Apr23 news: conferences, teX live, The LaTeX Companion 3rd ed., ctan

[TeX Users Group]

Dear TeXers

TUG 2023 (https://tug.org/tug2023/) is getting closer. The conference
will be held July 14-16 in Bonn, Germany, with a developers' PDF
workshop on July 13. DANTE will also hold a meeting at the same venue on
July 13.

April 10 is the deadline for both bursary (tug.org/bursary) and
presentation submissions (tug.org/tug2023/cfp.html), and
April 15 for early bird discounted conference registration
(tug.org/tug2023/register.html).

The TUG'23 conference hotel in Bonn is now sold out (except for a few
individual nights, but nothing for the whole conference). If you'd like
advice on choosing alternate lodging, feel free to email the conference
committee at tug2023 at tug.org, and the local organizers will happy to help.

In other conference news, the deadline for BachoTeX registration is
extended until April 11.  BachoTeX will be held April 29-May 3.
As Jerzy Ludwichowski notes, there are compelling reasons to come:
- we have not met for a long time
- the conference program is (as always ;-) very interesting and
  entertaining (https://www.gust.org.pl/bachotex/2023-en/program),
  to mention some items of the still being extended program:
    - Andrzej Tomaszewski with his fascinating book projects,
    - Hans Hagen's series on ConTeXt MkXL and the LuaMetaTeX engine,
    - Bogus\l{}aw Jackowski and the GUST e-foundry's font engine,
    - Piotr Bolek about the monumental Project Kolberg,
    - workshops by Willy Egger, BarBara Wili\'nska and Kasia Burakowska,
    - West African djembe and dundun drumming concert,
    - beer tasting/appreciating,
    - bonfire,
    - conference dinner,
    - and, and, and ...
 - our special guests will be 5 students from Odesa University, Ukraine.
The registration is at
https://www.gust.org.pl/bachotex/2023-en/registration/registration-form

To continue the topic of conferences, the 17th International ConTeXt
meeting will take place September 10-16th, 2023, in Prague-Sib\v{r}ina,
Czech Republic.

TeX Live 2023 is out. You may consider installing it from
https://tug.org/texlive/. The accessibility report for it can be found
at https://ctan.org/pkg/tex-vpat (thanks to the ongoing work in LaTeX,
that VPAT document is itself generally accessible in HTML and PDF
formats, though some issues remain). DVDs should start mailing by the
end of May. TeX Live is our flagship distribution. As of today it
includes 7667 packages. Many thanks to the thousands of volunteers who
submitted and maintain the packages and the infrastructure of TeXLive.

In other news, Frank Mittelbach and Ulrike Fischer have finished the
new, third edition of The LaTeX Companion. The release is expected
mid-May. You can pre-order it here:
  https://tug.org/l/tlc3
If you start the order from the links on latex-project.org or tug.org,
you will get a discount and the authors will get a small extra
commission.

The Companion has been a desktop reference for many LaTeXnicians for
almost thirty years. The third edition discusses many new packages and
developments, as well as the user-facing aspects of the long-awaited
LaTeX3. You can download sample pages of all chapters at
  https://latex-project.org/news/2023/03/17/TLC3/
and the sources and outputs of all examples in the book are available at
  https://ctan.org/pkg/tlc3-examples

Finally, new CTAN packages in March:
- alchemist, typeset alchemist and astrological symbols;
- babel-lithuanian, Babel support for documents written in Lithuanian;
- egpeirce, draw existential graph invented by Charles S. Peirce;
- emo, emoji for all (LaTeX engines);
- fenetrecas, commands for CAS-like windows (Xcas or Geogebra) in TikZ;
- fistrum, access to 150 paragraphs of Lorem Fistrum very dummy text;
- korigamik, typeset articles using KorigamiK's document class;
- mpchess, drawing chess boards and positions with MetaPost;
- outilsgeomtikz, some geometric tools, with TikZ;
- tangocolors, use colors from the Tango color palette;
- tikz-nfold, triple, quadruple, and n-fold paths with TikZ;
- uvaletter, uofficial letterhead template for the University of Amsterdam.

Happy TeXing!
Boris Veytsman, TUG President