Jun20 TUG news: tug'20 online, latex-dev, ctan

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers,

The events of the last months and weeks stressed the vulnerability of
our culture and our way of life in general. This is frustrating and sad.
However, our ancestors have lived through times of plagues, wars,
disasters -- and not only survived them, but also created great works of
art and science. I am sure we will survive these times as well -- and we
should continue to work hard even when it seems to be impossible.

One of the most hopeful pieces of news I can share is the fact that
TUG2020 will occur, albeit online. See https://tug.org/tug2020/ for the
details. Important dates:

   June 24 - deadline for abstracts for presentation proposals.
   July 10 - deadline for preprints to be in the program.
   July 24-26 - conference.
   August 3 - deadline for final papers for the printed TUGboat
   	 proceedings.

I want to express my deep gratitude and admiration to many people and
organizations who are making this possible (some of them are listed
on the conference Web page).

If you would like to participate, give a presentation, and/or
volunteer to assist during the conference, we would be very grateful.
Please see the conference web pages for details.

There are more meetings planned for Fall 2020 and Spring 2021.  Of
course due to the pandemic the announcements are preliminary.

  - 14th ConTeXt Meeting, Prague-Sib'ina, Czech Republic, Sept. 6-12,
    2020, http://meeting.contextgarden.net/2020

  - DANTE meeting, Otto-von-Guericke-Universität, Magdeburg, Germany,
    March 10-12, 2021, https://www.dante.de/veranstaltungen/dante2021

In other news, the LaTeX Team has announced the release of the new
development pre-release of the LaTeX kernel; see LaTeX News 32 for details.
https://www.latex-project.org/news/

Igor Liferenko has released a new implementation of
Metafont in CWEB based on the web2w program by Martin Ruckert.
https://github.com/igor-liferenko/mf
https://github.com/igor-liferenko/mf-wayland

Dave Walden's review of History of Desktop Publishing by Frank Romano
has been added to our book pages: https://tug.org/books/

May was a productive month for TeX software authors.  Among new
packages on CTAN are:

- akshar, support for syllables in the Devanagari script
- antanilipsum, generate sentences in the style of ``Amici miei''
- beamerappendixnote, create notes on appendix frames in beamer
- biblatex-unified, unified stylesheet for linguistics journals
- biblatex-vancouver, Vancouver style for BibLaTeX
- bookshelf, ceate a nice image from a BibTeX file
- helmholtz-ellis-ji-notation, beautiful in-line microtonal just
    intonation accidentals
- lua-uni-algos, Unicode algorithms for LuaTeX
- marathi, typeset Marathi language using XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX
- metanorma, writing Metanorma standardization documents using LaTeX
- pwebmac, consolidated WEB macros for DVI and PDF output
- readablecv, a highly readable and good looking CV and letter class
- semantex, object-oriented mathematics
- tikz-lake-fig, schematic diagrams of lakes
- tikztosvg, a utility for rendering TikZ diagrams to SVG
- tile-graphic, create tiles of a graphical file
- utf8add, additional support for UTF-8 encoded LaTeX input
- vcell, vertical alignment of content inside table cells

Happy TeXing!
Boris Veytsman, TUG President