Apr21 TUG news: conferences, Knuth and TeX Live, election, CTAN

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers,

There is much exciting news for the TeX community to report.

First, the annual meeting, TUG2021, is being held online, like the
previous one. Paulo Ney de Souza, who was in charge of TUG2020, is
organizing TUG2021 together with Arthur Rosendahl, so I am sure the new
meeting is going to be as successful as the previous one. The meeting
dates are August 5-8, and the Web page is https://tug.org/tug2021. As
in the previous year, we decided to waive the conference fee for the
online meeting, and we are grateful for our generous sponsors who helped
to pay for the IT and other support. You may join their ranks by adding
a donation on your registration form. Submissions are due before June 24:
see the call for papers at https://tug.org/tug2021/callforpapers.html.

Another important meeting, the 15th International ConTeXt Meeting, will
be held offline in Bassenge, Belgium from September 20-25, 2021, the
fourth meeting held at 't Sjetootje / Ch\^ateau Boirs: see
https://meeting.contextgarden.net. Registration opens on May 1. The
theme for this meeting is: expanding orbits. The programme committee is
Hans Hagen and Taco Hoekwater.

In other news, TeX Live 2021 has been released, and mostly made its way
to the CTAN mirrors; see https://tug.org/texlive. The principal
changes are described at
https://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#news

DEK has announced a special Jubilee Edition of volumes ABCDE of
Computers and Typesetting, adding a ``plentiful new dose of spit and
polish'' to the definitive summary of TeX, Metafont and Computer Modern
(https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/abcde.html#jubilee). Some of
the changes to the programs (the ``2021 tuneup'') are described in Knuth's
report in TUGboat, available now as a preprint at
https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb42-1/tb130knuth-tuneup21.pdf. They are
incorporated in TeX Live 2021. The new editions will be available in
print later this year.

TUG election results are available at https://tug.org/election. Because
there is a single nomination for the office of President and because
there are not more nominations for the Board of Directors than there are
open seats, there is no requirement for a ballot this election. Two
current vacancies on the Board were filled by appointment (Section 7 of
our Bylaws, https://tug.org/bylaws). Ulrike Fischer and Paulo Cereda
have kindly accepted and are now new Board members.

TUGboat 42:1 is now being finalized; the next issue will be the
TUG2021 proceedings. Please submit presentations to the conference, as
noted above, or if you prefer to write an article for the regular
issue in the fall, we welcome that too. The TUGboat website with
deadlines, author information, archives, and more is
https://tug.org/TUGboat.

New packages on CTAN in March (see https://ctan.org/pkg):
aesupp, special support for the italic \ae{} character;
beamertheme-trigon, a modern, elegant, and versatile theme for Beamer;
beaulivre, write your books in a colorful way;
biblatex-license, add license data to the bibliography;
buctthesis, Beijing University of Chemical Technology thesis template;
colorist, classes to typeset articles or books, with a colorful design;
econlipsum, generate sentences from economic articles;
einfart, write your articles in a simple and clear way;
eq-fetchbbl, match Biblical passages with verse references in a quiz;
foliono, use folio numbers to replace page numbers;
gckanbun, Kanbun typesetting for upLaTeX and LuaLaTeX;
gridpapers, graph paper backgrounds and color schemes;
highlightlatex, syntax highlighting for LaTeX;
hitreport, Harbin Institute of Technology Report LaTeX Template;
knuth-pdf, PDF collection of typeset C/WEB sources in TeX Live;
lebhart, write your articles in a colorful way;
lectureslides, combine single PDF files into one file;
lua-typo, highlighting typographical flaws with LuaLaTeX;
mindflow, add a memo section;
minimalist, classes to typeset articles or books with a simple, clear design;
newpax, experimental package to extract and reinsert PDF annotations;
nl-interval, represent intervals on the number line;
scrlayer-fancyhdr, combining package fancyhdr with KOMA-Script's scrlayer;
simplivre, write your books in a simple and clear way;
suppose, abbreviate the word `Suppose';
tzplot, plot graphs with TikZ abbreviations;
xesoul, use the soul package with XeLaTeX;
zbmath-review-template, template for a zbMATH Open review.

Happy TeXing!

Boris Veytsman
TUG President