Jan21 TUG news: videos, memberships, election, calendars

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers,

The strangest year in the lives of many of us has ended. Let us hope
2021 will be much better.

The Great Tikzlings Christmas Extravaganza 2020 was one of the
highlights of the holiday season. If you did not see it yet, you might
want to try https://vimeo.com/492532561. Speaking of interesting videos,
here is another, where Richard Kegler (P22 Type Foundry, p22.com) and
Amelia Hugill-Fontanel (RIT Cary Graphic Arts Collection, cary.rit.edu)
discuss the seven lives of a typeface, specifically LTC Goudy Initials,
including recasting of metal type:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=S1ldj5LMv8Y.

By the way, both RIT Cary Press and P22 Foundry products have been used
as prizes for new members. As a reminder, every year we conduct a raffle
among all new members, and the lucky winner gets a special prize. In
2021 our lottery will have not one, but four prizes from P22; a good
incentive to join TUG.

As in previous years, we have a greatly reduced trial membership fee for
first time members: https://tug.org/trial. On the other hand, if you are
a TUG member already, please do not forget to renew your membership
here: https://tug.org/join.html and enjoy the early bird rate (until
March 31). TUG is supported by the membership fees and generous
donations from the TeX community.

Speaking of TUG business, 2021 is an election year. The deadline for
nominations is March 1; all election information is posted at
https://tug.org/election.

March 31 is the deadline for submissions to TUGboat, our flagship
publication. Please see author information at
https://tug.org/TUGboat/location.html.

New CTAN packages in December:
- albatross, find fonts that contain a given glyph;
- archivo, the Archivo font face with support for all LaTeX forms;
- arvo, the Arvo font face with support for all LaTeX forms;
- bithesis, templates for the Beijing Institute of Technology;
- chinesejfm, luatexja-jfm files for Chinese typesetting;
- easyfloats, an easier interface to insert figures, etc. in LaTeX;
- froufrou, fancy section separators;
- inter, the inter font face with support for all LaTeX forms;
- oswald, the Oswald family of fonts with support for all LaTeX forms;
- pbalance, balance last page in two-column mode;
- puyotikz, quickly typeset board states of Puyo Puyo games;
- skeldoc, placeholders for unfinished documents;
- stepgreek, a free Times/Elsevier-style Greek font;
- uninormalize, Unicode normalization support in Lua.

Last note for the new year: Hans-Martin M\"unch has updated his package
for calendar creation in several languages,
https://ctan.org/pkg/calxxxx-yyyy. I'd also like to mention that Peter
Wilson has once again provided lovely Japanese woodblock calendars
available to all from http://tug.org/calendar.html.

Happy TeXing!

Boris Veytsman
TUG President