TeX Hour: Thu 17 June: Enlarge TeX Live: Improve user markdown, HTML, EPUB, XML experience

[Jonathan Fine]

Hi

Tomorrow's TeX Hour is about what would be nice to add to TeX Live. Your
suggestions are important. Next week's TeX Hour is about squeezing
everything into the 8GB available on the TeX Collection DVD.

When and where. Thursday 17 June, 6.30 to 7.30pm UK time. The UK time now
is at https://time.is/UK. The zoom details are
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/78551255396?pwd=cHdJN0pTTXRlRCtSd1lCTHpuWmNIUT09
Meeting ID: 785 5125 5396
Passcode: knuth

One of Don Knuth's goals in writing TeX was to give people software that
worked the same for everyone, across space and time. In the 1980's the TeX
Users Group contributed to this by distributing source code tapes (the best
medium at that time). Today TUG's support for the TeX Collection DVD and
the TeX Live distribution has a similar purpose.

This week and next TeX Live is the focus of the TeX Hour. TeX Live provides
a shared software experience for LaTeX to PDF. The focus this week is what
would be nice to have in TeX Live, for other outputs such as HTML and EPUB.
And for other inputs such as Markdown and XML transformed to LaTeX.

In case this seems a bit strange and off-topic, remember that Don Knuth's
WEB system of literate programs produces Pascal source and TeX source as
output, from a single WEB file. And tools such as bibtex produce LaTeX
source from content held in bibliographic databases.

The focus this week is on what's nice to have, in enlarging the shared TeX
Live experience to include outputs such as HTML and EPUB, and inputs such
as Markdown and XML. Today many authors and publishers want multiple media
outputs. And it's key for accessibility. And for integrating with modern
learning systems.

Next week the focus is on shrinking and simplifying the present TeX
Collection DVD, and making year-on-year change more manageable, without
significantly reducing the user experience. For the R-community, TinyTeX
shrinks TeX Live to 100MB.

The videos for the last two weeks are available at

3 June 2021: Rethinking the beginner experience
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw1FZfIX1w7gTrQjLKPx6tdidALVbNiUB

10 June 2021: Code and Math Accessibility: Hard? Easy? When? Why?
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw1FZfIX1w7igKkNMZDU2CLQuvVE9ERCo

with best regards

Jonathan
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