
For the people in the USA, July is a time of celebration and
festivities. Let us relax and recharge for the rest of the year.

There was a paper about LaTeX in Nature,
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01796-1,
which sparked a discussion at Hacker News,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20191348.  Some of us might find
here interesting insights about the way our community is perceived
from the outside.

I'd like to use this space sometimes to mention organizations which
might be interesting for the community. As noted by Barbara Beeton, the
Museum of Printing in Haverhill MA (https://museumofprinting.org/) is
one of them. The web site features many items from the museum
collection. It is especially interesting that the museum now posts on
twitter, facebook and instagram highlights of women's involvement in
printing-related activities through history, with the selected bits
associated with women in the countries represented in the current
women's soccer world cup.

In more TeX-related news, TUG 2019 is now just a month away.  Hope to
see you in Palo Alto! More participants are most welcome.
(https://tug.org/tug2019)

As TUGboat 40:1 has now been received by (almost) all print subscribers,
let us congratulate the great team of our flagship journal with the
anniversary of their exemplary service. (https://tug.org/TUGboat)

New packages on CTAN last month (https://ctan.org/pkg):

- thuaslogos, logos for The Hague University of Applied Sciences (THUAS),
- spacingtricks, dealing with some spacing issues.
- pseudo, typesetting pseudocode,
- poiretone, LaTeX support for poiretone fonts,
- inkpaper, a mathematical paper template,
- hu-berlin-bundle, LaTeX classes for the Humboldt-Universit\"at zu Berlin,
- forum, LaTeX support for forum fonts,
- bargraph-js, create bar graphs using form fields and JavaScript,
- arraycols, new column types for array and tabular environments,
- amscdx, enhanced commutative diagrams,

Also, there were many updates for fonts and font support. Great thanks
to Bob Tennent, Mohamed El Morabity, Michael Sharpe, and others, for
their massive efforts in building so many large font packages, and to
Marc Penninga (autoinst, https://ctan.org/pkg/fontools) and Eddie Kohler
(otftotfm, https://ctan.org/pkg/lcdf-typetools) for software that helps
makes it happen. While on the topic of fonts, let me mention LaTeX Font
Catalogue (https://tug.dk/FontCatalogue/), by Palle Jorgensen of our
friends at TUG-DK, which provides several views for browsing hundreds of
the available TeX-world fonts.

Happy TeXing in any font!
Boris Veytsman (TUG President)