Feb21 TUG news: elections, lectures, papers, TeX tuneup, CTAN

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers!

The most notable upcoming event for TUG members is this year's election.
Nominations for board member or president are due:
    07:00 a.m. PST, 1 March 2021
The process is described at https://tug.org/election. We have an
unusually high number of expiring terms this year. Please consider
serving the community if you have the time and inclination to do so.

Our friends at the Cary Graphics Art Collection at the Rochester
Institute of Technology (https://rit.edu/carycollection/) posted a
schedule of their own new events. There are some notable entries
including a Cary Pressroom Tour (February 12) with associate curator
Amelia Hugill-Fontanel, who delivered a memorable talk on type
speciments at TUG 2020 (available online, https://tug.org/tug2020), a
lecture about Tibetan typeforms (February 26) by Jo De Baerdemaeker, a
tour of the collection with curator Steven Galbraith (April 16), and
other events, see https://mailchi.mp/rit/cary-collection-news-jan2021.
All are online.

Cary events require (free) registration; while their form is geared
towards RIT students and faculty, the general public is allowed and
encouraged to join in (set your affiliation as 'Other' on the form).

Amelia is also the latest subject in the Interview Corner. Her
interview, conducted by David Walden, includes many illustrations of
some amazing book- and type-related items from the Cary Collection:
  https://tug.org/interviews/hugill-fontanel.pdf

On another front, the LearnLaTeX website has gone public:
  https://learnlatex.org/en/
It contains 16 short lessons, interactive examples, and is available in
many languages. Give it a whirl, send feedback, pass it on ...

Some of us may have attended the lecture by DEK in 2014 about
unfortunate trends in the history of computer science. The transcript of
the lecture is now published in the Communications of the ACM:
https://doi.org/10.1145/3442377.

In other DEK news, he has finished the 2021 tuneup of TeX, Metafont and
friends! The updates are being tested and will soon be on CTAN and in
distributions. The report will appear in the next issue of TUGboat.

New packages on CTAN in January:

- aalok, LaTeX class file for the Marathi journal `Aalok';
- alfaslabone, the Alfa Slab One typeface;
- cascadia-code, the Cascadia Code font;
- chifoot, Chicago-style footnote formatting;
- easybook, typeset Chinese books or notes;
- gudea, the Gudea typeface;
- hindmadurai, the HindMadurai typeface;
- luakeys, a Lua module for parsing key-value options;
- magra, the Magra typeface;
- matapli, class for the French journal `MATAPLI';
- mlmodern, a blacker Type 1 version of Computer Modern, with
  multilingual support;
- nunito, the Nunito typeface;
- orientation, set page orientation with dvips/Ghostscript (ps2pdf);
- play-font, the Play typeface;
- profcollege, a LaTeX package for French maths teachers in college;
- pxpic, draw pixel pictures;
- sankey, draw Sankey diagrams with TikZ;
- tikz-bbox, precise determination of bounding boxes in TikZ.

Finally, let me mention that the latest update to the newcomputermodern
font project provides complete coverage of all Unicode math characters:
https://ctan.org/ctan-ann/id/mailman.3089.1611042712.2532.ctan-ann@ctan.org

Happy TeXing!

Boris Veytsman
TUG President